How to stop being financially nihilistic without pretending everything is fine

A note on Mondays:

The question I get most often from readers is some version of “okay, but what do I actually do about this?” Which is fair! Going forward, I want Mondays to be where I answer that question more directly through tactical essays or reader Q&As — basically the kind of financial advice that actually meets you where you are. I also have a few new long-term projects taking up more of my week, and I’m trying to be more deliberate about making the things I do publish good rather than putting things out because my content calendar tells me I’m supposed to. Wednesdays will still be where I do the bigger culture/economy/money-psychology essays. Mondays will increasingly be where we figure out what to do with all of it.

Consider this the first experiment. And please send me your money questions!

Financial nihilism is all the rage these days. I’ve written about this trend approximately 700 times at this point, so I am not going to spend this entire essay re-litigating why.

You know the world we’re living in. Rent costs an absurd amount of money. Buying a home increasingly requires either family wealth or a miracle. A normal middle-class life increasingly requires an abnormal middle-class salary. The job market feels weird, AI is threatening to rearrange entire industries, and most of the traditional milestones we were told to work toward have gotten more expensive at the same time they’ve started feeling less guaranteed.

And then there’s the internet, where everyone else appears to have responded to these conditions by becoming incredibly rich at 27.

It’s not particularly surprising that this has produced financial nihilism, or the sense that the slow, boring, supposedly responsible path to financial security is not actually going to get you where you want to go, so you may as well look for a shortcut or enjoy the money now.

So how do you build a financial plan when you don’t feel particularly optimistic about the future?

For paid subscribers, I’m going to walk through my anti-nihilism financial plan: how to figure out which goals are actually yours, build a financial floor that gives you real choices, spend money in a way that makes your life better now, and make enough so that one bill doesn’t derail your entire financial life.