Nihilism with a Business Model

The gig economy didn't just change how we work. It changed how we imagine ourselves.

This is a guest essay by Dr. John Seel.

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Sociologist James Davison Hunter observes that America is “a nihilist culture without nihilists.” This is because culture shapes individuals long before individuals shape culture. Culture is more than the sum of the beliefs and values of individuals, rather it is the reigning ethos and logic of the institutions that shape our lives. Most Americans could not define nihilism. Few have read Friedrich Nietzsche, its great prophet. Yet increasingly we live as though transcendent meaning does not exist. We behave as if there is no sacred order beyond personal desire, emotional satisfaction, and economic utility.

Human beings are shaped less by abstract arguments than by rituals, habits, and systems of daily life. Our practices disciple us long before our philosophies explain us. Here is where our human-social formation attention should be placed. We are heavily impacted by the environments we work and live within.

This reality helps explain one of the most overlooked developments among younger generations today: the rise of what might be called gig addictions.

A hard truth facing recent college graduates is that the American economy no longer reliably delivers what previous generations were promised. Recent graduates now experience unemployment rates significantly higher than the national average. Underemployment among degree holders has climbed above forty percent. Meanwhile, most graduates leave school carrying substantial student debt into one of the weakest entry-level labor markets in decades.

This produces more than economic anxiety. It produces existential instability.

When your only options are working in the fast-food industry (underemployment) or live at home with your parents (unemployment), it is understandable that finding quick fixes in the gig economy are a logical option. Some of these options may not be the best for you, but reality has not made the best option an easy or attainable default experience for many. Reality points in other self-destructive directions: the white-collar hustle of sports betting among young men and OnlyFans postings among young women. Before judgment should come some measure of understanding as this is a cultural condition before it is a personal behavior.

One of the defining features of modern economic life is the rise of the gig economy. The gig economy is an economic system built around short-term, flexible, and often digitally mediated work in which individuals earn income through temporary tasks, freelance labor, side hustles, or platform-based services rather than stable long-term employment. Increasingly, younger generations no longer imagine work through the older categories of vocation, profession, institution, or long-term career. Instead, work is experienced as fragmented, temporary, transactional, and endlessly flexible. Drive for Uber. Deliver for DoorDash. Sell products online. Build a personal brand. Monetize your following. Create content. Manage multiple side hustles simultaneously.

At one level, the gig economy reflects an understandable economic adaptation to a rapidly changing technological environment. But every economic system eventually shapes not merely how people make money, but how they imagine reality itself.

The gig economy does not simply create gig work. It creates a gig mindset.

And that mindset is increasingly reshaping the moral imagination among younger generations in deeply consequential ways. At the center of the gig mindset is the assumption that nearly everything can become monetized, optimized, and converted into market value. Everything and every experience are now for sale. The self itself becomes a platform.

Consider two rapidly expanding phenomena among young adults: men are increasingly addicted to online sports betting, and women are increasingly posting on platforms such as OnlyFans. These two are deeply connected manifestations of the same cultural logic. Together they speak to the contemporary challenges of human-social formation.

The level of sports betting involvement among college-age men has risen dramatically over the past several years and is now considered a significant public health and campus-life concern. Recent research suggests that roughly 58%–60% of Americans ages 18–22 have participated in sports betting, while among college students specifically, estimates rise as high as 67% participation on some campuses. More concerning than participation alone are the addiction indicators emerging among young men. Approximately 10% of men ages 18–30 now show behaviors consistent with gambling problems, compared to about 3% of the overall adult population. Gambling is becoming a major problem among college age males.

Online sports betting transforms competition, risk, and uncertainty into perpetual digital monetization. Young men are increasingly drawn into algorithmically engineered gambling ecosystems operating continuously through their phones. Every game becomes a financial opportunity. Every moment becomes speculative risk. Every emotional high becomes chemically reinforced through dopamine-driven cycles of reward anticipation.

The danger is not merely financial loss. The deeper danger is psychological formation.

Sports betting trains young men to experience life itself through the lens of volatility, stimulation, risk, and immediate payoff. Patience erodes. Discipline weakens. Work and reward become psychologically disconnected. Slow formation loses emotional appeal compared to instant speculative excitement. The result is not simply addiction but habituation into instability.

Not to be outdone, young women have their own onramp to gig addiction.

The same logic appears differently but relatedly in the rise of platforms like OnlyFans among young women. In 2019, the site featured approximately 350,000 creators. That number today, in part thanks to Covid-19, is over 4.1 million. Approximately 1.4 million American women are now creating content on OnlyFans. This represents one out of ten women in the college age cohort, depending on the methodology used.

One can think of OnlyFans as Uber for pornography. But its cultural significance is more than the normalization of pornography. It reflects shifts in our culture toward the monetization of identity, direct-to-consumer sexuality, the “creator” economy, and the blurring of public and private lives. The average OnlyFans creator does not make a lot of money, but the promise that they could and the normalizations of the thinking behind the platform make it increasingly common and attractive on college campuses.

New York City-based psychotherapist Jonathan Alpert warns about the concerning trend. “Psychologically, it offers instant gratification, attention, validation and income all at once. Those same rewards can create dependency and affect self-worth. Students risk tying their identity and confidence to clicks and subscribers. What is framed as independence often masks a deeper vulnerability.”

The deeper issue is not merely morality in the narrow sense. It is the view of the person being fueled by economic realities and the resulting rituals. Today’s America teaches young women to view their bodies primarily through the lens of monetized visibility. The body becomes detached from covenant, transcendence, mystery, and sacredness. It becomes economic inventory within an attention marketplace. But if the view of the body is already so detached, why not make money from this detachment?

This is why both sports betting addiction and OnlyFans participation emerge from the same cultural soil. Both reflect the convergence of technological acceleration, digital capitalism, fragmented identity, weakened institutions, declining transcendence, and algorithmic monetization.

The gig economy intensifies this because it conditions people to think of life itself transactionally. Everything becomes a hustle. Every talent becomes potentially monetizable. Every hobby becomes side income. Every interaction becomes economic opportunity.

The older idea of vocation quietly disappears. Vocation implied calling, stewardship, a contribution to something larger than oneself. All of this is dissolved in the gig economy.

This helps explain the growing emotional exhaustion among younger generations. Constant self-monetization is psychologically draining. One must continually perform, market, optimize, and compete for attention within digital systems engineered to produce insecurity and comparison.

What makes this especially dangerous is that the system often disguises itself as empowerment. Flexibility appears liberating. Monetization appears entrepreneurial. Visibility appears validating. But beneath the surface many young adults increasingly experience fragmentation, emotional detachment, and quiet despair. They are becoming economically connected while existentially unmoored. When everything is for sale, utility is everything, and nothing is sacred, they end up with a condition of commodified nihilism.

The answer is not merely stricter rules or louder moral outrage. Church-based finger wagging is not going to help. The deeper need is the recovery of a larger story of human dignity rooted in creation, embodiment, and transcendence.

Previous pushbacks against gambling and pornography are typically framed as individual moral failures. While this is partially true, the challenge is far more than this. This behavior is located within a nihilistic cultural context where this kind of plausibility and normalization dominate. To narrow prohibitions to individual morality is to ignore the forest for the trees.

Young adults do not simply need restraint. They need meaning larger than the marketplace. Until that meaning is recovered, gig addictions will continue multiplying. Human-social formation needs more than an individualistic response. We also need to attend to the structural and cultural realities that give these behaviors their rationale. Working to recover the dignity of the person and the dignity of work in this setting must be our starting point.

Cover image: OnlyFans model Annie Knight via Expert on Nothing podcast.