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Detoxifying Hustle Culture

Gotta grind! or not?

Understand Why You Want to Work More Set Realistic Expectations Make Smart Choices on How You Hustle Self-Care and Boundaries

Hustle culture is known for being toxic and predatory, but it doesn’t have to be that way. When we set boundaries and understand why we are taking on extra work, we can balance a side hustle with the rest of our lives. Or, you might discover that the best hustle for you right now is not to have one at all.

Why Do You Want To Take On More Work?

The entry point into hustle culture is why you should care. When I look at the reason why hustle-culture gurus try to justify why everyone should listen to them, three areas can be particularly problematic:

Not working all the time is some form of moral failing.
Solution for financial insecurity. While financial issues are an unfortunate but understandable reason to work multiple jobs, the issue here is that people can prey on those fears to lead people into scams or purchasing learning materials that aren’t useful.
Easy money or unrealistic results. Survivorship bias is a thing- basically, investment advice from someone who won the lottery is not generally a good idea. There are often circumstances involved that someone else simply doesn’t have access to.

While there are bad reasons to work extra, there are also better ones:

In some industries, long hours are the norm. While the ideal scenario might be finding a job in that space with more reasonable expectations, you may decide that you are willing to work those hours to have that job.
Financial insecurity. While not ideal, you do need to pay your bills and buy food. This is another place where cultural change would be the preferred solution (full-time work = enough money to live on), but that doesn’t help pay the rent today.
It will help your primary career but isn’t part of your primary job. Creating content about your job is a typical example of this one.
It allows you to pursue something that wouldn’t pay the bills on its own. These are things like art, writing, music, or game development. Making a living as a fiction writer is difficult, but publishing a novel or two is readily achievable. I’ve chatted with Uber drivers that just like talking to people, and driving people around allows them to do that.
You are moving between different careers, and it’s not something you want to do in a single step.
Sometimes people will pick up a second job to cover a specific expense- a dream vacation or a wedding, for example.

Set Realistic Expectations For Your Results

The reality is that most of us won’t be rich no matter how many hours we work. That’s just not how things function in reality. If we only listen to the stories of people who did “win” and drastically improved their financial situation, then results that are actually quite impressive will seem like a failure.

Make Smart Choices on How You Hustle

Having reasonable expectations will also help you make intelligent decisions about what you want to take on. Generally, things with the highest payouts also have a high barrier to entry and carry the largest risk. Starting some businesses requires significant initial investments, won’t make a profit for years and might fail due to circumstances outside your control. On the flip side, your hourly rate driving for Uber is much lower, but it’s easy to get started, and Uber is unlikely to miss a payout.

Self-Care and Boundaries

Humans are not magically excluded from the concept of diminishing returns- our limitations of time and physiology control how much we can do in a day. It’s entirely possible that working less can lead to accomplishing more. For some, “lifehacks” like getting up early also harm productivity more than help.

You don’t necessarily have the perfect self-care routine to successfully balance a side hustle, but you will be in a better position if you consider it part of your overall plan. Starting a business might take long hours initially, and you might give up a few weekends to get it going, but it doesn’t have to be that way forever. Instead, you may choose slower growth or outsourcing parts of the work to return to a sustainable schedule before burnout sets in.

Boundaries are also a critical component. This isn’t just about personal and work life either. By adding in a second (or third) job, you will also have to set boundaries between the different roles. How that works will depend on your specific situation, but it’s better to figure out how you will handle that than get caught off guard. What will you do if you are at one job and there’s an emergency at the other?

Wrapping Up

Hustle culture has gotten a bad name, and for a good reason. It can often be predatory and harmful to your quality of life. When we create reasonable expectations and plan appropriately, we can add rather than subtract from that quality. Things like understanding why we want to work more will help determine whether or not this is something that will even fit in with our lives currently.