A few weeks ago, I read a piece that Erin Griffith wrote for the New York Times, and it completely blew me away. I have burned my friends’ ears down talking about how horrible hustle culture actually is, and how work for the sake of work accomplishes nothing in the grand scheme of one’s life. So, fair warning.
And, really – I don’t delve into serious stuff like this too often, but if it’s your thing, I highly recommend reading the entire column. It’s girthy, but it’s damn good.
Courtesy of the New York Times:
Even the cucumbers in WeWork’s water coolers have an agenda. “Don’t stop when you’re tired,” someone recently carved into the floating vegetables’ flesh. “Stop when you are done.” Kool-Aid drinking metaphors are rarely this literal.
Welcome to hustle culture. It is obsessed with striving, relentlessly positive, devoid of humor, and — once you notice it — impossible to escape. “Rise and Grind” is both the theme of a Nike ad campaign and the title of a book by a “Shark Tank” shark. New media upstarts like the Hustle, which produces a popular business newsletter and conference series, and One37pm, a content company created by the patron saint of hustling, Gary Vaynerchuk, glorify ambition not as a means to an end, but as a lifestyle.
Ambition, grit, and hustle, baby!
I’ve always been critical of this lifestyle. Now, don’t get me wrong – I would probably classify as a “hustler” myself. I have a regular day job at which I work 40 hours a week, doing dull and tedious work for the big machine that is “the company” to make money. I feel unimportant on a daily basis, but I’m okay with that.
Then, I come home and put in anywhere from 30-50 hours a week on SoBros Network stuff. But, it makes me happy, and I get my sense of purpose from not how many hours I work but the satisfaction of putting something creative out into the world, and potentially turning that into a business. I love it. Even if we had never made a dime from it, I can’t imagine my life without it. I’ll do it until I can’t do it any longer.
That feels different from the pissing contest that develops when people in scenarios like the one I’m in at my day job try to see who can work the most hours.
Hustle culture becomes about the work itself, as a lifestyle, and not the ultimate fulfillment of achieving a dream. In fact, I’d say there is no real dream.
I previously worked for a San Francisco tech startup. I saw it all the time – people I worked with doing remedial tasks and putting in ungodly hours doing it. Even I myself was guilty of it – I once put in a 70+ hour week punching numbers into a spreadsheet. People were lauded for that kind of work ethic, but I just thought the whole thing was fucking dumb.
So, I got out.
It’s not difficult to view hustle culture as a swindle. After all, convincing a generation of workers to beaver away is convenient for those at the top.
“The vast majority of people beating the drums of hustle-mania are not the people doing the actual work. They’re the managers, financiers and owners,” said David Heinemeier Hansson, the co-founder of Basecamp, a software company. We spoke in October, as he was promoting his new book, “It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work,” about creating healthy company cultures.
Mr. Heinemeier Hansson said that despite data showing long hours improve neither productivity nor creativity, myths about overwork persist because they justify the extreme wealth created for a small group of elite techies. “It’s grim and exploitative,” he said.
Grim and exploitative! There you have it….two words that I would absolutely use to describe this phenomenon.
The truth is that the vast majority of us are going to live and die without doing something that the history books are going to write about for centuries. What’s the ultimate goal of hustle culture? One day, we’re all going to be absurdly rich billionaires? If only we put the 100 hours in each week? Come on.
If you don’t have that kind of pressure on you, it makes it easier for you to focus on the things that simply make you happy. And, I’m a big proponent of that. Just do what makes you happy, because no matter what happens over the course of your life, at the end of it, six people are going to put you in the ground.
Do you want to look back and wish you had taken more time to better yourself emotionally? Develop genuine, deep relationships with people? Play more video games? See the world? Or, do you want to just focus on what makes you happy now so that you can rest easy once that final day comes?
There’s empirical data showing that hustle culture is stupid – it’s out there if you want to research it, but for brevity’s sake in this piece, we’ll just leave it at that. It’s actually counterproductive. All you’re doing is lining the pockets of the people at the top.
Aidan Harper, who created a European workweek-shrinkage campaign called 4 Day Week, argues that this is dehumanizing and toxic. “It creates the assumption that the only value we have as human beings is our productivity capability — our ability to work, rather than our humanity,” he told me.
It’s cultist, Mr. Harper added, to convince workers to buy into their own exploitation with a change-the-world message. “It’s creating the idea that Elon Musk is your high priest,” he said. “You’re going into your church every day and worshiping at the altar of work.”
Yeah, fuck this.
It’s much more likely you’re going to hit a wall of burnout and maybe suffer a mental and emotional breakdown by engaging in this useless behavior.
Whatever it takes – being happy at the individual level trickles out into all of your relationships. You do have an effect on those around you, and who knows? If you’re happy maybe you can make someone else happy and so on and so forth. It’s okay to be yourself – even if that means using all of your free time to be a lazy piece of shit on the couch.
People need to be told that that’s okay.
Stoney Keeley is the Editor in Chief of The SoBros Network. He is a strong supporter of Team GSD and #BeBetter. “Big Natural” covers the Tennessee Titans, Alabama Crimson Tide football, the WWE, and a whole wealth of nonsense. Follow on Twitter @StoneyKeeley
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