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<\/figure>\n\n\n\nNobody enjoyed this more than Sam Cat.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n That the Wi-Fi stopped working the first night felt like a cosmic joke. You said you wanted to disconnect<\/em>, I chided myself, panic rising in my throat as I uselessly refreshed a Chrome tab that stubbornly bore the same \u201cNo internet\u201d message below a pixelated dinosaur. But wasn\u2019t that the entire point? To avoid, as Jia Tolentino characterized it<\/a> earlier this year, the \u201cdevice that makes me feel like I am strapped flat to the board of an unreal present: the past has vanished, the future is inconceivable, and my eyes are clamped open to view the endlessly resupplied now?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Burnout\u2019s spin cycle in an age when one could theoretically be sustained by a nonstop parade of front-door deliveries of (truly) any conceivable desire is\u2014how do I put this?\u2014humiliating. I imagine some ancestor freshly arrived at Ellis Island, knee-deep in a slurry of animal remains inside a rancid meatpacking plant for 18 hours each day, being confronted with a discomfiting vision: It\u2019s their distant progeny (me!) pacing around a climate-controlled apartment in sweatpants, mumbling about something called a podcast and bemoaning an endless barrage of electronic mail and voter registration and parking tickets and doctors who don\u2019t know why you sporadically wake in the middle of the night to vomit, but it sounds like chronic stress<\/em>. Would they get back on the boat, assessing that it wasn\u2019t worth it after all to guarantee the future of such a weak-willed dilettante? <\/p>\n\n\n\n Regardless of the cause, becoming a little unmoored has by now taken a recognizable shape. I become hyperfixated on some virtually useless commodity that symbolizes The Treat That Will Change Everything. Last week, an ASMR YouTube video was recommended to me which pledged 1 hour and 15 minutes of \u201cCozy Fall Pampering\u201d with Trader Joe\u2019s pumpkin-scented ephemera. I immediately began rationalizing why autumnal-themed foodstuffs were\u2014obviously\u2014my mental health\u2019s missing link. How had I not seen it sooner? The answer was right in front of me! (Or, more accurately, across town at Trader Joe\u2019s.) Eventually, I settled on a Thoreauvian compromise: the cabin. <\/p>\n\n\n\n On the second night <\/strong>(after the internet was restored), we watched the 2024 erotic thriller Babygirl<\/em>, a genre of film I generally refer to as a \u201csick f***\u201d movie. (Used in a sentence: \u201cThat\u2019s a movie for sick f***s!\u201d) As far as kink plots go, it was actually fairly vanilla\u2014an exploration of the popular fantasy that powerful, rich women secretly wish to be powerless and subjugated. The movie was ostensibly about consent, desire, and shame, but all I could focus on was what Nicole Kidman\u2019s character, CEO Romy Mathis, was wearing. (Sexist!) For as long as I can remember, I\u2019ve been reluctantly drawn to characters like hers, mistaking cautionary tales about caricatured strivers (and their color-coordinated schedules) for tutorials. You can put a woman in the woods, but you can\u2019t make her stop fetishizing business formalwear.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The proto-Boss Babe, Ashley Olsen\u2019s Jane Ryan. The moment she pulled back the double doors to reveal her closet in <\/em>New York Minute<\/a> (2004) was one of many Olsen-twin-facilitated formative memories<\/em>. That daybook? Her note cards? Transcendent. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Pinning hopes for success on hypercompetent navigation of a modern economy is typical of the so-called professional-managerial class, a term coined by Barbara and John Ehrenreich in 1977 (or, in political theory, the \u201cpetite bourgeoisie,\u201d a phrase which for some reason always makes me think of dainty finger sandwiches). It\u2019s \u201cthe fantasy that financial anxiety and stress are temporary states of being that can be overcome through hard work, competition and education,\u201d as Catherine Liu writes<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n If Barbara were still alive, she might observe<\/a> that the economic extremes plaguing the 2020s are merely the continuation of a process that began many years ago, when deindustrialization broadsided America\u2019s working class. The rising sea levels of neoliberal policymaking have finally begun to meaningfully dampen the prospects of the professional-managerial class, who (maybe subconsciously) believed themselves to be more or less exempted from its worst offenses. Of course, she would probably tell us<\/a>, that was never true. Because they, too, had to sell their labor, they were always \u201csubject to the same pressures as other workers: deskilling, the weakening of their collective economic power, the degradation of the meaning of their work.\u201d There is an implied lesson in this analysis that would suggest a change of course: The respites of self-help, hustle, and merit once assumed to reliably produce autonomy and fulfillment were a sleight of hand all along, which served only to<\/a> \u201creproduc[e]… capitalist culture and class relations\u201d and undermine any real chance at transformative solidarity.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n Naturally, most financial media prefers to avoid class analysis, instead framing this ennui in terms of generation or gender. This provides narrative cover for dismissing structural strain by assigning it to the unique psychology of young people (or men, or women), rather than a legitimate force that exists outside TikTok. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Gen Z is, allegedly, rife with \u201cfinancial nihilism\u201d about the future. \u201cZoomers grew up with smartphones, the internet, and social media during difficult times like the 2008 economic crisis and Great Recession, and the subsequent Occupy Wall Street protest movement,\u201d Fast Company <\/em>offered<\/a> last week in one unconvincing explanation. In this telling, it was not these crises themselves, but the crust of digital connectivity specific to Gen Z that shaped their preferences and disenchantments. \u201cThey\u2019re disillusioned with traditional ways of doing things, which extends to how they invest and conduct their own finances,\u201d the article explained. Back in January, <\/em>Bloomberg<\/em> warned<\/a> that a \u201cfeminine\u201d form of financial nihilism (read: find rich man) was ascendant. Over the summer, CNBC <\/em>sympathized<\/a> with \u201cyoung speculators\u201d so eager to \u201cbreak out of the American caste system\u201d that they had \u201cembraced financial nihilism.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The story has been exercised to the point of exhaustion by now. When there\u2019s little hope that the traditional path will pan out as promised (student loans, unaffordable homes, wage stagnation, etc.), the metaphoric lottery ticket looks like a reasonable alternative. The scant proof of said nihilism is a stated interest in riskier investment behavior, like options trading or cryptocurrency or sports betting. (All products, it should be noted, with multibillion-dollar markets and marketing behind them.) Young women have given up on money and careers of their own in favor of mating up, the story goes; young men have given up altogether and turned to the slot machines of memecoins and DraftKings. The resultant impression is one of generational hopelessness and fatalism, a group so up to their eyeballs in trauma and trigger warnings that they\u2019ve stopped trying en masse. But is it true?<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/moneywithkatie.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/image-2-1024x624.png\")
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