Fuck "Hustle Culture"
Instead, let's celebrate these bizarre things...
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The greatest insult I get online is that I promote hustle culture.
Garbage. I hate hustle more than I hate the smell of poo in the baby change room at my local shopping center while I change my daughter’s nappy.
I am anti-hustle.
It’s why I quit the 9-5 corporate world. All work and no play. A never-ending mountain of work that you can’t say no to, if you want to keep your job and collect your mediocre performance bonus at the end of the year.
Working hard is for amateurs.
The best work is done with lots of rest and a helluva lot of play. Hustle culture is the opposite, which is why it produces terrible results.
Let’s celebrate these bizarre things instead of hustle culture…
Absolutely no time spent on trains, planes, or airplanes
I hate commuting.
I get motion sickness and like my own space. Sharing a toilet with another human who isn’t my wife or daughter is my definition of hell.
No washing hands
Toilet paper everywhere
Poo stains down the side of the toilet
Some coughing weirdo spreading coroni-rona without a care in the world
Why oh why…
How hard is it to be a civilized human and clean up after yourself? Now I spend zero time stuck commuting. I save hours every day. The only time I commute is on the occasional overseas holiday I take with my family.
It’s short-term pain for an insane experience in a new country. Other than that I don’t dare go on public forms of transport if I can avoid it.
Free time is 10x better than wasting time commuting.
An alarm clock that never goes off
Waking up to an alarm clock is bad for you. To hustle hard you need one, otherwise you’ll miss your golden twilight hours. LOL.
I remember I read somewhere that every time you wake up to an alarm clock it triggers your body’s fight or flight mode.
It can even give you a heart attack.
Our bodies are meant to sleep and wake up restful – not be woken up by an almighty roar with an emergency services siren.
Zero incoming phone calls
The other day a person I haven’t spoken to for 3 years called me multiple times in a few days and I didn’t answer.
They then called me from a number I didn’t recognize.
I thought it was the real estate agent for the house I’m trying to buy. It wasn’t. They hijacked my day at a bad time with zero agenda.
Minutes later I blocked their number.
Incoming calls feel so 1990. No one wants random interruptions anymore. Peace and quiet over hustle-and-answer-calls-24/7.
Honestly, throw your phone in a lake.
Zero freaking calendars
There’s nothing worse than the hustle culture of a full calendar.
Most meetings could have been an email or DM. Who wants to stare at a calendar full of meetings that make even the happiest person anxious?
I’m on a 90-day streak of zero meetings. So much more mental peace.
No debt
Debt equals stress.
I remember talking to a banker friend recently. He said “mate, you should have some debt. It’s leverage. It’s good for your credit score.”
Get lost. No way man. Debt is a trap. It forces you to work to pay it off. I haven’t had debt for over a decade. I want to know I can wake up and not be paying the interest income for someone else’s business.
If I can afford it, I hit buy. If I don’t have enough money, I say no. Simple.
Debt is what has enslaved America. Hustle culture is what has normalized it.
Debt will only make you unhappy because you’ll have fewer choices and less time.
Conversations with people you don’t kiss the ass crack of
Most conversations are designed for someone to get something.
Business teaches us to turn conversations into transaction opportunities. I’m so over it. It’s the foundation of hustle culture. You’re supposed to monetize everything and everyone. No thanks.
My favorite line I use in direct messages: is “I have nothing to sell you.” And I mean it.
No stupid Slack messages (the meeting that never ends)
When workplaces introduced Slack it felt like a productivity virus.
All day long I got red notifications. Most of them were from departments that had nothing to do with my job.
Can you do a survey?
Can you try this new feature?
Can you look up this phone number for me?
NO.
Once you start work conversations on Slack they become meetings that never end. Direct messages force us to respond in real-time while whatever thought we were having is lost forever.
This is how creativity is destroyed. I say no to being a work slacker on Slack.
A high-energy plant-based diet
Hustle culture is low energy.
It’s all about supplements and loads of coffee. I’d rather have high energy than waste my time on a low-information, low-life, low-energy existence as a hustler.
Sure, you can eat fast food to maximize time and work more. But all that convenience comes with stacks of extra chemicals.
Chemicals nuke gut health and cause low energy.
Choose a life with no brain fog by eating more plants. It’s a game-changer. Oh, and drink water instead of Haterade.
No knob in a penguin suit telling you what to do
In the hustle culture lifestyle there’s always someone telling you what to do.
In the corporate hustle there’s a boss. But if you quit working for other people you can fall into the trap of having customers as your new boss.
We accept the dictator-style leadership to stack cash. Once you opt out of the hustle culture lifestyle you realize cash isn’t so flash.
Money for the sake of money is unhappiness in disguise.
Daddy-daughter time at the park
Every single person I know who embraces this stupid hustle culture life has one giant defect …
Their families never see them.
They’re always grinding for some award, some goal, some meeting with Richard Branson, some revenue target, some new business idea.
That equals failure to me.
I have a 21 day old daughter. No amount of hustle can rob me of these precious moments with her. Her smile is worth more than any amount of money. We have fun. We go to the park. We play bouncy.
Once you transcend ‘the hustle’ and respect your family more, you reach a higher state of consciousness. Priorities reverse
Gorgeous creative exploration is 10x better
Let’s end on this surprising note.
The biggest problem with hustle culture is it secretly focuses on acquiring money. But money can easily destroy creativity. It can warp your goal and make you act differently.
I don’t want my ideas ruined and poisoned by money. I want money to be a side effect, not the main effect.
What we should celebrate is the quality of people’s creativity reflected in the output of their work. Not how hard they worked or how great their grind was.
Maybe I’ve become a millennial boomer. Maybe I’m a weirdo. But hustle culture and all its worshippers feel way out of date.
The bigger question is: what the heck are you hustling for?
If it’s for homie points or bro claps, perhaps, it’s time to rethink your game plan. The person who hustles the hardest misses all the best bits of life. One day when they realize it they have Mt Everest-sized regrets they can’t escape.
Here’s a better mantra…
Play harder than you work.
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A brilliant piece, Tim and congratulations on the birth of your daughter. I’m freelance and wouldn’t go back to 9-5 working for the world.
Great piece Tim thank you for writing it. I’ve always been skeptical of American hustle culture yet here - it is kind of built into our DNA from birth at least that’s how I feel about it. I choose however to not partake in it any longer and have found peace. Congratulations on your daughter, enjoy every precious moment because in the blink of an eye she will be a teenager! ❤️🙏😂