There is nothing inherently wrong about working hard. But as long as you’re hustling on the right thing for the right reasons, working for long hours religiously does have its caveats and it generally has a negative impact on ourselves and even our society.
Rise-and-grind culture teaches us to value wealth and accolades over everything else.
"Working hard saves you from poverty. Work is what prevents people from descending into a social outcast. People who grind the hardest get to own ALL the good things in life. The hefty rewards for consistently-exploiting-your-ass-off ALWAYS worth the huge sacrifices in life ".
Our narrative for justifying workaholism is the classic example of how meritocracy affects our society. We believe that wealth and power should be vested in people on the basis of talent, effort and achievement. Theoretically, if we put serious effort into doing everything that sounds important and great, then all pain and suffering in life will miraculously go away. So, my dear readers, simply beaver away from sunrise until sunset every single day and in no time your face will be featured in Forbes magazine cover and hopefully your long-time crush will finally ask you out to dinner.
I'm not saying that the philosophy itself is a piece of junk. The untold prosperity of our world today wouldn't have been a reality if it hadn't been for meritocracy. But after all, as much as those woke IG posts and Tony Robbins motivational screeds extolled work ethic, “rise and grind” becomes pretty dehumanizing if we think work is the only thing we ever need.
Your mom sometimes asks you to come over her house for dinner, you’d come up with excuses like: “I’d love to, but I have a tight schedule “ or “ I’m catching a plane tonight “ or a blunt “Next time ok ?” . Your friends would ask you for help and support, and you feel like you’re too cool for this and you leave your friend alone. You feel fatigued and foggy from sitting at one place and chowing down on junk food, but you convinced yourself always that you are 100% fine. Even if you’ve gotten what you’d wished for, you’d be delighted for a short while and soon after when illness and loneliness set in those Wario memes start to hit different.
So, what’s the bottom line here? Simply put, accolades and achievements don’t really bring happiness and contentment if you give up everything else JUST for them. Success is a product of multiple variables in life and not the way around. Taking care of your body and spending time with your loved ones doesn’t sound like productive work, but in fact they are the recipe for a fulfilling and productive life.
Hustling doesn’t correlate with productivity
If you decide to hustle just because you think you're a lazy piece of shit, then you're in good company. We sometimes force ourselves to stay on the computer for no reason for any other reason than not being judged as a giant sloth.
There’s this ingrained belief among us that the more we work our ass off, the more work we will do. We assume that our effort brings linear returns period. It is especially evident if you flip burgers for Burger King as the more you flip the more burgers, you’re definitely gonna make. Although this is true for menial work though, the equation works differently if you’re working in a creative field or industry. That’s where your effort will bring diminishing returns as the more, you’re trying to create the less work you’ll be able to put out.
I remember there was a time when I had to build this one UI for a webpage. Looking back, the job was a breeze to me, but the silly me fell into the rabbit hole of constantly looking for a solution while the solution was actually just around the corner. I didn’t take breaks or whatsoever, and I was still stuck at the same problem for hours until the ‘aha’ moment at late night. What could’ve taken a couple hours total to get done costed me a whopping 8+ hours.
The worst part of hustling is that it gives you an illusion of being productive without actually being productive at all.
Hustling exacerbates FOMO
A knock-on effect of overvaluing work it leaves you susceptible to FOMO. It’s easy to see this coming, even if you don’t know what opportunity cost is. If you used to pull an all-nighter or skip lunch breaks to save time for work, a short break or a 6-hour sleep is enough to make you sweaty about missing out important events.
While FOMO is commonly used to refer the situation of seeing others having fun without you, you also get the same feeling as FOMO when others around you outwork you and get bigger bonuses. Chances are we would constantly press ourselves to work harder and grind longer in order to make “the most” of our working hours. Let’s skip lunch breaks, sleep on the office desk, burn the midnight oil and we will never have to regret being lazy again.
I never truly understand how FOMO could be a thing, because we all have to make trade-offs about literally anything. To do something is to give up something else. If you work for 12 hours, then you would miss 12 hours of social interaction, and vice versa. Missing out is natural and integral to human experience, however unpleasant it is, but what’s even more unpleasant is that we never truly savor the present moment – we need to deny reality to some extent. We begin to live in our own imaginations and fantasies where nothing would get in your way and no repercussions would never happen. And in that dream-land, it is logically convincing that our hard work can compensate for everything we’ve ever missed.
Working addiction also encourages exploitation
The last thing that many companies and employers would ever regret doing is to associate your ego and self-worth to the amount of hours you spend busting your ass off at the cubicle. Because having a team of hard-working salarymen/salary-woman largely benefits them employers.
I got an impression that major companies ( yes, the FAANG companies ) would cleverly push employees into overdrive by giving them bigger perks and financial rewards and in turn they would feel morally obliged to give up everything in life to close the moral gap even if it means killing off their well-being. I’m speechless on this one, but the guilt-tripping thing is probably why our working hours would never reduce, despite the unprecedented increase in productivity. Keynes predicted that in 2030 we will be having 15-hour work weeks, but in 2020 we’re pretty much still…. working, even during the pandemic.
Totaly agree with author