Hustle Culture.
The other day I was scrolling the internet for some motivation. I was in a slump and usually the internet provides with a lot of motivational content. As I was scrolling, I came cross some motivation content, which really surprised me. The content made me stop and think for a second. This content did not really motivate me but instead it led me to dig deep into the world of hustle culture. Hustle culture in simple words, refers to the lifestyle in which a person prioritises his career over other aspects of their life. According to my research, this kind of lifestyle is a very recent phenomena and lately it is been claimed to be "Toxic".
One may question how a lifestyle that promotes people to achieve their goals, be toxic?
The answer to that is simple. Yes, having career goals is very important . But career is only an aspect of your life, and it is not life itself. There are various other aspects of life, like the social aspects, the health aspects etc. All of these together contribute to life, not just a career. A balance is necessary. Just focusing on the career aspect will make life very one-dimensional, it will lose it's value.
Another reason why I think this culture is toxic is because the culture kind of promotes capitalisation of everything. This quote I found proves my point, "If you are good at something, then do not do it for free". This quote just proves how materialistic people have become. It shows that a person cannot do something just because he enjoys it, he has to capitalise everything he does. When a person is capitalising something he enjoys, the activity may lose it's pleasure. I may be exaggerating here but the culture kinda makes it seem that if a person does not capitalises his existence, then his existence is useless.
This culture have been in media, recent years. But this culture is normalised to us since we were younger. Let me given an example, an individual usually starts going to the school, let's assume, the age of six. The child goes to school for eight hours, after that 2 hours of self-study and then an hour of homework. After this there isn't much left to socialise or to practice any hobby. Here I haven't made an imaginary routine of a six year old. The sample routine was the one that I was exposed to since I was younger. Not everyone may have had this kind of routine, routines may have differed from person to person. It will be wrong of me to over-generalise here but when we look at the ways the education system has been built, we can see the education system hyper-focusing on career.
The soul purpose of going to a school or to any educational institutions, is to make an individual get a degree. By getting the required degree, the person can get a job. One can say that students learn social skills, learn new hobbies etc in school. Yes, students do learn those things as well but that is usually an addition and not the main goal of going to school. Schools usually take up most of a person's life and thus an individual gets lesser time to develop other things. Thus this normalises the "Hustle Culture" in all of our life's
In the end, I do not want to demotivate or discourage anyone to achieve their goals. Have goals in life, work hard for them, make your dreams come true. But along with that, take few moments, just to breathe. Take few moments to experience the rain, few moments to see movie, a moment to have a conversation with a stranger. Take few moments for yourself.
Thank You💘
-MJM.
