🌀 The Return of YOLO in Marketing
How consumer uncertainty is reshaping where brand memory forms. And why IRL experiences are the last protected category. Plus: What Pinterest, Lululemon and Wynter understood before everyone else.
Hi 👋 I’m Florian Schleicher. This is the FutureStrategies newsletter. Thank you so much for reading along 💚
Over the last couple of months I talked at 15 events and for 10 clients about FRICTION RELOADED, my trendreport around the four shifts in consumer behaviour and the potentials for marketing they contain.
One central observation didn’t let me go…
Uncertainty and pressure are the new baseline.
Consumer confidence is at historic lows. Inflation is still biting. People are cutting back on clothes, electronics, groceries. And yet young people are travelling, concerts are selling out in minutes. Festivals are packed. Live Nation just reported 107 million tickets sold, up 11% year over year, with no slowdown anywhere, no demographic, no venue size, nothing.
That is a contradiction. And a signal.
And inside of this a term from the recent past is coming back to my mind that I have forgotten about a little: YOLO.
The original post-COVID YOLO was built on something optimistic. We survived something terrible, the world felt short and bright, spending freely felt like a celebration.
That party is over.
With crisis after crisis, war after war, AI doomsday messages everywhere and no one really knowing whether their job will still exist a couple of years from now, many are in a slight panic mode.
Yes, I am also thinking a lot about my future job as an independent strategist.
I still believe that AI can’t replace the emotional depth, the experience, the passion, the gut feeling and the ability to imagine new ways of reaching people that I have gathered over the last twenty years of working in this industry.
But am I sure that I will have the same job in 5 years? No, absolutely not.
And like me, many people are currently experiencing some uncertainty about their future, not just from a professional POV.
Crises are always starting points of something new.
🌀 The mutation of YOLO
What I observe now is different to that previous YOLO, and honestly way more interesting from a strategic perspective. It has split into two patterns that look similar on the surface but come from completely different psychological places.
The first is what economists are beginning to call “Disillusionomics.”
Gen Z is currently carrying an average personal debt of $94,000, more than any generation before them. Millennials know they won’t be able to afford the same as their parents (and no, it’s not the fault of obsessive avocado eating).
“The economic system their parents are talking to them about isn’t really going to work out for them in the same way.”
Alice Lassman, British Economist
At the same time, spending on entertainment and travel is growing faster than any other category, up 25.5% year over year according to Bank of America. Alice Lassman described it as a coping strategy for an uncertain and mystifying financial future. If the system is broken anyway, why defer? The logic of the original YOLO is still present, but the emotion driving it has shifted from freedom to fatalism.
This is not just a Western phenomenon: In Korea, driven by a prolonged economic recession and high exchange rates, young people are turning to digital platforms like “rooms for beggars” (geojibang) and “map for beggars“ (geojimap) to gamify their penny pinching.
Different expression, same underlying psychology:
When the future feels unreachable, you stop planning for it and start optimising the present.
The second pattern is more deliberate. People are actively trading down in categories that feel replaceable, cheaper (or second hand) clothes, fewer electronics, private label groceries, so they can protect the things that feel irreplaceable. They are making this trade-off consciously. And what they are protecting, consistently, across demographics, is experiences.
Especially live ones.
Especially shared ones.
Especially the kind you can’t watch on a screen later.
According to the Eventbrite Social Study 2026 “Reset to Real” 79% of 18-to-35-year-olds plan to attend more events in 2026. Nearly a quarter of that same age group reports feeling lonely. The Eventbrite CEO describes it precisely:
"They're done with performative get-togethers and instead want spaces where they can shape the moment rather than perform for it."
Julia Hartz
Both patterns lead to the same place.
🎭 Experiences have become the protected category
Because in a world that feels digital, overloaded and abstract, a real moment with real people in a real space is one of the few things that still feels unambiguously worth it.
In FRICTION RELOADED I called this trend IRL is the New Gold.
Recent data from 2026 is remarkably consistent on this, across geographies, income groups and research methodologies.
