hustle culture - badge of honour?

What’s in trend today? I know what isn’t, taking a fucking break!

Whether it’s a job or a startup, planning weddings and workouts, cultivating hobbies and diving into the black hole of toxic productivity, has our generation forgotten how to relax? And what’s worse is the fact that those who are somehow saved by the ongoing propaganda of encouraging hustle, are shamed by the pseudo hustlers. Yes, pseudo hustler. What’s with the adjective?

Working on yourself and yearning to grow as an individual, is healthy and should be promoted. What shouldn’t though, is the incessant reminders to be at war with the world and not letting yourself or others around you to relax.

“I am busy” – a statement that is being used as a badge of honour today by people who measure one’s worth with how much time they are devoting to their work. What is so wrong with it?

Toxic productivity is a state of mind that creates a contagion effect and either infects people around us or merely pushes them away. It represents working not for the sake of what the outcome is going to look like, or how is it going to serve one’s higher good, but solely for the sake of inducing an adrenaline, a feel-good factor. But tell me one thing, whom are you lying to? Is it all that we are here for, to work until we die and then be remembered as someone who ‘worked a lot’ ?

For those of us, for whom the situation calls for it and its more like a need over a want, I have deep compassion. But for those who have their life revolving around how busy they are or can get, it’s more like a disease. When I talk about a social disease, of course social media has to be mentioned. The impact it has on spreading false hopes and sending people’s mind on autopilot is immense. Needless to say, that the influencers on their Instagram are doing a great job at influencing people. They make hustle look appealing.

And while we are on the subject, the soar in self help books, (guilty of binge reading it at some point of time in my life), are although emboldening good habits, too much of anything is toxic.

I am a big fan of growth minded individuals but can spot a pseudo hustler from a distance. Life is supposed to be lived, it’s not my philosophy, it’s the only truth. Do not dig a hole so deep that it gets difficult to come out of it.