Edited by Oishiki Ganguly
How many of these sound like you?
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I feel guilty when I’m not working.
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Even during my downtime, I can’t stop thinking about the work I have due or the work I’ll receive soon.
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If everyone else is able to manage this workload, why can’t I?
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I should always do as much as I physically can and then some more.
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I feel constantly overworked while simultaneously feeling like I’m not doing enough.
Feeling attacked? Welcome to the downside of hustle culture.
Hustle culture, for anyone who isn’t familiar with it, is essentially a movement focused on improving work ethics in order to promote a more hardworking environment. It’s the idea that despite what life throws at you, you can always succeed by ensuring that you constantly persevere. Basically, every motivational poster in your classroom (“Winners never quit, quitters never win!”) and every speech you heard telling you to “Never give up” is hustle culture on wide display. The collective motivation of an entire community is bound to impact individuals and inspire them to work more diligently. In both theory and practice, hustle culture has proved to be extremely beneficial for societal improvement and has had overwhelmingly positive outcomes.
On the other hand, hustle culture is also a major source of anxiety and burnout for far too many of us. The urge to succeed takes over our life so covertly that we forget to draw the line between working hard and overworking. Moreover, it can blur the motivations we had to do something in the first place, leaving us stuck in a cycle of overworking simply for the sake of overworking. Worst of all, it can induce unhealthy competitiveness to the point that we constantly gnaw at ourselves to do better than everyone around us, or to just do better than we did the day before. Just knowing that someone out there is working harder than you are can make you feel like you’re not doing enough, even when you know you couldn’t possibly be doing more. So how do we break out of it?
First, there are a few things that we really need to think about, even if we’ve heard the same thoughts countless times before. Hustle culture is a common mindset, yes, but this has no guarantee that the output it produces will be common across every individual. The world would be an extremely different place if life was as easy as hard-work equals success for everyone. Still, the propaganda of this idea is so far spread that when we “fail,” our first reflex is to think “I should have worked harder” instead of taking into account the circumstances that may have led to this. Hustle culture also entirely neglects difficulties that anyone without a privileged social status has to face. It doesn’t even consider that in a country like India, where millions are made to unceasingly work with no possibility of personal growth, be it economic or otherwise, breeding the idea that your success is dependent on your own efforts can not only be damaging for the self-esteem of scores of individuals, but also leave them trying harder to succeed in a rut with no scope. Not knowing when to quit is a serious problem imposed by this lifestyle. Moreover, this concept of “failure” is so capitalistically driven that a 16 year-old crying about her possibly ruined job prospects, because she got 90% instead of 95% in her 10th grade final exams, has started becoming a norm. This toxic fear is what drives the entire culture, which probably isn’t the healthiest motivation for anyone to work harder.
Hustle Culture is definitely troublesome, but sometimes, so are we. For some reason, we have a really hard time accepting that everybody is built differently. It’s such a simple idea and so easy to dismiss, but it’s imperative we realise the gravity of what it’s trying to convey. There may be a lot of people who thrive under pressure and can handle the effects that hustle culture brings with it. At the same time, there are a lot of people who can’t. Some of us do better working hours at a stretch, some of us need breaks every 30 minutes. Some of us can’t sleep without completing our work, some of us can’t complete our work without sleeping. A direct result of this would naturally be that some of us may be able to carry on longer than the others. That doesn’t imply that you’re weaker in any sense or that those who can carry on longer are more hardworking than you, because if you’re functioning differently, it does not mean you’re functioning wrong!
It also doesn’t mean that you can’t ever improve or that your capacity to work is limited. If you do want to improve, your first step has to be dedicating enough time to yourself to understand what works for you. Unfortunately, we all have to do certain things even if we may not want to, but it’s crucial that we develop strategies that allow us to make it through these tasks without burning out. We don’t like to admit it, but a lot of us prioritise who we are on paper over who we are in the real world. We’ve started thinking about our lives so objectively that we hardly make a decision anymore without overthinking the impact it’ll have ten years down the line. Because of this, we’ve completely scrapped the idea of instant gratification, perhaps thinking we haven’t done enough work to deserve it. Say you have an exam tomorrow, would you feel guilty if you spent even an hour today playing games, despite having studied 8 hours already? If you do, that may be you escaping any form of indulgence until you feel like you’ve worked yourself beyond what is needed. It’s a feeling we’re all too familiar with, but when we take a step back and rethink it for a moment, it seems absurd that we expect this much of ourselves. This may sound like an exaggeration to you now, but it’s very easy to get caught up in this fad to the extent that you forget your own saturation point. If you convince yourself that this kind of an imbalance is ordinary, there’s no doubt you’ll be overwhelmed by how worn out you always feel.
I can only speak from experience, but there were two approaches that helped me regain my equilibrium. Firstly, I redefined “success” to be a more dynamic notion in my daily life. Like everyone, I have my good days and my bad days. On a good day, a success for me might be completing all the assignments I had pending for weeks. On a bad day, it might be mustering the strength to get out of bed. And this definition is independent of the success of those around me, and more importantly, independent of the success that I may have had earlier in my life. The main idea is to have realistic expectations of myself which will change over time. Trying to get through chapters when I don’t have the energy to even read a page is more counterproductive than an act of commitment. This is not to say that I don’t try my best, but I have accepted that my best will not be the same every day. The edge I get from overworking may not always outweigh what I had to go through to get it.
Secondly, and I can’t emphasise this enough, it makes a world of a difference when you stop delaying your happiness. As cheesy as it sounds, it really helped to consciously evaluate my priorities, so as to not constantly compromise on the things that make me happy. Instead of looking at one hour of playing games as squandered time, consider it time spent to recenter and save yourself from feeling overburdened. Take advantage of the time where you genuinely don’t feel productive. Instead of spending an hour reading a page over and over again, try doing something fun to feel relaxed, so that when the productivity kicks in, you don’t feel absolutely spent.
As I said, we’re all built differently. What worked for me may not necessarily work for you. But if your current game-plan is making you feel relentlessly worn out, make it a primary objective to rethink your way forward. We can’t belittle the role that effort plays in success, but it’s also imperative to realise that it’s not the only factor, and so we can’t treat it like it is. Your well being plays an equally important part, and neglecting one for the other is not a price you should be willing to pay.