In short, anyone who makes money from your participation in Hustle Culture. Directly these are the people supervise you, have performance based bonuses (read: bonuses based on your performance), or have ownership interests in your place of business. Indirectly, this is anyone who can convince you to spend money on things that fit HC’s definition of success. This can be a real estate agent who sells you on a bigger house than you need or your friendly neighborhood spa who pushes Botox and touch ups every few months. Anyone who sells you anything that doesn’t line up with your ideals of success is using Hustle Culture to sell you something.
We participate because we haven’t defined success for ourselves. When we don’t get clear about where we’re headed, everyone and everything around us will tell us where we should go. The answer, regardless of the question, is that you need more, newer, and sooner. The shiny trophies of Hustle Culture success are almost universally accepted as indicators of our own worthiness – whether we feel that way or not.
The problem is Hustle Culture distracts us getting what we individually need out of life. Hustle Culture tells you what you need: more – and permits one way to get it: work. Believing that work is equivalent to salvation and worthiness is silly. It is not a meaningful way of life because you didn’t determine that it had meaning – purveyors of Hustle Culture did. Deriving meaning from something that helps you earn money is satisfying. That doesn’t mean that this, alone, provides for a satisfying life or that you should do as much of it as possible. (You’ve heard of diminishing returns? Moderation? Being well-rounded?)
If you’ve found that working harder has not brought you the kind of satisfaction you were hoping for, it is perfectly understandable that you feel a little less inclined to hustle. After all, the fundamental promise of Hustle Culture is that you’ll get out of your work what you put into it. If this turns out to be a fleeting or flimsy promise, all of our self-sacrifice seems less worthwhile. Understanding Hustle Culture helps us understand what to do when we accidentally spot the magician’s misdirection.
So, what do we do now that paying for this performance suddenly doesn’t feel so magical?
I thought I needed more value from my career to feel good about myself. It turns out the opposite was true.
That’s when Hustle Less Law was born.