With traditional goals such as stability and homeownership feeling out of reach, young people are focused on the present
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.
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