Winners and Losers in Gen Z’s Dating and Economic Market, Part 1
Why is it that I Suddenly Long for a Tall, Rich Husband?
A month after moving into an apartment complex in Two Bridges, Manhattan, my Hinge profile quickly reflected the local ecosystem of the elusive New York City “finance guy.” New grad investment bankers, venture capitalists, quants, as well as guys with “[vague position] at Finance”, within a one-mile radius, brandished their titles with overwhelming confidence. They were, after all, the most prized commodities in the dating market— and the reason my roommate never mentioned her potential date’s love for hiking but instead the fact that he went to Yale and works in Private Equity.
I first became aware of the 6’5, trust fund-wielding, blue-eyed, finance guy following a conversation with my computer science lab partner, a tall, conventionally attractive and intellectually gifted math major who casually said he didn’t care too much about his job after graduating, “as long as it’s in finance.” Despite previously considering a PhD in pure math, for him, the rewards of academia paled in comparison to the status and earning potential “finance” promised. It was less about passion and more about claiming the position he seemed preordained for, one that came with cultural capital, economic clout, and the highest position in the dating hierarchy.
So who exactly is this guy? Why does everyone want him and why does he want “finance”? Most importantly what does he have to do with all the disgruntled incels, frolicking tradwives and dead girlbosses?
This essay, the first in a three-part series, explores the finance guy as a cultural archetype emerging from Gen Z’s social and economic anxieties and aspirations. Using the frameworks of neoliberalism, red-pill masculinity, social Darwinism, and Todd McGowan’s theory of the capitalist gaze, I examine how this figure came to dominate the dating imaginary and what his popularity reveals about the winners and losers of Gen Z’s dating market. Clearly beyond simply being a symptom of personal desire, the finance guy reflects a deeper ideological current. One where wealth is conflated with worth, masculinity is measured by market value, and romantic success is increasingly dictated by economic positioning. First, I’ll briefly discuss the meme that started it all.
The Origin of the Trope
If you haven’t seen it, you’ve probably heard the sound bite. The viral TikTok and its remix set to the “Like a G6” instrumental features a blonde woman with wet hair singing, tongue‑in‑cheek, “I’m looking for a man in finance. Trust fund. 6’5. Blue eyes.” The caption, “Did I just create the song of the summer?”, signals satire. I strongly believe the remix contributed to the loss of nuance because it was, undeniably, a banger. However, the fact that this TikTok was created at a time when broader discourse about “high‑value men” and “providers” was culturally acceptable made its satirical origins evaporate immediately. Many young women began using this sound unironically in their TikToks, typically featuring their boyfriends or other men who fit those requirements. The perfect storm that makes the finance guy a trophy in the modern dating market predates this TikTok trend, the entire platform, and even the internet. Understanding this phenomenon requires an examination of the Western history of patriarchy, capitalism and the ways that they intersect.
The classic American nuclear family is one of great brand recognition and perceived prosperity. Often framed as the natural evolution from our (misunderstood) hunter-gatherer past, where men supposedly hunted and women gathered, this family unit is typically imagined as a heterosexual, middle-class household: the man leaves for work in the morning, the woman stays home in a dress tending to the children. Within this framework, manhood was defined by productivity, provision, and control. Despite being constantly championed as the norm of the 20th century, Male single-earner (‘breadwinner’) households comprised a majority only for a 40-year window in the 20th century, peaking around 57%. But alas, with this model constantly shoved down our collective throats, masculinity became dependent on a man’s ability to produce and provide. It is not innate or immutable; it’s performative, and ultimately tethered to the success and the failure of the system it serves. For most of U.S. history, that system has been capitalism.
Todd McGowan’s theory of the capitalist gaze positions the effectiveness of capitalism in its “image of neutrality”. That is, its ability to appear as the default mode of existence rather than a political construction. Whereas systems like communism are clearly associated with revolutionary decisions highlighting their political origin. Essentially, we’re all on The Truman Show, taking the growing wealth of billionaires, need for DIY retirement, student loans exceeding mortgages, and bankrupting medical costs as natural and inevitable despite being carefully constructed and actively enforced by governing bodies. McGowan believes the performed neutrality of capitalism makes it difficult to even recognize, let alone imagine or enact alternatives. That is —when it operates smoothly.
But what happens in moments of crisis? This, according to McGowan is when the illusion cracks, inciting mass rejection of the system.
The Economic Landscape We Inherited
Born between the mid-1990s and early 2010s, Gen Z came of age in a rather long shadow of financial instability and “unprecedented times”. Our formative years were shaped by the aftershocks of the 2008 Financial Crisis, which wiped out $16 trillion in household net worth in the U.S. alone. Instead of buying the dip and making the most of a crappy situation, many of us were too busy playing tag at recess. By the time we started applying to college, tuition had ballooned far beyond what our parents paid, and taking out tens, or even hundreds, of thousands in loans felt less like a choice and more like a prerequisite to get any decent job, many of which previously didn’t require a degree. Now, the national student debt total sits above $1.7 trillion, and many of us are graduating into a job market that simply doesn’t justify the price tag. To add fuel to the fire, we entered adulthood during a pandemic that decimated job prospects (not to mention stole prom and the freshman experience from me and my fellow 2020 high school graduates). The rise of the gig economy further reduced job security and access to benefits. There was also the violent 2020 stock market crash; and the inflation surge of 2021–2023, which peaked at 9.1% in June 2022 –the highest in four decades. The series of unfortunate economic events goes on but this is all to say, things looked rather grim.
You might be wondering now, why, after so many economic crises, we only murmur about eating the rich and haven’t dug out our forks yet? Or at the very least why we haven’t taken steps to dismantle a system that has failed us at many pivotal points in our lives. Or why old money, hustling, and stealth wealth are aspirations we’ve not only invented but deemed worthy of pursuit. Particularly among Gen Z men, as under a system where masculinity is built on provision and economic dominance, this economic reality has had gendered consequences. The collapse of stable, single-income households, the shrinking middle class (down 11 percentage points since 1971), and the erosion of upward mobility have all undermined the conditions that once enabled men to “be men” in the capitalist sense.
The impact of this on the Gen Z male culture is evident. But, instead of these economic setbacks paving the path of widespread rejection of a system that failed to deliver what was promised, social media arrives, just in time to patch the illusion. Crypto bros flaunted their alleged gains on TikTok. Meme stocks surged and collapsed in the span of a week thanks to Reddit threads and Robinhood trades. Women posed by pink Cadillacs peddling MLMs as feminist entrepreneurship. In a world where most people are falling behind, algorithms amplified the few who’d “made it,” selling statistically rare outcomes as universally achievable goals and keeping the machine churning.
Is It a Systemic Problem or Are You Just a Beta?
Against this economic backdrop and media arena, social Darwinism creeps in. It is disguised in the language of meritocracy, mindset, and male self-improvement. Stripped of its 19th-century vocabulary, the logic remains: only the fittest win, and if you’re not winning, you’re simply not trying hard enough. Structural inequalities are reframed as personal failures. Falling behind becomes a character flaw, not a consequence of systemic breakdown. Under this illusion, to question the system is to expose yourself as weak, bitter, unfit, or worse; a beta.
Social media has more or less subverted McGowan’s capitalist gaze by acting as a mirage of the economy, magnifying rarities of class mobility so it seems seamless. We’re still on a set, but there is now an echo chamber full of A-list actors telling us it’s all real, and we’re kind of losers for questioning reality. For Gen Z, wealth has felt simultaneously unattainable and terrifyingly arbitrary, as the line between merit and exceptionalism became increasingly blurred. This distortion is a feature, not a bug, of neoliberalism, a political and economic philosophy that prizes individual responsibility and market logic above all else. Neoliberalism privatizes not only public services but personal outcomes. If you’re not successful, it’s because you didn’t optimize hard enough. If you’re not wealthy, you simply haven’t unlocked the right strategy yet. Under this framework, the state fades into the background, and inequality is naturalized as the result of different levels of discipline or desire.
For men, whose social worth under patriarchy has long been tied to their ability to succeed under capitalism, this economic erosion is existential. As Gen Z women surpass their male counterparts in educational attainment and have begun out-earning them in some U.S. metropolitan cities, many Gen Z men are discovering that the ease of claiming their status as men has eroded as well. Yet instead of rejecting the script entirely, a growing subset is reinterpreting it for the neoliberal age. Now, the manly thing to do is to decode the system and become one of the winners. There’s a fixation on the hidden rules of capitalism, often filtered through Reddit threads, long-form YouTube videos, and TikToks about “escaping the matrix.” This is where the dynamic trio of Andrew Tate, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk enter the scene, not necessarily admired for what they do, but for what they represent.
Tate sells a fantasy of aggressive domination: wealth, women, control, all achieved by unlocking some primal version of masculinity. Bezos and Musk offer a different kind of supremacy, tech-prophet billionaires who seem to bend the market itself to their will. Both represent exaggerated versions of winning in a system that claims to reward merit and discipline, even if their actual paths were paved by monopoly, timing, or privilege. For disaffected young men this narrative is much more seductive and actionable than the reality. It suggests that masculinity can still be reclaimed, not by questioning capitalism, but by mastering, or better yet, conquering it.
He’s Not Too Extreme, He’s Just Right
Where the Tates, Musks and Bezoses represent extreme, often unattainable versions of conquering capitalism—hyper-masculine, billionaire-level dominance feels out of reach to most. The finance guy offers something more grounded. He’s not selling an illusion of god-like mastery; he’s mastered the system just enough. He wears the uniform (vest, watch, inflated title), speaks the language, and plays the game with fluency and ease. For Gen Z men navigating economic precarity and a crisis of masculine identity, he embodies a feasible aspiration: someone who cracked the code without needing to reshape the entire world. For Gen Z women (the focus of part 2 of this series), many of whom are contending with their own economic disillusionment, with rising educational attainment but eroding social support, higher incomes but greater burnout, the finance guy represents security, prestige, and a return to a more legible social order. Hypergamy, once considered outdated, is now reframed as economic realism and postfeminist sensibility: if the system won’t protect us, perhaps he will.
This is why everyone wants to be him, and everyone wants to be with him. And as the financial industry is the beating heart of capitalism itself, it’s where value is abstracted, controlled, and concentrated. To succeed in finance is to be close to the source and to align yourself with the logic that governs everything else. That is why he chooses finance.
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