#personal-debt

#personal-debt

My second startup had collapsed about six weeks earlier. Eighteen months of burning through investor cash, of believing my own narrative, of being so emotionally unavailable that my girlfriend had already left because I couldn't be present for a single conversation that wasn't about runway or burn rate. All of it - gone. And the wreckage wasn't just professional. I was staring down roughly $47,000 in combined credit card and personal debt, a number I couldn't even say out loud at the time.

On TikTok, a wave of recent videos under the "bankruptcy" hashtag shows young people framing their personal bankruptcy filings as life-changing wins, drawing hundreds of thousands of views. In clips viewed by Business Insider, individuals touted their bankruptcy filings as the "greatest" and "best" decision they've ever made, saying it allowed them to wipe out massive amounts of debt - sometimes tens of thousands of dollars - in just a few months.

Last year, I sat in my office staring at the three monitors on my desk. On the screens were my online bank accounts - all of which were channeling Whoopi Goldberg's character from the movie "Ghost." "You in danger, girl," they seemed to be saying, mocking me. I spent decades building a career, collecting titles, degrees, and glowing reviews. Yet the numbers on my bank statements told a different story.