.png)
Give Hustlers a Break!
Last week, I stumbled upon the following job posting. If the vacancy calls for a JUNIOR Marketing Manager, what a Senior would have been required to do? Drop dead for the sake of scaling the business to new heights?
As I was scrolling through what seemed like a bottomless list of accountabilities, I was visualising the poor “ideal candidate” that would land the offer. They would be someone who hits the morning floor running as soon as they blink their eyes open, replying to emails while gulping down shots of espresso, and shoving a toast in their mouth as they sprint out the door with a shipload of worries racing through their head.
*draws a deep breath*
They would be someone who supercharges themselves with more tasks than the 24-hour timescale could endure, and fast-track to searing their brain with the workload. (Can you smell the smoke yet?)
This “rise and grind” situation seems like some hustle-culture-victim profiling, doesn't it? Bingo! Unless you live in a remote island, you must have come across the #careerporn and #TGIM (Thank God It's Monday — more like Thank God Sunday's Laziness is Over) hashtags with which social networks rife nowadays. These buzzwords frame the online presence of hustlers who work past their limits and 8-hour shifts to attain and brag about their ever-greater achievements. Apparently, this mentality shapes the contours of an evolved, cyber-savvy human that's constantly on autopilot, without the need to sleep, eat, or take a break.
Welcome to internalised capitalism, folks!
Let me paint the picture of hustle culture further for you. Hustling is a societal expectation crystallised around a singular objective: that you feel forced to love what you do and sacrifice your whole life doing it. This much-glorified state means ignoring some basic structures of balance between work and life — grinding and enjoying — and straining your energy at max capacity in your workplace.
Now you may think, is this some kind of normalised workaholism? Well, yes but no...
Workaholics VS Hustlers
There's a pervasive misconception that the two terms can be used interchangeably. Wrong!
What differentiates them is that the former emerged in the 70s, whereas the latter is a neologism that saw a flare-up in relatively recent times. Hustling is more commonly-used among millennials, a.k.a aspiring entrepreneurs, who pulled all-nighters to hand in academic assignments and transferred this unhealthy habit to their professional life.
Also, where workaholics struggle internally without beating the drum for their compulsion, hustlers treat technology as their number one ally in the promotion of their overworking ethic on social media. Yet if you think about it, this attitude is counterintuitive to hustling: if busy-ness is your default mode of being and anchor of self-definition, how did you find the time to boast online about the goals you've “crushed” that day, or what your payslip figure is?
Social Media
Social media platforms are culprits to the silent suffering that success (in the grinder's mind) entails. I present it as suffering precisely because the biggest representatives of entrepreneurship perceive it so. In 2018, Medialink CEO, Michael Kassan, gave a speech called The Art of Hustle at Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity. Yes, you guessed right. All the participants unanimously espoused the Grind mindset. More specifically, philosopher Alain de Botton pointed out a correlation between creativity and suffering:
There is a real relationship between the capacity to endure suffering and the capacity to do great things.
But what's hustle culture even for? Shark Tank investor, John Daymond, offers an explanatory snapshot through his book Rise and Grind. In its subheading, he boils down the value system that he subscribes to: Outperform, Outwork, and Outhustle to a More Successful and Rewarding Life. (No dude, just no...)
It appears then that pro-hustling individuals strive towards an ideal capitalist utopia in which their self-worth is determined, calculated and rewarded by the hard work they do, and that’s the mark that they leave on Earth. Is this happiness though? For some, who have grounded their self-respect in this never-enough philosophy, it might be.
In this collective attempt to automate and optimise life, there’s a need to quantify results and verify legitimacy; the need to measure everything — from the amount of hours that you’ve worked to the ounces of water that you’ve drunk. More and more tech companies and online retailers tend to attribute a rating on things like:
Are we hitting our metrics?
Is our brand growing quickly enough?
If we place our customers on a scale, how many of them are using this feature, and is it driving up engagement?
How many page-views did we receive? (is that click-through percentage high enough?)
We've reached a point where outworking each other in a highly competitive market is lauded and applauded, where stretching yourself to an extreme is the norm. As social media users, we're incessantly overflowed with propitious corporate ventures and people kicking ass professionally.
It's unlikely that we're informed about bankrupted businesses, layoffs, job rejections, unemployment rates; nor do we get sneak backstage peeks at the psychological turmoil, the blood-sweat-and-tears involved in these filtered success stories. Work can break you as easy as it can make you. Such unrealistic standards put pressure on young people who aspire to this capitalist-grind cult that's disguised in a tasteful “productivity” attire.
When you join the tribe, you feel that by hustling your life becomes more purposeful, that it has a framework to live by. But how about when you're not hustling, when you momentarily escape the Chinese-originated 996 — that is, 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week? Do you feel divested of a defined reason to exist when you just curl up on the sofa practically doing nothing? Are you hit by guilt-ridden thoughts that you don't deserve to be happy when you engage in a hobby instead of working harder, faster, stronger? (Let me give you the warning signal and tell you that that’s some harmful self-talk!)
As founder of Embrace Change, Cynthia Pong, aptly puts it:
We have crafted a lot of our feelings of self-worth on achievement, accomplishment and being prolific in stuff that we do. If you take that away, there’s a void. And voids are so hard to deal with.
Get the job done
I discovered the above picture in another job board — Indeed. The application captures the “included yet not limited” skillset that X job seeker should possess to be a match for the role. As you may have noticed, however, all the bullet points build up only to conclude in the phrase: Get the job done. That instantly reminded me of former Yahoo CEO, Marissa Mayer, who confessed to Bloomberg that she allots the near-entirety of her time working: 130 hours per week which equates to 18.5 hours a day, plus Sundays.
That's a pretty good indicator of a non-stop producer who lives and breathes to “get the job done”! I don't remember signing up for this frantic pace of life that serves the income-making tale of capitalism on my first day at school. I don't remember agreeing to turn into a work machine; spending every waking second of my life investing in my future while brushing now-moments of self-care off to deal with them later, or in private, or never so that to carry on working for that tangible monetary output.
We're conditioned to believe that work excess will lead to life success, with the status of being slow as the equivalent of failure. This is a notion that advanced capitalism has instilled, which precludes many people from challenging a purely profit-driven system. They're encouraged to keep their head down, jeopardising their sanity and mental welfare, in hopes that they'll gain a slice of this toxic fantasy. Crazy isn't it?
The Hazards of Hustling
As all things in life, nothing lasts forever. Sooner or later, this tireless pattern of toil beyond typical 9-5s will take a toll on hustlers. Based on findings from the Health and Safety Executive, 595,000 workers go through work-based anxiety and depression in the UK, amounting to the loss of 15.4 million working days.
In the US, the situation has spiralled out of whack, given that work has become the fifth primary cause of death according to management expert, Jeffrey Pfeffer, author of Dying for a Paycheck: How Modern Management Harms Employee Health and Company Performance — and What We Can Do About It:
In total, workplace environments in the United States may be responsible for 120,000 excess deaths per year [...] accounting for about 180 billion dollars in additional healthcare expenses, approximately 8% of the total healthcare spending.
Bottom line: Hustle culture doesn't necessarily speak productivity!
To the contrary: it approves burnout. It's scientifically proven that sleep deprivation due to overworking results in performance decline, vision collapse, and stress overload to name a few.
Conclusion
Don't get me wrong, measuring quantifiable outcomes is great, as it helps clarify the ambiguity in a world where no one truly knows what they're doing. Logically speaking, the more you earn the better living conditions you'll secure for you and your loved ones. I do acknowledge that financial stability enables social mobility, but it doesn't mean that you must bound your entire existence around that manic hustle. Qualitative insights for personal fulfilment should be valued: a delicious meal, a captivating novel, a two-hour long stroll in the park with your cherished cluster of people.
My solution to this never-ending loop of grind is to show some love to distractions. When deployed wisely, i.e., when you're being present while having lunch with a friend rather than checking your phone, they can help spawn fresh ideas and facilitate reassessments. Spontaneous experiences shouldn't necessitate action-taking or immediate benefits. Life is meant to be packed with surprise trips and more days when you indulge in self-pampering (however you conceptualise the act of pampering) guilt-free.
So, go do it! Go grind, go dream, go learn, go achieve, but also be aware of the hustle stage that you're standing on where you're expected to play your part. Why draining your soul to tune into a world that's not willing to stop advancing at lightning speed? Why is this that you're rushing? Life isn't going to get away from you if you intentionally slow down or pause. I promise you're not going to miss out on anything, especially now that you're confined indoors.
Annex a territory within yourself where your hectic routine and peace of mind coexist — where you have more dormant hours for leisure and decompression without imperatives to run your relentless schedule, nothing to fix or accomplish. Turn the rat race into a mindful journey. In the digital universe of instant gratification, being patient is a virtue. Realise that some things take time to actualise, and treasure what's happening at this very moment.
Give hustlers a break, I mean it!
Comments