Looking for a simple definition of hustle culture?
Work harder. Achieve more. Sacrifice self-care.
That, in a six-word series of sentence fragments, is what hustle culture is all about. It’s a mindset—or #grindset—that emphasizes working long hours to achieve professional success. Once you achieve that success, you don’t stop. Instead, you move the goalpost and continue the grind.
Hustle or fail—it’s as simple as that.
What do people get out of hustle culture?
Hustle culture gives people a tough love sense of inspiration. Its rallying cry to work harder and achieve more provides a jolt of energy to budding entrepreneurs and seasoned pros trying to succeed in a highly competitive world.
Developing a strong work ethic—an essential part of hustle culture—can certainly help you become more self-reliant, financially stable, and professionally successful. Furthermore, in a world infatuated with overnight success, hustle culture’s message of putting in long hours is a helpful—and at times necessary—antidote.
The business world is fast-paced and highly competitive. Those who come in early and leave late are more likely to succeed than those who come in late and leave early. The more hours you work, the more likely you are to experience some level of success. It’s a simple numbers game. Even if that success is small, it will inspire you to continue the “rise and grind.”
That being said, there’s a harsh limit to that arrive-early-and-leave-late logic. Trying to work “fast as hell” for 18 hours a day is more likely to lead to a string of disasters than a train of productivity (more on that below).
What are some drawbacks to hustle culture?
Hustle culture has brought success to some through its message of working hard and achieving more. However, its emphasis on sacrificing self-care has led many others to ruin.
In the short run, you can probably get away with sacrificing a bit of self-care—for example, if you’re on a tight deadline, pulling an all-nighter to get the job done isn’t going to kill you. However, normalizing that kind of schedule most certainly will.
In fact, the Japanese even have a word for it: karoshi, or death from overwork. According to the WHO, it leads to 745,00 deaths per year.
Even if you don’t get a heart attack or stroke from working “fast as hell” for 18 hours a day, you’ll probably experience burnout, which not only destroys your mental and physical health but is also terrible for businesses and economies as well.
In short, sacrificing self-care is bad for health, productivity, and, by extension, success.
People aren’t machines—even machines aren’t machines in the proverbial sense, as they regularly break down and require maintenance. As the old IT Crowd bit goes, “Have you tried turning it off and on again.”
Where does hustle culture come from?
Hustle Culture as most people understand it nowadays dates back to the dot-com boom of the late 1990s. At that time, investors were pouring venture capital into new startups in the hopes that a few would be massively successful. To try and make that hope a reality, startup companies encouraged employees to work as much as possible—allowing casual dress, building game rooms, and offering other perks that blurred the line between work life and home life.
As the 2010s rolled around and the power of social media grew, so did the influence of hustle culture. Aspirational entrepreneurs everywhere embraced and spread the message through #hustle and #riseandgrind posts on Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, and other sites.
However, it reached a limit.
Where’s hustle culture today?
Although hustle culture is still around, its influence has decreased considerably, thanks in large part to the pandemic. As employees everywhere were forced to leave the office and work from home, they began spending more time with their families and re-evaluating the role of work in their lives. Is it really the most important thing?
For many, the answer was no. In fact, most employees prefer flexible hours over a salary increase.
In addition, growing awareness of inequalities in gender, race, and class has led many to seriously question hustle culture’s central promise: “If you work hard, you’ll be rich and successful.” That’s not to say people are against working hard, but it is to say that privilege, chance, luck, and other structural factors play a huge (and often unacknowledged) role in success.
Where’s hustle culture going?
The future of hustle culture is uncertain. Just as it had a swift rise in the mid-2010s, there’s also been a swift backlash that boils down to one thing: sacrificing self-care is a recipe for disaster, not success.
Remember Eureka moments?
The idea goes back to ancient Greece. Supposedly, the mathematician Archimedes was trying to figure out if the King’s crown was made of solid gold without ruining the crown. He hustled overtime and worked long hours but remained stumped and unproductive. Then, he took a break by taking a bath.
“Eureka!”—or “I have found it”—he shouted. If he placed the crown in water, he could measure how much water was displaced, allowing him to determine if it was made of pure gold or not.
Archimedes’ breakthrough came from a break. That, in a nutshell, is where hustle culture is going. It will still embrace the value of a strong work ethic, but with the knowledge that activity and achievement aren’t the same. The #riseandgrind needs a #break to avoid burnout and allow Eureka moments of productivity to emerge.