Writer: Siena Iwasaki Milbauer
Summer is the season for relaxing. The sun is shining, lemonade is chilling in the fridge, and school is out. While many of us don’t have the luxury to take time off work, or hit pause on family commitments, summer still feels like a special time when we have the chance to take a breath and get some well-deserved rest.
Or rather, that’s how it should be. But instead, youth and young people are packing their summers full of internships, multiple jobs, volunteer gigs, extracurriculars, summer classes, and so much more. Some of these activities come from a place of passion, which is fantastic: summer is a great time to pursue a professional or personal goal! However, much of young people’s schedule-packing is a symptom of something far less healthy: hustle culture.
Also known as productivity culture or busy culture, hustle culture in a nutshell is the idea that you are only worth as much as you are producing. This concept pushes people to prioritize work over everything else, and to feel massive guilt when they do take a break. For youth specifically, hustle culture also claims that as a young person, the only way to achieve future success is by hustling every chance you get.
At first glance, hustle culture might not sound that bad, which is probably one reason it has become so widespread. What’s wrong about encouraging people to work hard and take responsibility for turning their dreams into reality? However, hustle culture is actually a very limiting mindset that doesn’t care about you or the things that really matter in your life.
For example, the success that hustle culture encourages folks to work towards is totally defined by capitalist priorities of money, career hierarchy, and social status. There is no room for prioritizing love, everyday happiness, and health, arguably more important elements of creating a fulfilling life.
Additionally, hustle culture fails to acknowledge that some of the most important ways we grow have nothing to do with work. We become kinder because of long conversations we have with friends, not because we juggled six internships one summer. You could become a skilled video editor because you’ve put in a lot of work practicing your skills, but also because you went down tons of YouTube wormholes when you were first developing your passion for filmmaking. It is often in moments of rest that we discover our true passions and priorities.
Besides the silliness of the concept itself, hustle culture can cause horrible side effects for youth who get swept up in it. The physical and mental health toll of overwork is very real. Hustle culture can also cause young people’s dreams and goals, which should be positive sources of motivation and excitement, to instead become triggers for stress. Additionally, hustle culture can actually cause the quality of folks’ work to suffer. You can’t do your best if you are trying to juggle a million things at once.
All this is to say that hustle culture is not worth buying into. So this summer, let’s set a goal to dismantle hustle culture. In its place, we can value quality over quantity, relationships over work product, and ourselves as human beings over ourselves as robotic worker bees! Each of us is the sum of so many different parts. Work is one of those parts, but so is rest, and neither is more important than the other. We definitely need both to take us where we want to go: to professional success, to personal fulfillment, and to lifelong health and happiness.
Sources
Gibbons, Serenity, “How to Defeat Busy Culture”, Harvard Business Review, 29 Sept 2020. https://hbr.org/2020/09/how-to-defeat-busy-culture. Accessed 30 June 2021.
Hebert, Luke, “Hustle Culture: The Good, The Bad And The Ugly”, Study Breaks, 10 Aug 2019. https://studybreaks.com/thoughts/hustle-culture-amongst-the-modern-workforce/. Accessed 1 July 2021.
Smith, Lydia, “The problem with productivity culture is that we aren’t robots”, Yahoo News, 25 June 2020. https://www.yahoo.com/news/the-problem-with-productivity-culture-is-that-we-arent-robots-050028976.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAANmdwRuvMqCnqFLWvIfbX4FKSwZyxs7uKjpPXKwbryhYfmb37mLUVz5SQSFo1o75ClMOtkT2s_Pot6xSlOhGanllDRDYv0YHt9iPPta1bHsuiMvbbE5rAmk7flaETv6RycpRnVk2d6ninFf7xNNPjaOIbBUJUn46BhOjuV4ldbLN. Accessed 30 June 2021.
Soojung-Kim Pang, Alex, “How Resting More Can Boost Your Productivity”, Greater Good, 11 May 2017. https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_resting_more_can_boost_your_productivity. Accessed 1 July 2021.
Tiongson, Hannah, “Hustle culture and toxic productivity are ruining your brain”, The Concordian, 2 Mar 2021. http://theconcordian.com/2021/03/hustle-culture-and-toxic-productivity-are-ruining-your-brain/. Accessed 30 June 2021.