When I was in my early 20’s, I hustled my ass off. I worked 2 jobs and a side hustle. I drank 8 cups of coffee a day and popped No Doz pills to work at night.
And then I burned the fuck out. And crashed hard.
And it wasn’t worth it.
There’s a lot of folks who will tell you: “grind to the point of exhaustion. Chase wealth and rest later. Make work your only religion.”
That advice is poison. It will leave you broken and hurt and tired and alone.
It wasn’t easy to rebuild my life after that breakdown.
Years later - I don’t own a house. I’m not wealthy. By the standards of the Hustle Bros and Growth Hackers, I’d be called a failure.
But I do what I love, I’m passionate about my writing, and I have a partner and a kid who I adore. None of that came from sacrificing myself on the altar of the grind.
@Daojoan The saddest part is that the ‘hustle’ advice is touted as the way of success, but that one person was just lucky so it’s not even the reason for their success.
The everyday people touting ‘hustle hard’ are looking for a reason to excuse their behaviour. It also allows reclassification of stunk cost as personal investment.
The only sure fire way to get richer is to start rich as the more wealthy you are the easier it is.
Whatever you measure yourself by, you will be limited to. So don’t make it money. Make it love, kindness and joy.
You are. You are more successful now then ever.
@Daojoan A truly horrific property of that modus, is that you are absolutely deaf and blind to external warnings. Like, friends and family begging, screaming or reasoning with you to stop.
You just feel they are dragging you down, holding you back, in envy or incompetence.
So it’s not just you burning yourself, it’s a public spectacle where you burn yourself at the stake, with loved ones and others forced to watch.
In 1677, Spinoza identified greed and ambition as forms of insanity that were perceived as only annoying and contemptible. Erich Fromm notes how by 1955 they've lost even that mildly negative tinge. He calls these "socially patterned defects" "the pathology of normalcy".
https://www.marxists.org/archive/fromm/works/1944/neurosis.htm
"The individual shares it with many others; he is not aware of it as a defect, and his security is not threatened by the experience of being different[.] What he may have lost in richness and in a genuine feeling of happiness is made up by the security of fitting in with the rest of mankind – as he knows them. As a matter of fact, his very defect may have been raised to a virtue by his culture and thus give him an enhanced feeling of achievement."
@Daojoan I pulled 90 hour weeks thinking that you were supposed to do that in your early 20s.
Then I fell asleep while driving. Ended up in a field by the highway, thankfully... No one else around.
Sacrificing other people's safety (and your own) for some 'hard work' bullshit that doesn't really get you anywhere is never worth it. I nearly didn't have a long term to enjoy a 'reward' from! Or could have imperiled someone else's.
Agreed that its terrible advice to grind and work to the detriment of everything else.
One thing that happened to me and some friends/Acquaintances that also work in tech was not developing other critical skills because of the outsized focus on work.
I know so many people that crash and have to heal and learn how to socialize, build hobbies, etc in their 30s which is far harder.
@Daojoan it's a very common discussion on Mastodon, and you're in good company here, but I still think advice is just that. It's subjective.
I hustled until I dropped and got lucky. Nowadays I hustle because I enjoy the impact I think I have, and I try and encourage my organization to be humanely capitalist, or at least not completely psychopathic.
YMMV, y'know? The older I get the more comfortable I am with not having dogmatic answers to pertinent questions.
@Daojoan
Hustle culture can fuck all the way off.
My father hustled himself into a stroke then spent a decade with dementia brought on by the stoke that left him a shell of his former self.
I had a tough job and was offered 4x my regular pay for some side work.
They loved me and tried to work me to death. Initially I’d just take elaborate vacations with the extra money.
But I could only keep going 60+ hrs/wk for 6 years and *had* to quit.
A friend was in a similar position and put himself 300k in debt getting a fancy PhD. Wanted us to be millionaires as partners.
His life is awful. He’s worn out and sold out. And broke. I feel sorry for him.
"Word hard to get ahead in life" is corporate BS to make you work yourself to death or leave you with a broken body
Worked with a fellow 15 years older than me.
He'd been working consulting engineering since leaving university. He did a lot of field work, and was away from his family for years at a time. Talked a lot about all the plans he had for retirement, including buying a place in Italy, touring Europe etc.
Sixty came and went, then his wife finally put her foot down and he retired at 65. They did buy a place in Italy. Six months later a massive coronary left him lying on a slab, and his wife stranded in Italy alone.
I was on the same grind, but dropped it. Took a supervisory position so I was home every night, and stick to regular working hours.
Life's too short to waste on making other people rich.
@Daojoan 500 boosts in 36 hours; many here seem to resonate. 👍
Burnout: if you can learn the lesson another way, avoid it.
"Occupational burnout is a chronic condition that occurs in people who experience a lot of stress at work, & who do not have a chance to recover from that stress. Very often, people have the feeling that they are unable to meet the expectations of their employer. Their condition often occurs together with other conditions, such as clinical depression.
-- wikipedia
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