As if summoned from every woman’s worst nightmare, here comes an ad for a company that helps men cheat on dates by lying about everything from their interests to their age. The fictional dating profile claims to be 6’4” and work at “Bananazon.” “Maybe you are just way older than you look,” the older woman tells her much younger companion. As his ID card is rejected and he’s served grape juice, the man is discreetly prompted by his AI assistant to recover the date, complimenting her art. Launched on 4/20, the ad copy reads: “Cluely is out. cheat on everything.”

Lee observed job interviews had already been made outdated by technology, becoming a kind of drudgery that was no longer meaningful for screening human talent. Then-Columbia student Lee started the company as a way to cheat on technical interviews for big tech firms. After their product, an AI “cheating tool” called Interview Coder, secured the team internship offers from Meta, TikTok, Amazon, and Capital One, Columbia University suspended Lee for live-tweeting his disciplinary process in late March.

Since then, Lee has raised a $15 million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz. Though Cluely no longer brazenly uses the word “cheat” on most of its copy, Cluely tells its users that the AI will do the heavy lifting for them. The product now advertises itself as an “undetectable AI” that responds to users’ screen and audio. “It’s inevitable that college students and young people will use the tools at their disposal,” Lee told me. The Cluely manifesto, subtitled “We want to cheat on everything,” spells out how cheating becomes the new normal:

And yes, the world will call it cheating. But so was the calculator. So was spellcheck. So was Google. Every time technology makes us smarter, the world panics. Then it adapts. Then it forgets. And suddenly, it’s normal.

Outrage is proof of concept. If software can ace a technical interview, write a stellar essay, or anchor sales deals better than a human, maybe we ought to just let the AI do it. This is just the creative destruction of capitalism: a feature, not a bug. Lee is further only hiring engineers and influencers with at least 100,000 followers to boost virality. Technology brings about change. The incentives of social media have profoundly changed the incentives of new companies, with virality becoming a close correlate of user growth. Software startups have now ended up in a new variant of a very old business—the entertainment business. Calling Cluely cheating, as Roy told me, is just a way to grab attention. This relentless chase of online virality has already bought the company free publicity in the form of countless news articles and over a million dollars in revenue.

Cluely’s casual observers and critics alike both give the start-up a boost—all comments and casual watches feed into the algorithm. In a world where the passivity of billions of viewers rewards marketing stunts, it almost doesn’t matter what the product even is.

The Competition to Nowhere

The appearance and language of this economic mood and the executive decisions it leads to can be startling. To some this economic nihilism can even be offensive. The previous mode of relating to economic activity couldn’t be more different: the old way was one of hard work, in one career, loyal to one firm, maybe two. Your Boomer parents probably spent most of their career like that. Mine did. But today, the average graduate from America’s top universities plans to work at their first job—prestigious firms such as McKinsey, Goldman Sachs, or Meta, when they were still hiring—for not more than two years.

To get these coveted jobs with acceptance rates of one or two percent, striving college students jump through hoops like interviews you need to study for and dozens of twenty-minute zoom calls. Some even hire coaches to walk them through the process. If applicants have a higher risk tolerance, or a great awareness of the absurdity of their search, they can use the shortcut of having generative AI do it for them.

When the two years or so is over, rinse and repeat. The management consulting giant McKinsey even formalizes this churn, offering its consultants Search Time, paid time off accrued over time to look into non-McKinsey jobs. After one year, you get six weeks of Search Time, and so on.

It’s rare—and unexpected—that any college graduate will spend their career at a single company. The thing about careerism today is that its most devoted followers seldom have a single career at a single firm.

Don’t want to graduate college? Want an easier way out?

Gamble on papal or presidential elections, enabled by technically illegal but widely-used Polymarket. Dropship. It’s believable, if not true, that one out of ten women my age have an OnlyFans, perhaps the most insidious of the new get-rich-quick schemes. 

Or, make money trading “shitcoins.” DOGEcoin, the namesake token of the government agency promoted by the world’s wealthiest man, has a market cap of $30.65 billion as of writing, higher than the GDP of sixty countries. DOGEcoin, like all shitcoins, has no value nor utility. It does not stand for anything other than the financialization of memes or, rather, the memefication of the economy.

Most shitcoins flunk. Their name alone implies their meaninglessness. Anyone who buys a shitcoin knows they’re a quixotic hope wrapped in the respectable guise of humor. The lifestyle of the shitcoin billionaire is, at least in theory, attainable with the small price of being hyper-online and plugged in to Discord channels and X (formerly Twitter) all day. This is the default setting of a generation that spends a fourth of every day on our phones anyway. Why not gamble to get rich quick? Easier, and less humiliating, than a nine-to-five.

The process of trying to get a job these days is, for most, humiliating—that is the word thrown around college dining hall tables in conversations about the future, on sunny spring days meant to mark the optimism of senior spring. Job hunting is a dog and pony show where elite college graduates are reduced to drudgery such as automating LinkedIn job postings, scrambling to claim their spot in the laptop class, using the dunce cap that is the LinkedIn “Open to Work” banner, or even taking off a semester solely to apply for jobs.

Going into college, we were told by teachers, parents, and other responsible adults to study business, as it was the most useful major. The New York Fed reported earlier this year that a general business major had an underemployment rate of 52.3% and business management of 51.3%. Even those who listened to the then-current mantra of “learn to code” and majored in computer science still have an underemployment rate close to one in six. 

Yes, it’s because the elite is oversupplied; too many students at elite universities clamoring for the cushy jobs that were at times taken for a birthright. The elite universities are not helping by expanding class sizes under the guise of making elite education accessible, an incredible paradox. The old saying used to be “the hardest part about Harvard is getting in.” Let me suggest a wordier revision: “The hardest part about Harvard is getting the select few jobs the Harvard bubble deems acceptable that have lower acceptance rates than Harvard itself.” Less than 20,000 bachelor’s degrees are awarded from the Ivy League every year. Even still, there are not enough laptop jobs to go around. 

Why not be like the kid you know who made millions on shitcoins?

Jobs Not Worth Doing

It’s not just that it’s difficult to get an elite job. It’s that the jobs themselves feel meaningless—and are meaningless. Humans are simple creatures, we like to be able to see, touch, feel our work. The code for one tiny portion of the Google Maps CarPlay interface or spreadsheets deciding whether to extend credit to failing Midwestern companies are not tangible and do not satisfy those human needs. Americans, both those who graduate from elite institutions and those who don’t, largely work in services.

My dad, who worked in law, and my mom, who worked in healthcare, were both in services. They both had fulfilling careers. But other services jobs are more abstracted, less tangible, less real, both for the provider and the customer of the service. Nearly 300,000 Americans work in data entry. Over 400,000 are “compliance officers.” There are an estimated 955,000 unique consulting companies in the United States, a truly astounding number.

Anthropologist David Graeber described many of these as “bullshit jobs” in a 2018 book that claims over half of workers spend a third or more of their time in the titular “bullshit jobs.” These jobs are work for the sake of work, rather than building something greater. They are jobs that are wading into red tape, repeatedly editing the font in powerpoint presentations, and box-ticking. Simultaneously grueling and easy, these jobs demand the souls of those who carry them out, rather than their bodies or minds.

As a result, the economy as a whole feels fake. Most of my peers are not going to produce real things that they can see and hold with their own eyes and hands, but are gearing up to work in a simulacrum for the rest of their lives.

I believe deeply in the value of hard work and creation—and that those should be rewarded by market forces. I am excited to work, and I think everyone should be. But, understandably, people are not excited to work meaningless jobs that eschew the most fundamental of human acts—creation.

All economies are measured by growth. But, as Dan Wang has pointed out in his essay “How Technology Grows,” the growth in the services industry is far from tangible. And the financial benefits are concentrated not in the hands of ordinary service workers but in the hands of Facebook VPs and hedge fund managers.  Growth on some fronts has progressed massively while others have stagnated. In the first quarter of 2025, as per the Bureau of Labor Statistics, productivity is decreasing, even with superintelligent AI allegedly right around the corner. 

The fakeness of the service economy is rubbing off onto material reality. Though a small corner of Silicon Valley may dream big, stagnation is the reality. Everyone has experienced the frustration of flimsy goods, terrible service, and the feeling that we do not live in the future we dreamed about as kids, whether that childhood was twenty or eighty years ago. It does not feel like we are living in the future. When the best and brightest in every hometown in America becomes a cog in consulting, finance, or big tech, there is little room for improvement.

Economic Nihilism is Accurate Observation of Our Economy

The ideology of those who believe that economic activity is meaningless is then quite understandable. At least, the type of economic activity expected of the elite class, seeing itself as too smart and productive to dirty their hands with machinery. 

Economic nihilism is then the ideology of the young, aspirant class, willing to put in two years—but only two years—at whatever firm is prestigious upon graduation. Economic nihilism is the ideology that celebrates taking shortcuts. The economy itself is abstracted away, what’s left is a salary or its equivalent in crypto payouts. 

Roy Lee told me that he thinks the future of work will be more intellectual and creative. “Standards of living will just grow and people will just spend their time fighting in the marketplace of ideas,” he said. He suggested that AI, eclipsing human productivity, may bring about a universal basic income. I thought this to be an overly-optimistic response coming from someone who made the defining product of economic nihilism. This same lackluster dole future remains the default answer given by even the most prominent tech executives such as Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, and Elon Musk, when asked about humanity’s economic prospects. 

When laptop jobs join stable single-earner households and good customer service in the pantheon of distant, pleasant memories of the economic past, I doubt most will celebrate their newfound ability to think rather than work. After all, the educational system that gave rise to—and then punished—Cluely is the same educational system that teaches students not how to think but how to check boxes.

Over the last few months, I’ve argued with friends about which jobs AI will automate away first. I argue that it’s the jobs of the elite aspirant class: consultants, software engineers, and big law associates. The reason is that these jobs are knowledge work, meaning that they just require intelligence—not ingenuity, creativity, or a great amount of urgency—to successfully do. Rather than worrying about Uber drivers, waiters, and telemarketers, perhaps elites are worrying about themselves. Perhaps the existential risk is one of facing the end of their work rather than the end of work as such.

And perhaps the elite class is on some level reaping what it has been sowing. While the current new generation has not created these conditions, few from it have sought to change the dismal economic and political landscape. With AI ready to replace the bulk of Ivy League knowledge work, perhaps we will finally exit the paper belt and enter what was the real economy all along. This is, however, a dangerous circumstance for society given that the history of revolution can be read as the history of frustrated aspirant elites leveraging their collective power for their own rather than general benefit. Economic nihilism, being a form of nihilism, ultimately seeks to abolish itself. What remains to be seen is what approach, if any, this elite class will use to adapt.