- This video is brought to you by Keeps.
(laid-back hip-hop music)
What up Wisecrack, Greg here.
Have you been hustling lately?
It seems like everybody is.
Whether you're busting your balls at the nine-to-five,
or adding an Uber shift at night,
or selling your knitted frogs on Etsy: the hustle is real.
The culture surrounding hustling
means that rest is our last priority.
Hustle culture encourages us to spend our free time
pursuing money, and economic stability,
by any means necessary.
It's the embodiment of the classic philosophy
of pulling oneself up by the bootstraps to make ends meet,
especially in today's tough economic climate.
But, ironically, the term "bootstrapping",
coined in the 1800s, was initially intended
to reference something being literally impossible.
Impossible like, pulling yourself over a fence
by the straps of your boots.
Or crossing a river by the straps of your boots.
Or flying to the moon by the straps of your boots.
Yet today, the phrase basically means
you can overcome all barriers to success
through sheer determination and hard work.
The bootstraps narrative tells us that no matter what,
if we work hard enough, we will eventually be successful,
just like those self-made millionaires
who struck gold with just a small,
$1 million loan from their parents.
And hustle culture success stories
are endlessly parroted by the mass media.
Often, these success stories come from celebrities
using existing social media clout to, say, push diet teas,
perfumes, or even stoner pottery.
And while it may have worked for Rihanna,
most of us are in a more hopeless place.
So, today we're gonna ask:
is hustle culture a positive motivational force,
or is it just a buzzword used to make us feel bad
for using our free time to relax?
- [Princess Carolyn] Starting now, you are a hard,
heartless career gal.
Go to work, be awesome at it,
and don't waste time on foolish flights of fancy!
From now on, you are a robot! Beep, bop, boop, blorp, bleep.
- Let's find out in this Wisecrack Edition
on Hustle Culture: Is It Bad For Us?
But before we get into it,
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Now back to the show.
While treated like a contemporary phenomenon,
hustle culture actually has roots in the late 1800s.
At the time, many folks suffered from burnout.
That's in part because many of them
were working much longer hours
due to the advent of electricity
and the pressures of the industrial revolution.
Some of these folks were even diagnosed
with a medical condition then known as neurasthenia.
Its symptoms were depression, insomnia, fatigue,
and other mental and physical ailments
which we now associate with millennial and Gen-Z burnout.
But here's the thing:
getting a neurasthenia diagnosis wasn't strictly negative.
It meant you were faithfully conforming
to the idealized Protestant work ethic of the time.
These symptoms were considered a natural part
of having an active mind,
and being a good, hard-working American.
In fact, an alternative name was American-itis.
Naturally, miracle cures like Rexall's American-itis Elixir
were marketed to the anxious patients.
Those suffering from American-itis
were given treatment recommendations like self-care.
It's like how we're told that a few minutes of meditation
each morning will cure our own modern American-itis.
Still there was one big caveat:
This disease wasn't for everyone.
The man who coined the term, George Beard,
believed that Black and Indigenous people
could not suffer from neurasthenia,
because they didn't overuse their minds.
He thought the same
about working-class Americans in general.
The diagnosis was basically exclusive
to white, middle-class Americans,
who were supposedly over-using their brain power
to pursue the American dream.
Which was all well and good,
but maybe a little elixir could take the edge off, right?
In contrast, for marginalized groups,
working to the point of exhaustion
wasn't seen as a treatable condition.
It was an expectation,
the only way of achieving social and economic mobility.
This is how the concept of the hustle
emerged in Black communities.
The hustle wasn't an option; it was a requirement.
If Black folks weren't hustling,
they were even stereotyped as straight-up lazy.
There was tons of pressure to be the model minority,
miraculously succeeding in a system rigged against you.
Keeping up with the hustle was, and has remained,
a matter of literal survival for Black Americans.
It's only recently that the term hustle culture
has become commonly appropriated by white people.
But the timing of this particular appropriation
over recent years is interesting.
That's because it coincides
with diminishing economic conditions across the board
for middle- and working-class people at large.
Today, society applies the same shaming rhetoric
to practically everybody, though especially people of color.
If you're cobbling together a 70-hour work week
and still not getting by?
Well, the system isn't the problem, man. You're the problem.
Whether it's called American-itis or the hustle,
working your butt off
has long been intrinsic to the American dream.
Now, that used to mean working for the same company
your whole life, rising through the ranks,
and buying a home.
And, of course, earning a retirement
filled with comfort and Caribbean cruises.
But in recent decades, as jobs became less secure,
that old-school American Dream was slowly replaced
by the ubiquitous ethos of Hustle Culture.
Nowadays, we're told that the way to achieve true happiness
and economic freedom isn't from working hard at one job
your entire life and climbing the corporate ladder.
It's from balancing multiple jobs,
cultivating a unique side hustle,
and maybe striking gold on a late-night Doge-coin trade.
But why is this all happening in the first place?
That is to say: When did hustle culture
become so deeply entrenched in our society
that people are getting up at 3:00 a.m. to drive for Uber,
before a full day of work?
A lot of it seems to be the result of one major shift:
the erosion of labor unions,
which provide a means for the working class
to build collective power.
Since a bunch of shoemakers first unionized in 1794,
American unions have been a way for working-class folks
to fight back against unfair working conditions.
During the second Industrial Revolution,
they achieved things like higher pay,
safer conditions, and shorter workdays.
Back then, unions fought especially hard
for a 40-hour work week.
Yet today, high-profile business people
like Elon Musk tweet things like
nobody has ever changed the world on 40 hours a week.
And Silicon Valley employees wear T-shirts
declaring 9 to 5 is for the weak.
Damn! So, what's changed?
Union membership has declined, and dramatically.
In post-war America, 35% of the workforce were in a union.
In 1983, that fell to 20%, and by 2020, to 11%.
Some of this is because sectors
which had high union density have declined,
says Cornell professor Kate Bronfenbrenner.
Simultaneously, a high number of jobs
have been created in newer sectors, like tech,
where unions haven't existed before.
Union suppression is also rife,
with companies from Amazon to Tesla to Starbucks
actively discouraging their workers from joining unions.
Tech companies in Silicon Valley
even introduce measures like casual dress,
margarita Fridays and free food
to try and reduce union membership amongst its workers.
But it doesn't stop at petty attempts to please.
Elon Musk illegally coerced employees
into not joining unions when he tweeted,
"Why pay union dues and give up stock options for nothing?"
So, what does this decline in union membership say
about hustle culture?
Well, with fewer people collectivizing
to demand a living wage and better hours,
we have less control over our income.
Indeed, it's no wonder that the stagnation of wages
overlaps with the stagnation of unions.
Instead of focusing on the collective,
we're going at it alone
to try and outpace our colleagues and climb the ladder.
If working conditions are intolerable,
it's not on our bosses for denying us bathroom breaks.
The responsibility is on us to manage our own stress.
But it's not just the demise of unions
that has played a role in promoting hustle culture.
It's also the way overworking
has been repackaged as proof of worth.
Hustle culture has a way of changing the narrative
from your boss is a dick for making you work weekends
to you're doing a great job if you're working weekends.
And if you're not,
maybe you're just not working hard enough.
Under the prevailing hustle culture narrative,
when we rise up the ladder
due to working overtime or multiple jobs,
it's not exploitation; it's a success story.
That's even if the odds are stacked against you.
If women are having a hard time succeeding in the workplace,
they can now girlboss their way out of it.
- If Angelica's ever going to make it
in a male-dominated power structure,
she's gotta eat, breathe, drink and sweat self-esteem!
- When Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer
boasted of her 130-hour work weeks,
she wasn't being overworked by an understaffed company.
She was girlbossing.
The problem is the narrative of the girlboss
takes our attention away from systemic issues,
specifically, the numerous barriers
that women, and especially women of color,
already face in the workplace.
You know, lower wages,
discriminatory hiring and promotion policies,
inadequate maternity leave, and so on.
Instead, our culture focuses on success stories
of Marissa Mayer spending 18 hours a day at her desk.
And then we wonder why we aren't doing that, too.
Hustling also presents a way for people
pushed out of the traditional job market to get by.
Being your own boss is presented
as a way to navigate systemic racism
and other barriers to success.
And both the gig economy and side hustling
have grown with digital platforms.
Doing casual freelance work in your free time
is easier than ever via apps like Uber, Lyft,
Fiverr, TaskRabbit, and so on.
In this way, recent tech has, ironically,
helped us move away from the utopian dream
that the technology industry preached in its early days.
See, the prevailing notion used to be
that innovative technology
would increase productivity so much
that we wouldn't have to work nine-to-five jobs anymore.
Hypothetically, we'd all have a lot more free time.
Now, innovative tech just seems to find more ways
to fill our free time with more work.
This is made all the more depressing by the reality
it's really hard to gain a significant income
from side hustles.
A survey from Bankrate found that the average
monthly earnings from a side hustle were $686 a month.
Notably, though, 49% of respondents
were making less than $200 a month.
The dream of eventually earning your way
out of your day job, then,
rarely becomes a reality for most folks.
But that doesn't fully explain why hustle culture
has become so dominant in recent years.
One of the things that makes hustle culture so appealing
is the notion that by working really hard,
accumulating major achievements, and earning lots of money,
we will eventually become happy.
Of course, you can't experience the joys of high achievement
and mega-bucks unless you're being productive,
which is why hustle culture depends on the idea
of productivity being tied to self-worth.
Constantly working is seen as a positive,
rather than as a sign you're not being paid enough.
- Work's...
Work's going okay, I would say. Yup.
Working hard.
- One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown
is the belief that one's work is every so important.
That's Bertrand Russell.
- Huh.
Yes, indeed. Yes.
Yes to that.
- This leads to toxic productivity.
That's where your self-worth is so tied to your productivity
that unless you're doing something
which benefits you financially, you're wasting your time.
When we're valued by how much we can achieve,
and especially by how much we earn,
the consequences can be devastating.
If we're not making a profit,
we're not just economically worthless;
we're literally worthless.
It's no wonder, then, that job-related busy-ness
has become a status symbol.
In one experiment,
participants were presented with a hypothetical man:
One who either worked long hours and was really busy,
or one who didn't work and enjoyed leisure time.
As you might guess,
the busy man was considered more high-status.
But what are the consequences of this pressure
to never stop working?
We've all heard the uplifting/low-key dystopian stories
of hustle culture in action;
the Lyft driver who kept working while in labor,
the girl who sells lemonade to fund her brain surgery,
and so on.
There's no set answer
as to how often hustle culture actually works.
A lot of it, as we see from celebrities
and the extremely wealthy,
has to do with having existing capital
to invest into new projects
or existing fame to leverage your side hustle off of.
That's not to mention being able to afford nannies,
chefs, cleaners and assistants
to do the tasks that normal people have to juggle
alongside their multiple jobs.
The mythos of the hustle is far less realistic
if you're not already rich.
So what about the rest of us?
Well, the stress of hustling may be reducing our life span,
increasing our risk of dying from a stroke or heart disease,
and other scary stats you can Google in the dead of night.
And ironically, studies show
that working these long hours and multitasking
is also reducing our all-important productivity.
So, we're sacrificing our health, well-being, and free time,
all in the name of the mythical hustle
that, at the end of the day,
probably won't salvage our bank accounts anyway.
So is hustle culture here to stay?
The coronavirus pandemic was an interesting wildcard.
Obviously, it left a lot of us working from our bedrooms,
living rooms, and apparently even bathrooms.
This certainly had its positives,
like greater accessibility for people with disabilities
and more flexibility for all of us.
But we were also expected to be even more productive,
without water cooler talk to distract us.
So it's no surprise that one survey found
that 68% of remote workers worked weekends,
and 45% regularly did more than eight hours of work a day.
In the UK, remote workers have done $33 billion
worth of unpaid overtime.
But it's not just how hard you work at your actual job.
Hobbies became commodified into side-hustles,
especially in industries like entertainment and journalism.
People tried desperately to supplement lost income
from being unable to work, or losing their jobs.
So in some ways,
the pandemic arguably exacerbated hustle culture.
But, on the flip side,
there's a growing movement against the notion
that we have to spend our free time
doing profit-oriented work.
Hustle culture likes to tell us
that the only reason we exist
is to make money and achieve success.
But people are pushing back against the idea,
arguing that profit-minded work
is not our only purpose on this planet.
Activists have been promoting rest as a form of resistance,
asking questions like:
How will you be useless to capitalism today?
Books like "Laziness Does Not Exist"
remind us that toxic productivity isn't good for us
and that laziness might just be a societal concept
invented to make us feel bad for enjoying our downtime.
Whether this movement will have an effect
on hustle culture at large remains to be seen.
But what do you think, Wisecrack?
Is hustle culture a way of motivating people
to live their best life selling knitted frogs on Etsy,
or is it a con designed to make us feel bad
for spending our free time watching Netflix
and enjoying junk food?
Let us know in the comments.
Big thanks to our patrons for all your support.
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And as always, thanks for watching.
Later.
(upbeat hip hop music)
Rexall's American-it is Elixir
were marketed to those anxious patient-
Were marketed to those ancient-
To the ancient parent-
Anxious patients.
Ancients patients.
Anxious patients.