The tech hustle culture has gotten so intense that there's now an app for when you're too burned out to actually take a vacation. Endless Summer, launched by Meta product designer Laurent Del Rey, uses AI to generate photorealistic vacation photos starring you in destinations worldwide - no travel required. It's peak 2025: when you can't live life, just fake it with AI.
The dystopian reality of Silicon Valley's return to "996" work culture - 9 am to 9 pm, six days a week - has spawned what might be the most depressing app of 2025. Meta product designer Laurent Del Rey just launched Endless Summer, an iPhone app that generates AI vacation photos when you're too burned out to actually travel.
The timing couldn't be more telling. As startup hustle culture roars back and "locked in" founders embrace extreme work schedules, Del Rey's solution is simple: if you can't take a vacation, why not fake one?
"Burnout hits and you need to manifest the soft life u deserve," Del Rey explained on X when announcing his "first app 100% made by me." The designer, who recently joined Meta's Superintelligence Lab, reverse-engineered the entire experience from that feeling of summer nostalgia.
The app works with unsettling simplicity. Tap a camera button, and Google's Gemini Nano-Banana image model generates photos of an AI version of you exploring beach towns, dining with friends, or overlooking European cities from your balcony. Each image has a vintage film aesthetic that mimics the casual lifestyle photos flooding social media.
But this isn't just about convenience - it's about what we've lost. The photos show AI versions of users looking "fairly content" while supposedly exploring the world, notably without anyone "talking about AI or entrepreneurship or a lack of sleep," as Del Rey put it. It's a digital escape from the very culture that created the need for it.
The business model reflects the desperation. After six free images, users hit a paywall: $3.99 for 30 photos, $17.99 for 150, or $34.99 for 300. There's even a "Room Service" mode that auto-delivers two fake vacation photos every morning, complete with your latest synthetic escapades.
Del Rey told TechCrunch he was inspired by his love for summer and "how life feels during that time of year." The irony is thick - using AI to recreate feelings of a season when life supposedly slows down, delivered to people too busy to experience it themselves.
The app's privacy approach is refreshingly straightforward: it doesn't save selfies unless auto-generation is enabled, and users can delete everything with two taps. But the deeper privacy concern isn't about data - it's about what happens when we outsource even our vacation memories to algorithms.
