In the 74,833 words of a book I am writing, there are six words that, when strung together in a specific 12-word sequence, I cannot say. It’s a single line from the song Bloodbuzz Ohio by the National, which goes: “I still owe money to the money to the money I owe.”
My book is a memoir about the psychological toll that what I term “desperation capitalism” took on millennials in particular, and how it pushed tens of millions of people to try to find a way out of financial precarity by engaging in high-risk financial activity. It’s told through the lens of my own experience of falling deeper and deeper under the spell as I spent 11 months trading a few thousand dollars into more than $1.2m, and then 18 months chasing my losses all the way down to zero. Well, more than zero, in fact, since by the end I owed the US government nearly $100,000 in taxes on phantom gains that no longer existed.
