There's a, what I view as new, cultural phenomenon gaining steam.

It's what I call the "bro-style"

It's predominantly male, ages 15 - 22, and is becoming the next favored career amongst young men in the United States.

Growing up, I remember when there was an inflection point – more young children wanted to become YouTubers over being an astronaut. It might've been Logan Paul's doing, or perhaps, the stagnancy of the United States space program.

Yet, it was an inflection point nonetheless.

Today, I believe this trend is shifting away from YouTubing towards something new - small-time internet entrepreneurs who perform arbitrages to accumulate wealth quickly and live a dopamine-filled lifestyle.

The bro-style is a potent cocktail of digital savvy, aggressive marketing, and a specific brand of hyper-masculine ambition.

Its adherents are not creating new products or services of intrinsic value. Instead, they are masters of arbitrage, exploiting fleeting inefficiencies in the digital marketplace.

They are the young men using sneaker bots to snatch up limited-edition footwear for immediate resale at a premium. Or crypto daytraders.

Or, better yet, those selling courses to wanna-be crypto daytraders on Whop.com.

They are the dropshippers, curating sleek Shopify storefronts for products they will never touch, sourced from Chinese factories and marketed with a seductive, aspirational gloss (oh, and marked up 100-1000x).

I first got introduced to this when I was an active YouTuber. One of the Whop founders contacted me on Discord to make a sponsored video about their platform. I ended up declining due to a contract I had with a competing company.

In my work with the competing company, I could actually track how those I referred performed. I was seeing these people making millions of dollars teaching daytrading, sneaker reselling, etc. on Discord.

This world is propped up by a new pantheon of role models, figures like Iman Gadzhi and Andrew Tate. These influencers, typically in their early to mid-twenties, project an image of effortless wealth and unrestrained freedom.

Their social media feeds are a carefully curated highlight reel of private jets, luxury apartments, and exotic travel, all presented as the direct result of their "hustles."

They speak a language that resonates with a generation raised on the internet, a vernacular of "side hustles," "grinding," and "financial freedom." Their message is simple and intoxicating: the traditional path of education and a steady career is for the uninitiated, the "wage slaves."

The real path to success, they preach, is through shortcuts, through a life dedicated to the relentless pursuit of money and the dopamine hits that come with it.

Not creating real value.

The appeal is undeniable.

In a world of economic uncertainty and stagnating wages, the promise of making millions without a college degree is a powerful lure. Influencers like Zach Yadegari, an 18-year-old who garnered media attention for his multi-million dollar app, become aspirational figures for an even younger demographic. While Yadegari's success is in a more traditional tech startup, his story is often co-opted into the broader "bro-style" narrative, at least in my view.

Why dopamine...

A life lived in constant pursuit of the next dopamine hit is psychologically unsustainable. The human brain is not designed for a perpetual state of heightened arousal. These receptors become desensitized, requiring ever-greater stimuli to achieve the same level of satisfaction. This can lead to a state of chronic dissatisfaction, anxiety, and a pervasive sense of emptiness.

Beyond the physiological toll of a dopamine-driven life, the "bro-style" hustle presents a more profound problem: a lack of purpose.

Arbitrage, dropshipping, and speculative trading are fundamentally extractive. They do not create new value for society. They do not solve meaningful problems. They do not contribute to the betterment of communities.

Dropshipping, for instance, often involves marking up mass-produced, low-quality goods from overseas and selling them to unsuspecting consumers through slick marketing.

This stands in stark contrast to more traditional forms of entrepreneurship that are rooted in innovation and value creation. The entrepreneur who builds a business around a new technology, a more efficient service, or a product that genuinely improves people's lives contributes to economic growth and societal progress. And they are rewarded for their work.

I may change my mind at some point

I am 20 years old myself. I have no idea if bro-style leads to burnout, or if they will happily buy Rolexes for decades to come. But I'm curious. What do you think?