Young India sees consumption as just another activity, not an identity marker

Discussion around youth consumption in India has been largely focused around observed purchasing behaviour. Despite its enormous value in guiding marketers, two key questions have been left to the realm of assumption rather than data-led insights: one, the larger and more foundational question of where consumption is located in the overall canvas of life aspirations, dreams and emotions of ‘mass’ or mainstream young India. Two: the ‘state of mind’ or zeitgeist that fundamentally shapes the lives of this cohort. This is the territory of our last column in this series.

Taking the second question first and drawing on what has been discussed in our previous columns: Despite being a cohort that is tired and entropic from pitting large amounts of agency in the face of an unsupportive structure, rebellion is not its state of mind.

Also Read: Young India: Fuelled by agency but failed by structure

Young people do not feel betrayed by national systems. Instead, they accept an opaque and faceless ‘market’ as being the arbiter of jobs, even as progress in the nation is interpreted as the development of market conditions for work. They do not have a mind state of frustration either (so far).

This is, we argue, because of their ‘waiting room to a better place’ nature of hopeful living in the tough present, while planning for a stable and secure low-pressure future. Increasing individualization along with the lack of a strong collective peer culture, leading to loneliness and emotional fatigue, is an area of felt pain, though. Also, the leitmotif of young India is a mind state of fragmentation, echoing as it does the fragmented and fraught nature of their everyday lives.

The answer to the first question runs counter to the widely held belief that every generation after liberalization is increasingly more acquisitive or consumerist. Consumption of material goods, we suggest, is not the foundation that undergirds this generation’s aspirations. The nature of long-term aspirations, dreams and ‘the good life’ for this segment is surprisingly not about material goods— gaadi, bangla, makaan, green card—but centres around security and calm, and a connection with nature. Their search is for a je ne sais quoi or as one respondent stated, “magic."

A significant proportion of this population dreams of peace, quietude and meaning in animals, nature and pastoral lives. Whichever way we interpret these dreams, as literal reality or as metaphors for a certain kind of life, consumption is notable in its absence vis-à-vis this particular dreamscape.

Also Read: The young of mainstream India are too embattled to dream big

But does consumption not figure in their lives at all? Of course it does, and in a very big way. But only as an activity that offers a temporary thrill and distraction from the real world, as also relaxation and rest—in the words of one respondent, as “therapy."

This generation consumes distraction and “time-pass", “binge-watching", “self-care", “pampering", via social media, entertainment, shopping and other such daily forms of small pleasures. If we were to name a consumption culture in this regard, it would be that this segment of youth consumes like spongy magpies, distracted by every new thing, before flitting onto the next shiny object.

In the accounts of their lives, aspirations and dreams, material possessions do not feature significantly as a means of self-expression or status signalling that we usually associate with consumption. The closest they came in their consumption habits to this question of self-expression was in relation to becoming a “better version of themselves."

Also Read: Himanshu: What consumption data reveals of India’s economy

These purchasing preferences included motivational books, podcasts and social media content seen as contributing to their physical, social, intellectual and emotional well-being. Hence the primacy of the smartphone in their lives, as also the attention to clothes and grooming, the latter being specific to how they manage their perception and therefore value in the world. In this, apparel, accessories and cosmetics made up a large portion of their choices with a variety of brands featuring in these conversations. However, most did not show any particular indication of either lasting brand loyalty or preference.

There also exists in their expressed consumer desires the search for “newness" and “experiences," travelling abroad being a major preference. In this, however, they had deferred all consumption to the future; very few seemed to possess either the means or the motivation to travel to the places they listed with great zeal.

If anything, their virtual lives seemed to partially fulfil these curiosities and successfully manage such deferral. This, in particular, points to an ongoing blurring of the boundaries between real and reel life for our survey respondents. However, their engagements online do not provide evidence of any one source of influence; their likes and dislikes remain fragmented.

Also Read: Brands and geopolitics: A marriage made in conflict

Fragmentation and excessive information stimulus characterize this generation, with no evidence of brand loyalty. Consumption in this study emerged as a temporary dopamine hit, fading out to make way for the next avenue, promising a better everything.

This generation seems to only want little pleasures, has no big spending categories in mind, and more often than not pegs its hopes on the idyllic fantasy of a non-consumerist future spent in the company of nature and animals.

What emerges finally is that this segment of young India careens wildly between involved and engaged forms of learning, experience, pleasure, distraction and consumption, while harbouring fantasies of beauty, peace, animals and world travel. The culture of consumption we identify is one of distraction at one end, with a forever deferred, long-term politics of seeking “something else"—meaning, purpose, joy and connection—at the other.

Commissioned by Bijapurkar, the study was conceptualized and led by Krishnamurthy, with assistance from an Auxohub fieldwork team.

The authors are, respectively, a business advisor and associate professor of anthropology at IIT Madras.

This is the third and final part of a three-part series. Read the first part here and the second part here.