The Toxicity of Hustle Culture

By: Mary Sasso, Tori Corpuz, Justin Marquez

When we stay at home all day doing nothing, it is natural to feel as if you’ve wasted an entire day. Guilt from being “unproductive” rises and feelings of laziness and shame surface our thoughts. There is a certain stigma linked with being unproductive. A “good day” is commonly associated with getting out as well as accomplishing work intensive tasks. It is usually never associated with staying in bed or binge-watching trash reality television shows all day. We have created a culture in which the infamous motto cultivated by social media “the grind never stops” has conditioned us to obsess over productivity levels and stress over massive amounts of workload. This obsessive phenomenon is known as hustle culture.

Hustle culture glamorizes the infatuation of constant productivity and accomplishment. The higher the productivity level, the higher the self-worth. This lifestyle has the power to create a vortex of guilt when the work does come to a halt. It encourages people to disregard their mental and physical wellbeing, just so they can have the satisfaction of checking off a box on the to-do list. While an ambitious and productive mindset are essentially favorable traits, hustle culture has turned working hard all day everyday, regardless of your current situation, into the new expected norm. It has created a toxic environment in which people feel guilty about not being productive. We live in a world where incredible grades, incredible jobs, incredible paychecks are all prioritized over our own health and well-being. Being constantly busy has become a comforting blanket we can bury ourselves into. It is what we anchor ourselves to as a sort of identity throughout our day.

Social media platforms only amplify this plague of hustling. People will push into working 15-hour days and then run to Instagram or Twitter to post about this accomplishment—with the caption “#hustle”. This encapsulates performative productivity in all its glory. From this, a domino effect plays out. We see other levels of productivity, feel bad about how we have not reached other productivity levels, and then stress about trying to get a lot done before the day is gone. How can we not feel guilty about resting when this type of performative productivity is out there for all to consume? Here stands an ideology cultivated from social media of an “in” and “out” group. Those “in” the group are working hard, getting things done and feeling good about themselves and those “out” the group are doing the opposite. Social media has conditioned us into believing that when we accomplish this first, or become successful by doing x, y and z, then can we truly treat ourselves and rest. The infamous saying “I’ll rest when I’m dead” is popular for a reason. Society has associated success and worthiness to the amount of hard work we do each day. It has built up narratives in which work should be the most meaningful aspect in your life. If we slow down for even a minute, we’ll end up drowning in the fast-paced bustle of life.

Truth of the matter is what happens when we do not work—when we are not productive? Who are we when we are not working towards something constantly? If work becomes the most meaningful thing in life, what does everything around us become? It can be so easy to be engulfed in a hustle culture mindset that we forget life outside of it. Our passions, values, support systems all get carried away in the shadows.

Hustle culture has deemed time to be very finite and if we are not beating ourselves up with working towards the future, we are wasting our time. But what about now? The present moment? Now, don’t get me wrong, working hard and having goals is essential to living and having a sustainable future. However, taking care of yourself is also equally important. If we can invest five hours into studying or meetings, we can invest just five minutes into taking a walk outdoors or may god forbid it, a breath. Days should not be measured on the level of productivity. It should be measured on the daily experiences and profound moments that add to our character. What a waste it would be to ignore and not process the moments and simplicities of life that are collectively making up who we are right now in this very moment. We are enveloped in a plethora of identities and passions—work should not be the only one getting all the attention.

And yet, hustle culture is not a new concept. It has deep roots in American culture. The idea that we must constantly be working in order to be successful has been reinforced through years and years of conditioning.

Let’s revisit the green light. F. Scott Fitzgerald used it as the elusive object that Jay Gatsby sought after in The Great Gatsby- a symbol of the American Dream, capturing its alluring and unattainable promises that everyone has equal opportunity to reach the highest levels of success.

When it comes to green lights today, we commonly think of a streetlight. And though the modern physical embodiment of the symbol has changed, it is still just as seductive and just as demanding as its original form in The Great Gatsby, willing us to go go go towards it, now faster and more readily in our cars. Fitzgerald’s critique holds: We are still spellbound by the green light and still under its command.

The nuance behind the term Hustle Culture is not that it’s simply a way to term our ill workaholic tendencies, but that it shows that generation after generation refuses to give up the tireless chase of the American Dream, from the Roaring 20’s to the 2020’s. Hustle Culture is the revamped, Instagramified, Millenial/Gen-Z way to describe a long-lasting effect of capitalism.

But now, 100 years later, the green light is no longer simply the object at the end of a dock, it’s an essential function of everyone’s daily life, around the corner of every street. The American Dream has infiltrated our society and intuition just the same, omnipresent and with a tightened grip on our activity and perception of productivity.

Fitzgerald used Gatsby and his obsession with the green light to show the pursuit of wealth and upward mobility on the individual level. But it’s easier to see now that this pursuit is generational (and widespread). Our mental states are not just fatigued and aching from our individual day to day labor, but collectively, across generations. Each newborn baby is taunted with the fact that they must carry on the torch, after being given the opportunities of their parents before them (or lack thereof). Failure to do so equals shame and defeatism-so it’s a hard obsession to dismantle, passed down like a rotten tradition.

Even (or more so especially) for myself, this whole idea of work-life balance, is a work in progress. I live for the feeling of crossing things off my planner. I can’t stop the immediate pangs of fear and anxiety that come from comparing myself to Linked-In profiles. I love gloating from a productive day. I constantly switch from work anxiety, to anxiety from not working. Defeating Hustle Culture and axing away deep-rooted traditions is a hard and daunting task. So much of my line of vision is green.

And yet I try to be forgiving to myself. Because the majority of us are tied by the same need to be and feel valuable. We hope that the green light will satisfy this -that it will bring us worthiness and give our lives meaning. And so we run faster, stretch out our arms farther, and then one fine morning-

We can break the generational cycle. Little by little, we replace glorified self-sufficiency and independence with connection and companionship. We replace commitment to linear career goals and professional growth, to commitment to being life-long learners in all aspects of being. We replace endless consumerism and a need for acquisition, with gratitude. We replace the tightened horse-blinders that narrows our vision on green, with a corrective lens that lets us see complexity, endless colors and life goals to pursue. We replace mindless productivity, with focused efforts on living wholly for fulfillment.

We stop letting productivity define our self-worth, and instead ask: is searching to be valuable a worthy goal at all?