Past Due: Exploring Time Perception in Debt Narratives

This thesis investigates how participants in the Reddit community r/debt collectively construct, contest, and regulate temporal experience under financialized capitalism. Using an archival sample of "best" posts and top-level comments from 2024 (r/debt; ≈84k members), I apply conversation-analytic methods and thematic/discourse coding to trace how users narrate past failures, manage present coping strategies, and imagine future possibilities. Analysis focuses on three interlocking themes—frugality, credit-worthiness, and bankruptcy—and the three affective-registers that animate them: fear of default, rituals of credit validation, and the threat of erasure. Findings show that frugality functions primarily as defensive preservation, collapsing futurity into a minimized present whose rules are set by past trauma; credit-worthiness operates as a quantified proof-text that rewrites the past and underwrites access to a better future; and bankruptcy acts as a radical temporal reset that both liberates and exposes debtors to new vulnerabilities and stigma. Conversational patterns (adjacency pairs, stance-shifts, hedging, repair) and community affordances (pseudonymity, upvoting, archival threads) turn individual testimonies into shared scripts that both reproduce the loop-like temporality of finance and occasionally generate "outside" openings for alternative imaginaries. The study argues that digital debt discourse does more than reflect lived precarity: it actively produces the temporal horizons through which people imagine—and sometimes foreclose—their economic futures. Implications span socio-technical theory, debt policy, and the politics of temporal imagination, suggesting avenues for research and interventions that might re-open genuinely alternative futures.