By now, we all know the shape of financial nihilism: the throw-your-money-at-anything reaction to the dissolution of the slow, linear path to wealth; the prediction markets, meme stocks, cryptocurrencies and microluxuries growing in its place. We’re left in an economic no man’s land. But financial nihilism only describes where we put our money.
What about how we earn it in the first place? The modern economy has long relied on our need for stable employment – to pay the mortgage, to keep our kids fed, or, for some, to chase prestige and power – to generate the work ethic that keeps the wheel of production turning. None of this is going well for young people.
Our jobs are insecure, we can’t afford houses, we’re deferring having kids (if we have them at all), and only 6% of us say a leadership position is our primary career goal. Hope is one of the economy’s most productive inputs, powering our willingness to endure long hours. When the production function of income – the mechanism that turns hard work into a stable salary, then a mortgage, then a pension – breaks down, so does our relationship with the input.
I call this production nihilism: my generation’s growing indifference to the kinds of work we’re willing to participate in, and where we’re willing to earn. Good,” a young woman running her craft business at nighttime tells the camera in Shopify’s latest commercial. Partially thanks to all-in-one e-commerce platforms like Shopify, many of us have mastered the art of polyworking.
These are jobs our high school career advisers could hardly have imagined – platforms such as Mercor, where white-collar workers train LLMs to do their job; “YouTube empires”; the much-covered millions being made by young women on OnlyFans; non-sexualized escorts. Some are supplementary, some are enough to eventually become a primary source of income. Americans seem to be coming around to the idea of “portfolio careers”, with more than half calling them more desirable than traditional careers for a future workforce.
Take away the feasibility of long-term goals and our willingness to wait for “the good life” collapses. So we redirect our motivation to grind and save into channels that pay out sooner – cash, yes, but also autonomy, flexibility or a sense of identity. Fifty-seven percent of gen Z report having a side hustle, well over double the boomer rate.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
