Despite the long pushback, coffee won out. Not only have young, city-dwelling progressives come down on the side of Big Coffee, but so have plenty of homeowners, parents, and people in suburban and rural areas. Professionally made coffee tastes good, and Americans tend to like things that are sweet and rich and that can be procured via drive-through. Finance traditionalists might have notched a victory or two along the way, but their war against Starbucks and its ilk was over before it had even begun.

As a love of fancy coffee has lost its status as a unique demographic marker, refutations of its stain on financial stability have become far louder. Orman and her compatriots now receive widespread pushback when denigrating coffee aficionados, a change that reflects the shifting intergenerational tensions that are frequently a feature of the post–Great Recession personal-finance genre. The industry posits that many of the sweeping generational trends affecting Americans’ personal stability—student-loan debt, housing insecurity, the precarity of the gig economy—are actually the fault of modernity’s encouragement of undisciplined individual largesse. In reality, those phenomena are largely the province of Baby Boomers, whose policies set future generations on a much tougher road than their own. With every passing year, it becomes harder to sell the idea that the problems are simply with each American as a person, instead of with the system they live in.

“There’s a reason for this blame-the-victim talk” in personal-finance advice, the journalist Helaine Olen wrote recently. “It lets society off the hook. Instead of getting angry at the economics of our second gilded age, many end up furious with themselves.” That misdirection is useful for people in power, including self-help gurus who want to sell books. (Orman didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

In the face of the troubling economic and social trends that have shaped adult life for young Americans, buying a coffee every morning isn’t necessarily a bad way to cope. “Little luxuries actually have a real effect on people’s happiness,” says Laura Vanderkam, the author of All the Money in the World: What the Happiest People Know About Getting and Spending. “It’s these small, repeated treats that do a lot for you long term. In many cases, you’re probably better off getting a cheap dining room table and using that extra money to get coffee or go out to lunch with friends.”

That’s not to say that keeping an eye on your day-to-day finances is a bad idea, or that buying everything that catches your eye is a solid plan for your financial future. But when it comes to money, Vanderkam says, there are usually only a couple of things that actually make a difference in how stable people are. It’s the big stuff: how much you make, how much you pay for housing, whether or not you pay for a car.