Ducks in a Row: Hustle Culture
by Miki Saxon
Yesterday’s Oldie talked about one of the biggest lies perpetrated on an already vulnerable Millennial audience — relentless striving 24/7.
It’s a great article — equal parts enlightening and alarming.
Welcome to hustle culture. It is obsessed with striving, relentlessly positive, devoid of humor, and — once you notice it — impossible to escape.
According to Erin Griffith (@eringriffith), writing in the New York Times, the biggest drivers perpetuating the scam do so to line their own pocket.
“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.
In 2016 Marissa Mayer, of Yahoo infamy, claimed a person could work 130 hours a week was possible “if you’re strategic about when you sleep, when you shower, and how often you go to the bathroom.”
Many companies extoll the approach and incorporate it into their culture, but WeWork has gone further and built its business around it and is a good example of how this philosophy in action looks more like a cult than a culture.
It has exported its brand of performative workaholism to 27 countries, with 400,000 tenants, including workers from 30 percent of the Global Fortune 500.
But it took Gary Vaynerchuk, the patron saint of hustling and founder of One37pm to “glorify ambition not as a means to an end, but as a lifestyle.”
It’s a lifestyle that has made a fetish of convenience, not for the sake of a better, more well-rounded life, but as a way to free up more time to work.
Finally, without doubt, it can be stated that hustle is a culture with no redeeming features. It sucks humanity from its followers, then uses up and destroys the most devout.
Image credit: Hermann Kaser
