I’d rather be uncool than be a nihilist
Just because ethics isn't real doesn't mean it can't hurt you
I want to reflect briefly on the surge of nihilistic discourse that seems to increasingly plague the tech community. This particular disease goes by many names — ‘black pill’1, ‘stoicism’2, ‘pragmatism’. But don’t let that confuse you. These are all forms of the same thing.
The core of this mindset is a logical fallacy:
The speaker has realized that ‘everything is made up’, that ‘there are no rules’, that ‘you can just do things’;
therefore having values, beliefs, or morals at all is misguided, naive, cringe, and uncool.
A classic example that exemplifies the mindset is something like “but it gets clicks/views/engagement.” Another one: “this is just how the world works.” A third: “it’s not my problem.”
I first noticed an exaggerated version of this mindset when I spoke to a group of young 20yo founders in April of last year. I wrote:
Here was a group of people who were, by every account, living some of the most blessed lives on the planet. They were all healthy. They had decent relationships with their family and friends. They were surrounded by people who were eager to give them the resources to fulfill their wildest dreams. That’s not even an exaggeration. In between complaining about the decay of the city, one of the group mentioned off hand how a VC had bought him an 8sleep mattress and sensory deprivation spa treatments. I looked it up later — the 8sleep that he got was worth $5000 dollars. At the same age I was sleeping on a $100 foam/plastic twin bed.
In spite of their obvious good fortune, talking to them was a bit like talking to a 4chan greentext. They would joke about edgy bullshit — how it was good that 10 year olds were addicted to phones so that they could make money off them, that it was time for democracy to die and be replaced by techno feudalism, that we should renormalize homophobia as a society. It took me a while to realize they were serious, they were laying the irony on so thick. Why on earth were they so cynical? What did they have to complain about, that they were all so eager to “burn it all down”?
Why were they so eager to burn it all down? I never got a satisfying answer. But in the intervening year, I saw this thought pattern metastasize into the wider ecosystem, turbo-charged by the industry’s reliance on Twitter as its platform of choice. And now the nihilism just feels like it is everywhere, from the prevalence of startups getting funding for gambling apps to crypto scams to the naked use of AI to destroy the commons in pursuit of money.
I understand why the nihilism is baseline seductive. There is a lot of truth to the idea that many things in the world are artificial constructs. Founders and early stage employees understand this more deeply than most. It turns out that many company norms and rules exist because some guy just decided that that’s how things would go. I vividly remember when I had to pick my company’s insurance policy. Like, I read through the policies and did my best but at the end of the day, there I was, some guy that just decided that’s how things would go.
If you are in the startup world for long enough, shifting norms — or outright breaking them — becomes a learned muscle. And you start to see those norms everywhere. Sometimes this is helpful. “I know your policy says you can’t give me a refund, but also I know that’s just something you have to tell me, so let’s see if we can work together and give me something partial.” Works almost every time.
The problem, of course, is in the second part of the syllogism.
Bluntly, 2026 isn’t the first year where someone realized that there is no inherent morality to the world. This is a subject that philosophers have debated for literal centuries.
“Meaningless! Meaningless! Everything is meaningless. What do workers gain from their toil? I know that there is nothing better for people than to be happy and to do good while they live.” (Ecclesiastes) “Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one.” (Marcus Aurelius)3 “I do not reproach nihilism’s arrival. I believe it is one of the greatest crises, a moment of the deepest self-reflection of humanity. Whether man recovers from it, whether he becomes master of this crisis, is a question of his strength.” (Nietzsche) “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” (Camus)
The nihilist founder thinks abandoning ethics is the brave, clear-eyed position, and that anyone still following some sense of order is a naive sheep.
That’s cope, used to justify a ‘got mine, fuck yours’ mentality. Opting out is still a choice. Cynicism is still a value system — just a lazy and self-serving one. The only thing that distinguishes humanity as a species is our ability to define values and seek out individual ethics despite an unordered and chaotic world.
And this is hard to do! It is genuinely extremely difficult to build a coherent ethical system. It requires a lot of uncomfortable questions about what you actually believe, even when those beliefs cost you something. Especially when they cost you something.
That does not mean “never compromise.” Compromise is healthy and necessary, both as a founder and, like, as a person. You need to find a medium between ideological purity and complete rejection of ethics.
But as someone who has gone through one founder arc, at the end of every startup journey you are left with yourself and your decisions. And I have never, ever met a nihilist who was fulfilled and happy, even when they have good exits. The nihilism leaves a void that even success cannot fill.
(If they even have good exits! I can't rigorously prove it, but I strongly suspect founders that have real ethical beliefs are on average more likely to be successful at running a business. It's easier to hire, easier to get customers, and of course easier to have conviction about what you're building when it gets hard in the long haul.)
All this to say, if having beliefs makes me uncool, so be it. I’d rather be uncool than be a nihilist.
Final thought: I think there is a lot that more senior members of the tech community can do to stem this self-destructive (and society-destructive) mindset. We should act in accordance with our own beliefs and think more deeply about where we compromise. And we should guide the ever-younger members of the Valley towards healthy founder mindsets and ways of being in the world. If you fall in that latter category — if you’re a founder and are unsure how to be — feel free to reach out. DMs open.
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this one is particularly stupid; suffice to say, it is sad that it has gotten any play at all in the modern tech ecosystem.
I am not saying that stoics are all nihilists. I am saying that there is a class of people who call themselves stoics who are anything but.
Actual stoics had beliefs!
There was a This American Life episode, the Giant Pool of Money, that framed the subprime mortgage crisis as excess capital maximizing ROI by any means possible. Crypto and now AI fit into this thesis perfectly. The corrupting effect of "by any means possible", via the perverse incentives it creates for everyone else, can't be overstated.
To be clear, you can be a nihilist and still believe in and hold ethical positions. You just don't believe they're objective or universal. What you seem to be talking about is amoral libertarians who disguise their lack of morals with a lazy misreading of nihilism.