: Neither for nor against hustle culture
This seems to be a common pattern with me: There is a popular social position, such as “AI art sucks,” and I agree with the general vibe, sentiment, and intuition behind the social position, but struggle to sign on in full because I can’t agree to all the individual terms. Don’t worry, I won’t talk about AI art, that’s been done to death.
The take that’s on my mind now is “hustle culture sucks.” Let me be clear: I think hustle culture sucks. I don’t like that influencers go out of their way to pretend to be hustling harder than they are in order to compensate for insecurities about the extent to which their success comes from luck and good birth rather than grind. I also don’t like how hustle/bootstrap/grindset language is often attached terrible ideas like multilevel marketing scheme where you very much do not stand to benefit from a hustle mindset, and which tend to prey on people who are desperate for cash and have exhausted all their other opportunities.
But check this out: If you find a “hustle culture sucks” essay on the indieweb or tumblr or whatever and read down a few paragraphs, eventually the author overplays their hand, starts saying things like “all work is bullshit” and “there’s no point in trying to be a good employee, your job will never love you back” and “all your coworkers are enemies.” This is where I start to go, “Well …,” because I don’t think the solution to the (very real) competitiveness and unfairness of Modern Capitalism is to just throw your hands up and say it’s all pointless.
Have you ever worked somewhere where all your colleagues were totally jaded and checked out and thought that there was no point in even trying? Well, I have, and it’s awful. Once the mind virus of “all this shit is bull” starts to spread, the working environment degrades rapidly from merely dull to downright unpleasant. Old guys start making sexist/homophobic jokes in the open (who cares if I get fired?), people stop filling out tickets to order new office supplies/toilet paper or fix the coffee machine, people start leaving food to rot in the fridge, etc. It’s an awful feedback loop.
The ironic thing is that despite the supposedly progressive ethos behind the whole AntiWork thing (sticking it to the man!! yeah!!), in an office culture gone sour, it’s usually the young women who bear the brunt of the discomfort. They have to write all the tedious emails and status updates to management explaining what’s gone wrong, they have to endure the uncomfortable jokes, they have to cover the early morning/late night hours when everyone else goes home to be with family, etc.
My request to anyone who finds themselves stuck in a shitty bullshit job, is burned out, and is starting to think “my job will never love me back” is twofold:
- That may be true—time to start looking for new work.
- But also: Even if your job won’t love you back, don’t shit where you eat and consider processing your grievances in a way that doesn’t burn your colleagues. This goes double if you are in a management role where you are setting the culture.
Bullshit jobs—as the book of the same title points out—are part and parcel of the modern economy. Hustle culture is wrong to mislead people into thinking that your life and career only have value if your day is a wall-to-wall grind full of innovations and problem solving. But it’s also wrong to conclude from this fact that the workplace is a sort of virtual reality where the way you treat people, the things you say, and the things you do or don’t do are without consequence.