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anyway? They offer little monetary benefit and subtract time from the two central periods of your day: work (9AM to 5PM—when can I leave?) not-work (5PM to 9AM—bone deep exhaustion. I don’t want to go back there).

Can’t swing an outside pastime as a side hustle or a significant resume builder?

And so the cycle continues. A day turns to a week turns to a year, and the only foreseeable escape is the vacation days for which you practically groveled. They come and go, so finite.

The year in the life becomes the lifetime, measured in career objectives and dollar signs, in exploitation and exhaustion and overwhelming dissatisfaction.

In a culture that emphasizes material gain and values profit over people, it falls on us to value ourselves and one another as more than simply laborers rushing about in a busy world. We avoid falling prey to hustle culture and the monotonous cycle of materialism by taking the time to do things that we love for more than the monetary value they possess. We resist the cycle by viewing our fellow humans as more than just what task they can perform in the world and in our lives. We ever so slightly lessen the impact of the cyclical pace in the lives of strangers by practicing mindfulness when we consume material goods.

We are more than the sum of our careers, our degrees, and our bank accounts. We are more than cogs in a machine. Above all else, each and every one of us are human beings. That humanity is not something to overcome for the sake of productivity, but