10 Reasons Why We Should Hard Core Boycott Hustle Culture

We’ve all been told that practice makes perfect. That hard work, dedication, and sacrifices will make us successful. That working until our eyeballs fall out of our heads and our brains set on fire is admirable, and a desired quality, necessary even to make it in today’s cut throat competition for success. But what does success even mean? Making it to a point where we have a triple figure salary that we can spend on the incredibly minimal leisure time we are left with? Living in a big house, having nice cars, a huge closet full of designer clothes and an even more massive closet of stress, anxiety, and burnout? Do I sound bitter about it? I won’t lie, I am! Along with the growing community of people choosing alternative lifestyles, I’m here to tell you that this hustle culture that we have been spoon fed since we were young isn’t good for us (toxic even), its unsustainable and there’s SO much more to life. So here I present you with 10 reasons why I’ve decided to hard core boycott Hustle Culture, and maybe you should too.

Part I : It takes its toll on your physical health

Ill start with some of the most obvious downfalls of hustle culture that we all know are true, but ignore anyways. In the face of the overwhelming grind, I easily fall into patterns of neglecting my body by eating, sleeping, and functioning with lack of intention and presence. We all do it, so I’ll save you the time and go over them all pretty briefly so we can get to the more important stuff. Basically what it boils down to is while I know I’m not necessarily doing right by my body, what I end up doing often doesn’t feel wrong enough to change. But I’m lying to myself, and I know many of you out there are too. We get so used to the afternoon slump, poor digestion, chronic lethargy, and overall a dulled sense of life source that it’s easy to not realize how much of a disservice we are doing ourselves. So here is a friendly reminder that #yourbodyisatemple, and a vehicle to savoring more joyful moments in your day. I present to you the first 3 reasons why we should boycott hustle culture, quick and dirty.

1. With more time working, we have less time to properly nourish our bodies.

Processed foods, rushed or even skipped meals, and not enough water make us feel like shit. In the simplest way of looking at it, its self abuse. Cut it out! Eat more whole-foods, drink more water, and block out more time for meals so they aren’t neglected.

2. My body was beginning to feel like 21 going on 74

I was beginning to wonder why I was feeling like an old lady, complaining every morning about my back or neck hurting, joints being stiff, feeling lethargic. Maybe it’s because I was sitting in a chair, shoulders hunched, neck misaligned, looking like the Hunchback of Notre Dame for 8 hours a day. We might as well be in wheelchairs already with how much time we spend sitting. I HATE sitting for more than 3-4 hours at a time, it’s not sustainable long term, and being able to move my body is a luxury that I’m done taking advantage of.

3. How many people will we have to hear tell us that 8 hours of sleep is important for LITERALLY every bodily and mental function before we listen?

This one I don’t have to try very hard for because I live the #grandmalife and love going to bed by 9:30 every night. But for those of you out there who regularly pull all-nighters or don't follow a consistent sleep schedule, add me to the list of people berating you about it.

Part II: Surprise surprise, Hustle Culture may be worse for your mental health and functioning than it is for your physical health.

Sweet, now that those first three are out of the way, let’s move into the less spoken about things. Again, I think many of these next 4 reasons I’m boycotting Hustle Culture are things we already recognize. But I find they are a little easier to ignore and deserve a little bit more discussion.

4. Hustle Culture breeds competition which leads to a myriad of mental health issues.

In the highly outcome driven culture we find ourselves in, it’s hard not to judge how we stack up against others. Especially in the content creation space, there’s an endless amount of consumables, so its only natural to try and figure out how to break through and stand out. But this all ends up boiling down to being better than somebody else. And with that, always having somebody who will be better than you. So quickly this becomes the thought process we fixate on and its no longer about the work or why you started doing it in the first place. It puts us in a hamster ball of stress, always under a cloud of threat, feeling like we aren’t enough and like we have to purposefully separate from everyone around us just to stand out and survive (more on this later).

6. Prolonged elevated stress levels aren’t natural by any means

In my busiest periods, my stress responses are almost always activated. Trying to spin 18 plates at a time, its a constant job just to stay on top of what is coming next in the day, and there’s NEVER enough time. For some reason, society has decided to glorify and the idea of working way too long of hours and allowing stress to be a motivator for quality work and success #hustleculture. Unfortunately, when I start to get into these modes, the stress from work isn’t something that I can neatly box up and compartmentalize from the other parts of my life. It bleeds into pretty much everything including my relationships with others, my relationship with myself, my ability to decompress and do something that I enjoy, and even my ability to get a good nights sleep. It completely wipes me out, drains me mentally and physically, and takes a huge toll. As a species, we originally developed our ability to experience stress as a response to threat in our environment. And I mean real threat, like getting chased down and mauled to pieces by a bear, not just getting a B in English. These stress activations illicit hormone responses that were not meant to appear as often as they do in our lives (especially not due to perceived societal pressures). Many scientist hypothesize that chronic stress often leads to depression and anxiety. I know for a fact that this is true for me, and I’ve dealt with far more times than I’d like to admit. When stress begins to take over my mental sanctuary, there is rarely space left over for joy, happiness, relaxation, or creativity. So I’m left with a whole myriad of bad feelings and a mental/emotional fog that weighs me down like a wet blanket. I'm not willing to sacrifice that for hardly anything anymore, especially not for things society tells me I should want.

6. Lack of Creativity, motivation, and job effectiveness

As I mentioned above, as soon as high stress starts to set in, I no longer am able to save space for creativity, excitement, or relaxation. And I can tell you that those three things are the things that make me my best at what I do. I feel that this has become one of the most harming effects of Hustle Culture. With the idea of working to go farther faster, it leaves us little time to explore, little ability to allow creativity to flow, and absolutely no room to fail. Theres no time to mess up, no time to make mistakes, no time to try something crazy and then start over. In trying to stay as efficient as possible, I personally find that I do what I know works, staying safely within the bounds of what I’m comfortable doing. While it seems like I may be getting farther faster, its really just holding me back! Trying to always fit into the bounds of success makes work dull. Everyone’s work begins to get siloed into looking the same, it becomes very black and white. I create my best work when I have the time to be creative, try crazy new ideas, relax into the process and really tune into my own voice. It gives me the ability to breath color into what I’m doing, and its what makes me authentic and excited about what I’m doing. I find that it translates in the final product, and it has helped me to put out so much work that I’m genuinely so proud of and stoked on. Thats a feeling worth turning hustle culture down for.

7. Burnout

As competition, high stress, and lack of creativity (or creative block) come together to make the perfect storm, I shutter the windows and batten down the hatches to prepare for burnout season. Nothing is fun anymore. It feels like a constant uphill battle, might I even say full on mountaineering expedition up Everest, and it sucks! I think we are all familiar with what burnout feels like at this point, but the correlation between hustle culture and hitting burnout faster and more often than ever before may be something we are ignoring. I almost feel like hitting burnout and continuing to push and grind through it has become a badge of honor in society, something that is almost as worth bragging about as being able to buy that new car. I couldn’t help but wonder why we do this? Cool, yeah, I can get through a shitty situation where I hate what I’m doing, probably lost a friend or two, and feel (and probably look) like shit all the time. But we are literally the ones putting ourselves into these situations, doing so out of a perception that it will make us look good to society in the long run. Where is the honor in that? Wouldn’t it be so much better to take time for ourselves, our friends, our daily happiness, and be creative, authentic, and supportive of others? I understand that it’s important to know how to get yourself through a tough situation, to have perseverance, and be able to plug through when life necessitates it. I can agree that that has a certain level of honor. But putting yourself into this situation to go along with the grind bandwagon, or to prove yourself to hustle culture? Doesn’t seem to make sense to me when we could be learning, growing, and experiencing joy just as easily with a slight change of perception on what’s really important to us.

Part III: Taking a Deep Dive Into Understanding Why Hustle Culture Is So Toxic and Infectious

In my personal journey with kicking the Hustle Culture Virus, this last section definitely took the longest to process. With being burnout on burnout and completely at the end of my rope, I wanted to figure out how I could prevent it and what was really the root of why it kept happening. It may seem like the following reasons for boycotting hustle culture are pretty existential and some emotional woo-hoo bullshit. But I kid you not, changing my perception of these things has been revolutionizing the way I work and making my life much more balanced and joyful again. At this point I hope I’ve got you convinced that Hustle Culture “ain’t it chief”, but these next few reasons why I boycott it really help to dissect why its so toxic and infectious.

8. We aren’t being real with ourselves about what we ACTUALLY want

A huge reason why many of us get sucked in to participating in this “grind until death do us part“ mentality, pulling all-nighters, consuming entire pots of coffee alone, not saving time for friends and family, is because we want huge disposable incomes, nice things, and the societal label of being successful at what we do. Or in other words, we want to have the external validation that we worked hard and fulfilled some societal purpose of being more than just a pawn in the societal chess game. But why do we REALLY want this? Why are we willing to sacrifice so much of our daily happiness to work unreasonable amounts for this validation? I’ll let you in on a little secret….. society is gaslighting you to believe that you aren’t enough. What we want isn’t actually the material object of the nice car or house or wardrobe, but the nice feelings and societal attachments that come with it. We want to use these things to give us place in society and make us feel like we are indeed enough.

9. You ARE enough, just as you are. Happiness isn’t in the future.

I realized after too many burnouts that I was always just chasing a feeling of fulfillment, purpose, and needing that to feel like I was enough. Society tells us that if we make enough money to buy the latest and greatest iPhone, get promoted and receive a raise at work, become the CEO of our own company, it will make us happy. In fact, it suggests that we NEED those things to be happy. THIS IS WHAT MAKES IT SO INFECTIOUS. Almost everyone in society has been taught to believe that more is better and to fret that we are always lacking something because of it. But what if we believed that we have everything we need right now to be happy, to be enough? Why aren’t we taught that we are enough as we are? What if instead of operating from a state of lack, we honored ourselves enough to be able to provide time, space, compassion, and love to dive into our passions and moments of joy with purpose and intention. I personally find that if I remind myself that I am indeed enough and worthy of the things I desire when and if they are right for me, things seem to flow a bit more seamlessly. Having trust that this moment is exactly as it is meant to be takes quite a bit of pressure off and the stress of trying to get to a certain point to be happy falls away. Hustle Culture is based on the idea that we have to work hard to get to a point in the future where we have something more. And that that something more will be better and make us more happy than we are now. It fixates us and promotes attachment to a future time and date when we will be happy. This is a toxic way to live, it postpones your happiness when in reality the only thing we ever have is the moment we are in. Why not use it to be happy now?

10. It takes us away from each other, forcing a detrimental sense of individualism.

The cherry on top of all of this is how much Hustle Culture guides us into an “every man for himself” mentality. By promoting an unhealthy sense of competition, lack of time or energy for meaningful (and incredibly necessary) social interactions, and deteriorating mental and physical health, its leaving us stranded. It beats us down into health-compromised places where we need each other most and then also makes it harder for us than ever to connect and be vulnerable with one another with trust and comfort. It tells us that we should be as separate from everyone else as possible to stand out, to survive, and its societal sabotage. Imagine it like a form of the Hunger Games, it’s absolutely f**ked! Individualism in society began as a way to recognize and lift each other up for our differences, but it has morphed into an ugly beast that survives on comparison and separatism. It’s time we truly get back to a space where we can all operate with genuine celebration of our differences, our authenticities, and love. We ALL deserve to feel worthy of happiness, to feel like we are enough, and to have the opportunity to play, create, explore, and grow. No more of this beating ourselves and each other down to succeed. No more competing for what we’ve been told is a scarce resource of happiness and belonging. We have had it all along, its simply been masked by the false glamour and glory of Hustle Culture. Its time we take that mask off and take back a culture of belonging, vulnerability, and authenticity.

So Where Do We Go From Here?

So if you stuck around this long, you may be wondering what the solution is. I’ll be honest, me too. I won’t claim to know the best way to solve any of this, and I think that a full discussion of where we go from here deserves it’s own separate post (stay tuned, this is the next thing I’ll write about). But I’ll wrap up by leaving you with a short summary of where my thoughts lie on it. To me, the best way we can find the solution is by adjusting our lifestyles. Getting real with ourselves about what things we actually need, paying more attention to our consumption, and living with less things and more experiences. As cliche as living in a van or a tiny house or other alternative homes sounds, it makes a lot of sense! We are groomed to think that we need to graduate high school, immediately go to college (putting ourselves into debt before we even have a chance to live without it), get a job to pay off that debt and buy nice things, and then keep working to support an overblown lifestyle that is out of proportion. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t go to college, or want nice things, I’m just saying that we don’t HAVE to. That maybe instead it makes sense to take a gap year, work a serving job to get by and explore other things with our free time, passions and things that bring genuine joy. To work a job we love, with a lower salary, living in a van or tiny home that reduces our debt, and having more time and freedom to get out on the weekends or feel like we can take more time off. To put our ability to be creative, expressive, and authentic over our ability to spend money on things that we can’t enjoy because of the strings attached. Again, I won’t claim to know what solution actually works here, or to know what’s right for everyone, but if I can at least get you thinking about it, talking about it, I’ll consider my job done. I think conversations like these about why Hustle Culture isn’t working for us anymore, and how we can support each other through change, has the power to change quite a bit more than we’d give it credit for. Like I said before, it’s time we get back to each other and evolve to higher grounds.