{"id":1178830,"date":"2026-08-31T10:43:15","date_gmt":"2026-08-31T10:43:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/1178830\/"},"modified":"2026-08-31T10:43:15","modified_gmt":"2026-08-31T10:43:15","slug":"onlyfans-and-ai-training-why-gen-z-doesnt-care-where-our-money-comes-from-alice-lassman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/1178830\/","title":{"rendered":"OnlyFans and AI training: why gen Z doesn\u2019t care where our money comes from | Alice Lassman"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/a>, meme stocks<\/a>, cryptocurrencies<\/a> and microluxuries<\/a> growing in its place. We\u2019re left in an economic no man\u2019s land. But financial nihilism only describes where we put our money. What about how we earn it in the first place?<\/p>\n

The modern economy has long relied on our need for stable employment \u2013 to pay the mortgage, to keep our kids fed, or, for some, to chase prestige and power \u2013 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<\/a>, we can\u2019t afford houses, we\u2019re deferring having kids (if we have them at all), and only 6% of us say<\/a> a leadership position is our primary career goal. Hope is one of the economy\u2019s most productive inputs, powering<\/a> our willingness to endure long hours. When the production function of income \u2013 the mechanism that turns hard work into a stable salary, then a mortgage, then a pension \u2013 breaks down, so does our relationship with the input. I call this production nihilism: my generation\u2019s growing indifference to the kinds of work we\u2019re willing to participate in, and where we\u2019re willing to earn.<\/p>\n

\u201cNormal people are asleep. Good,\u201d a young woman running her craft business at nighttime tells the camera in Shopify\u2019s latest<\/a> 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 \u2013 platforms such as Mercor, where white-collar workers train LLMs<\/a> to do their job; \u201cYouTube empires<\/a>\u201d; the much-covered millions being made by young women<\/a> on OnlyFans; non-sexualized escorts<\/a>. Some are supplementary, some are enough to eventually become a primary source of income. Americans seem to be coming around to the idea of \u201cportfolio careers\u201d, with more than half<\/a> calling them more desirable than traditional careers for a future workforce.<\/p>\n

Take away the feasibility of long-term goals and our willingness to wait for \u201cthe good life\u201d collapses. So we redirect our motivation to grind and save into channels that pay out sooner \u2013 cash, yes, but also autonomy, flexibility or a sense of identity. Fifty-seven percent of gen Z report<\/a> having a side hustle, well over double the boomer rate. Day jobs start to function as financial anchors, paying the rent while our side gigs do the identity work. After all, \u201cwriter\u201d plays far better on a Hinge profile than \u201canalyst\u201d.<\/p>\n

With no solid formula for our futures, more of us are experimenting with what it means to interact with the economy at all. The cultural counterpart to this economic logic is a series of attitude shifts to work, nervously cataloged as trends: the gen Z stare<\/a>, or faked productivity<\/a>. I recently wrote about the slow death of the prestige career<\/a>, where \u2013 thanks to AI \u2013 companies no longer require a robust team of entry-level workers to scale.<\/p>\n

We\u2019re living through a transition in our economic relationship with the future. The cultural theorist Lauren Berlant described how an \u201canticipatory present\u201d kept people bound to an economic system: enduring the short-term in the hope for a promised version of the long-term. Profoundly unable to imagine \u2013 let alone attain \u2013 a prosperous future, young people may be among the first generations to name this for what it is: foreclosed<\/a>. When the promise of a future stops working, we \u201cmaxx\u201d for the present, extracting value as quickly as possible with whatever assets late-stage capitalism permits us to spend. It\u2019s the other side of the \u201clittle treat<\/a>\u201d economy.<\/p>\n

Neoliberalism, the system that raised us, offers a convenient way forward: everything can be commodified if we try hard enough. When western society was first learning this lesson, France\u2019s artists gave voice to the unease of their postwar consumer boom. The film-maker Jean-Luc Godard\u2019s Two or Three Things I Know about Her follows Juliette, a Paris housewife, as she prostitutes herself to keep up with the lifestyle being aggressively marketed to her. She decides to sell her afternoons, her time, her body. It\u2019s a precursor, in many ways, to the gig economy of platform capitalism: Juliette optimizes any assets at her disposal to enjoy the present moment.<\/p>\n

The New Wave tried to warn us against the relentless tide of commodification. But where Godard and his contemporaries channelled their anxiety through women as objects, gen Z reclaims Juliette\u2019s image \u2013 not as a helpless, bored object, but as subject. We are agents of our own relationship with the economy. Less despairing, less passive, less accepting: gen Z\u2019s nihilism feels distinctly active. Production nihilism leans into a new definition of work, forcibly detaching us from the neoliberal \u201cgood life\u201d fantasy that\u2019s clearly stopped delivering<\/a>. Nietzsche described nihilism of this kind as a process of clearing away dead values. Which is what production nihilism does: it detaches us from the neoliberal \u201cgood life\u201d fantasy that\u2019s clearly stopped delivering<\/a>. Refusing to accept the current economic system as the endpoint of our search for meaning, we improvise a new set of values as we go.<\/p>\n

But is there real agency here? There\u2019s an idea circulating in Silicon Valley: that \u201chigh-agency\u201d individuals \u2013 those who think for themselves and act without being told \u2013 will be the ones to survive the coming AI disruption<\/a>. This isn\u2019t really agency. It\u2019s the anticipatory bind Berlant warned us about, another story about how to succeed in an economy where fewer of us will realistically be able to. No wonder we\u2019ve stopped caring about where our income comes from, when its source no longer determines where we end up.<\/p>\n