Hustle culture

What it means.

Hustle culture is the belief that you can do anything if you only work hard enough.  If you’re only committed enough.  If you can keep giving all of yourself to a job or pursuit over and over.  Like crazed hamsters on a wheel, you keep running as hard as you can until the other hamsters drop.

Here’s a story from one of the Silicon Valley companies obsessed with hustle.  There was a cucumber in the office fridge.  Someone carved the following onto it “Don’t stop when you’re tired, Stop when you are done.”

The popular mantra is ‘TGIM’.  That’s right; Thank God it’s Monday.  As in; “The weekend is an inconvenient and wasteful pause in our work lives.

I bring this up because like all good lies it has the kernel of truth in it.  But in the current hustle culture that kernel of truth is twisted and dangerous.

Yes, you can succeed through hard work.  You can push your way to success by being rabidly committed to something.

But at what cost?

And what is success?

And who’s success are you hustling for?

There is this mythos around hustle that calls lionizes the less-than-1% who come out the other side of the hustle grinder.  We put them on a pedestal.  We hold them up as examples.  It one of our favorite stories.  So-and-so made it big through commitment and hustle.  They outlasted the competition.  They rose to the top.

Great.  That was their choice.  But, somehow in lionizing them we make the unfounded assumption that this is the model for everyone.  And worse we criticize as less worthy those who don’t commit to the hustle.

Companies and organization have tapped into the hustle culture.  They know that if they can get their employees to feel like they have to commit everything to the job, they win.

Startup culture has a big, stinking, dollop of hustle in it.

But at the end of the day, as a human experience, hustle culture is grim and exploitative.  It’s a swindle.  Convincing a generation of workers to beaver away unceasingly is pretty darn convenient for the owners.

Hustle culture is obsessed with striving, relentlessly positive, devoid of humor, and — once you notice it — impossible to escape.

The hustlers are told to “rise and grind”.

The hustle hypers go beyond hustle as a way to achieve to hustle as a lifestyle.

Elon Musk, tweeted that there are easier places to work than Tesla, “but nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week.” The correct number of hours “varies per person,” he continued, but is “about 80 sustained, peaking about 100 at times. Pain level increases exponentially above 80.”

Who benefits from the workers at Tesla maniacally striving 100 hours a week?  Yeah, Elon and the investors.

This is how hustle culture becomes seductive.  It becomes a cult.  Those are the cult leaders.  They use the half-truths and lies to create this sort of FOMO that draws people in.

But hustling towards success is a moving target.  The more you hustle the more the success becomes secondary and the hustle itself becomes the point.  The hustle acolytes begin to tie their self-worth to the hustle.

Where does it lead for the other 99%+ who get sucked into the hustle culture vortex?  It leads to unhealthy competition between employees. It leads to burnout. It leads to a very unhealthy company culture.

That’s what hustle culture is.

An interesting thing happened recently.  It was a pandemic that sent everyone home from their offices.  It gave people a chance to sit back and get a breather.

After they had detoxed from the hustle workers began having the great awakening.  They started to ask questions like ‘what is all this getting for me?’

Workers left the workforce in droves.  They left for greener pastures.  They just got up and left for no reason at all except that they had glimpsed the false gods behind the hustle altar.

They realized that if they dropped dead, all of their certificates, medals and awards would be swept into the trash.

You can’t take it with you.

And we see these shivering refugees from hustle culture groping their way to new truths.  To a balanced life.

A life of understanding.

A life of meaning.

They start exercising regularly, the meditate, they read.

They don’t’ work like mad dogs anymore.

And they are happy.