All borrowing begins with a utopian vision of the future. When people put their name on the dotted line (or tick the ‘I agree’ box on the lender's digital platform), they cannot conceive of a situation where they will fail to pay. Research from psychology has found that borrowers show certain cognitive biases, such as optimism bias (assuming that the future will be better than the present) and time inconsistency (valuing the present more than the future) (Ramsay 2017; Spooner 2019). This means that borrowers do not start out by seeing themselves as debtors, because a debtor is someone who has failed to pay their debts. Through a series of constant setbacks, they gradually adopt this mindset and begin to see the world through the lens of this subjectivity. This manifests through an obsession with budgeting, spending, and temporality – that is, how many days until I am debt-free? This chapter shows what happens when optimism meets cruel reality and builds on the work of the previous chapter by beginning to focus on culture and lived experience.

In this way it contributes to the endless debate about where, precisely, debt problems come from. Is it the result of financial illiteracy (Walker 2011)? Poor moral character (Rock 2014)? Misfortune (Atfield and Orton 2013; Atfield et al 2016)? Some combination of them all? Among scholars who have studied over-indebtedness (being unable to pay your debts), there is little debate; it is virtually a settled question. The literature shows that most people slip into debt crisis due to macroeconomic or structural factors beyond the control of any given agent (Russell et al 2011, 2013; Stamp 2012a). Most prominent among these are the ongoing rolling economic crises which have characterized modernity and project powerful shockwaves into the economy and credit markets. People cannot budget their way out of a financial crisis which is exerting massive pressure on the mortgage market.

Along with this, rises in the cost of living (particularly interest rates) are a significant contributor to debt problems, as is ill health (including stress and mental illness) (Knapp et al 2011; Wahlbeck and McDaid 2012; Davies et al 2015; Braverman et al 2018).