If people are buying lipsticks en masse, that’s a recession indicator. Sabrina Carpenter is back on top? A recession indicator. And if you’ve seen a dark grey cloud hanging over your house, that’s not just the New England gloom; a recession is absolutely looming on the horizon.
With the flurry of new tariffs and immense fluctuations in the U.S. economy due to President Donald Trump’s policies, many new posts, memes, and blogs referring to “recession indicators” have reemerged as a trend on social media. Recession indicators refer to a cultural trend or change in consumer behavior that people claim “predicts” economic recessions. These indicators are often taken from previous financial crises, especially the 2008 Global Recession. Indicators can be fashion trends (the hemline index, for instance, correlates longer hemlines with economic downturn), specific styles of music or “recession pop” (chart toppers in the 2000s with the style of electro-dance pop like Pitbull, Katy Perry, and Ke$ha), and even events that eerily resemble ones that took place in previous recessions (the Florida Gators’ unexpected March Madness victory, for example, given that their last win occurred during 2007).
Whether these arbitrary connections are actually evidence of an upcoming recession or not, the conversation surrounding recession indicators does show something about how people regard the current state of the economy. The observations and trends emerging on social media in response to April’s recent market crisis reveal a widespread desire to reclaim a sense of agency. The fact that we immediately look for historical patterns to explain or better understand our current state represents an irrational attempt to find some measure of security, predictability, and comfort in a time when everything may feel the exact opposite. Due to immense fluctuations in economies worldwide, with countless businesses and people’s daily lives being flipped on their heads, real-life consequences are being translated into online memes and captions. Conversation around recession indicators is a response to mass uncertainty — in times that feel scary and disorienting and out of our control, we turn to humor as a way to combat fear. Recession memes and jokes do not aim to trivialize reality but rather, to cope with it. In some ways, this is a demonstration of hope — to prevent impending consequences by anticipating them first.
Navigating any type of uncertainty may make us feel disoriented or out of control. As high schoolers, while our day-to-day lives may be more structured, our futures are full of possibilities, and thus uncertain and confusing. However, as with memes about a potential recession, we can find support in humor. We can create a sense of solidarity amidst absurdity and make the dark grey cloud something to bond over.
