To be the best, the brightest and the boldest…but at what cost?
I don’t need to tell you that a lot has changed over the last three years, but as I get closer to graduation and the real world of “adulting,” I’ve started to notice that one potentially positive change has been the renewed focus on the frequent toxicity of “Hustle Culture.” As the Urban Dictionary definition implies, the culture consists of a constant grind, late nights, early mornings and few breaks. Although American work-life philosophies have been privy to this rude awakening, I’m not sure you can say the same about its application in the university environment. After coming home from being abroad, I’ve found myself longing for the European pace of life, for better or for worse.
Cultures are dynamic, and you can have cultures within cultures. But, I’ve found in my studies that philosophies around work and achievement inform ways of life, and you don’t have to look very far into American lifestyles to see this two-fold. It’s difficult to argue that the values of the “American dream” don’t influence our subconscious ways of thinking. Whatever you want to say about the roots or realities of these ideas, American universities in practice seem to fall complacent in promoting its linearity, no matter how much they advocate for self-discovery.
It isn’t necessarily that these values are negative; in fact, valuing independence, self-sufficiency, hard work and success are great things. The larger issue is that we often get caught up in the idea that there are only two or three ways to define what they look like. Think about it: as students, we often define ourselves by our GPA or how many leadership positions we hold. We are consumed by searching for our next internship or hunting for volunteer hours and are always striving to meet that next tangible goal. Societal players also get into disagreements and arguments about what this should look like and the high thresholds that university students have to meet to be successful. What both of these approaches forget, to no intentional fault of their own, is that universities are made up of and thrive off of the contributions made by humans, many of whom are 20-somethings trying to figure out where they fit in the world.
There’s no shame in having high expectations; for the implicit value we place on a college degree, it should be something you earn. But at what cost, figuratively and literally?
College is the place where we’ve learned to embrace “Hustle Culture,” but the question becomes if we have embraced it at the expense of finding and cementing our purpose in the long term. As my friends start to graduate, I’ve been thinking a lot about how I want to define myself and how I want to create the impact I set out to search for in college. Somewhere along the way, I got trapped in taking the step that was the simplest because it was practical and much more concrete than self-exploration. And to put it plainly, the academic side of college is exhausting. So yes, taking four months out of my time in Wisconsin to go and live outside my normal bubble didn’t look like it made sense from the outside, but four months after returning from study abroad, it made all the sense in the world.
One of the many things I discovered in Europe was the difference between “work to live” philosophies and our more accustomed American “live to work.” Very few businesses were open before 8 am, public transportation was designed to more efficiently and inclusively get people from point A to point B, and some places were even beginning to implement a schedule of four work days with three days off. Europe is not perfect by any means, but it became clear that the pressure placed on young individuals, and the support given to families in many places, was more reflective of moderation than they are here in the States.
In a university setting, we shouldn’t be faulting students for not knowing exactly what their next step is upon graduating. We should encourage them to explore their diversified interests and figure out what their purpose is while in college. A university education should be more affordable, but we also need to reframe how we value education: as an opportunity to expand our knowledge and frameworks beyond what we know. In short, we need to redefine the word productive from checking off boxes on a to-do list, to as Former First Lady Michelle Obama put it, “Letting ourselves swerve.” College should feel like a safe place to do so, but it really is a tragedy that so many of us are terrified to let that happen out of fear that it will detract us, stalemate us, or worst of all, hurt our GPAs.
Although these broad, complex issues won’t be fixed overnight, if we want to reform “Hustle Culture” into, gasp, something more productive and happier, then it needs to start in the college and maybe even the high school setting, when individuals are ripe for discovery and idealist in nature. Otherwise, I really don’t think we’ll see a societal shift in mindset anytime soon.