Hustle and Grind

If you follow the news, you might know that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos launched his ass into space recently. The news that he also came back made many people sad, and when he opened his mouth after his ego trip he immediately highlighted why that was the case. In a press conference shortly after his flight, Bezos said the following:

“I want to thank every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer because you paid for all of this.”

Jeffrey Preston Bezos, Amazon CEO, worth over 200 billion USD

You might think that this is somewhat touching. The big boss thanking his employees and giving them a shoutout: it’s nice, right? You know what’s better than a shoutout, though? Not having to work in dystopian conditions where you can get fired by soulless robots (literally this time, I’m not talking about regular HR people) after you took a bit too much time searching for your next bottle to pee in.

I don’t have any data to back this up, but I bet if you gave 100 Amazon employees the choice between funding Bezos’ latest dick measuring contest entry (does the shape of that rocket remind you of something?) and paying off their mortgage, at least 99 of them would choose the latter. I say ’99’ because there’s always someone who feels the need to defend these wealth hoarding billionaires because they want to join the club and they’re sure they’ll get there one day if only they keep ‘grinding’ or ‘hustling’ or whatever it is that they call it.

I’m sure you know someone like that. It’s that person who is always posting stupid quotes like “no one ever changed the world on 40 hours a week” on their Instagram stories at 4 AM, followed by a photo of themselves with a slightly sweaty face in front of a gym mirror accompanied by “I’ll sleep when I’m dead” or one of its many idiotic variations.

“I’ll rest when I’m dead. #hustling #onthatgrind #getthatbag”

People who die of a stress-related heart attack at 45

You could say that all of this doesn’t matter because those people don’t bother me personally, but they do. They foster unhealthy working habits and they’re also conversational black holes, so they annoy me at parties. You can be talking about literally anything and within three sentences these people can turn it into shop talk.

Mention the fact that your cat died of a horrible unidentified flesh-eating parasite and before you know it they’re talking about one of their clients who had a cat and they used that to empower their connection with that client and to think outside the box and create a scalable solution tailored to their USP and whatever buzzword vomit they’ve heard at that week’s brainstorming session. Conversations amongst their own usually devolve into a circle jerk where they try to find out who had the least amount of sleep that week before going for a refreshing name-dropping session.

Of course it’s okay to have dreams, and I’m not saying that working hard should be demonized, but this whole idea that working yourself half to death is the only way to get somewhere in life is incredibly toxic and I personally put it on the same level as those impossible beauty standards that certain magazines and industries put out there. It makes people uncertain about themselves and creates unrealistic expectations.

It’s one thing to limit yourself to being a #hustler (you do with your life as you please) but the problem is that it doesn’t end there. It permeates aspects of society and culture, and that can be a problem. Before you know it, working yourself half to death really is the only way to get somewhere in life for some people.

You see, the people at the top of the ladder, they obviously love this type of stuff. A workforce that sees working as a religion is easier to squeeze, and if you get a bunch of people who are competing for the most unpaid overtime in the hopes of having a shot at that next promotion you’re really cooking with gas. Who wants someone who does their job and clocks out at 5 PM? No one, right? What a lazy clown! This company is a family, and ’round here we take care of our own, even if it means sacrificing yet another weekend! You should be grateful to work here, get with the program you ingrate!

At this point I am starting to sound as if I’m writing my own kindergarten version of the communist manifesto, but that’s not my intention. I don’t have anything against people who work all the time, nor am I saying that you should slack off and live off of government aid for the rest or your life. It’s just that, like with those impossible beauty standards that rightfully get lambasted all the time, things like these become the expectation and the norm rather than an outlier for a lot of people. You can’t say ‘ignore it if you don’t care about it‘ because not everyone can just do that (and if your employer is one of those ultra demanding types you’re not going to get very far ignoring hustle culture) and the echo chambers of social media only exacerbate the problem.

Just follow a couple of managers and smaller companies on LinkedIn and you’ll see this kind of stuff. Shit like “employee X chose to take no vacation this summer and kept on working the entire time! What a star! ?” and “these two heroes came in on their weekend off to update the database in their own free time!” gets posted there all the time, and it’s vile. It’s vile because it’s an attempt to normalize sacrificing your free time for your corporate overlords, and also because I never see these #riseandgrind entrepreneurs post something like this:

Something that you commonly hear when you complain about the rise and grind culture is that you’re a lazy piece of shit or that you’re just ‘jealous of people who made it’. “Well, if you want to get somewhere you have to work for it or someone else will take that spot!” While that might be somewhat true (Siri, define ‘nepotism’, ‘discrimination’, and ‘tough luck’) it’s also true that not everyone wants ‘that spot’.

Some people just want to earn enough money to (comfortably) do whatever it is that they want to do in life and treat work as an afterthought. Not everyone wants to climb the corporate ladder so that they can become the ones asking unpaid interns to spend yet another Friday night sleeping next to the server racks and not everyone wants to maximize their monetary gains at the cost of their (social) lives. That shit is draining, and I understand why it’s not for everyone.

Unless you’re working for a small family business or something of the sort, your worth to a company is measured in cold, hard numbers. No one cares about you, the person. They care about your output. You’re like a farm animal in the early 1900s: once you’ve outlived your usefulness they either toss your ass out or put you down. How you feel about all of that isn’t a part of the equation because your feelings were never part of the deal.

I’m not even saying that this is inherently wrong or illogical: pretty much the sole goal of most businesses (certainly larger ones) is to make money for their investors, owners, and other people on the top floors. They’re not in the business of giving a fuck about your life. As such you shouldn’t be giving too many fucks about them either though.

There are people who get paid a lot of money to figure stuff out and manage a company’s day-to-day activities, and they’re called managers. It’s their job to ensure that everything runs smoothly, and while it’s certainly possible that things spiral out of control in such a way that the situation requires extraordinary measures these things should not be a weekly occurrence.

Sure, help out when an entire division has fallen ill, and by all means take your coworker’s shift when they’ve got a family emergency and what not; I’m not telling anyone to be a cold and selfish asshole. I’m just saying that, if there’s a pattern where you’re constantly being asked to ‘help out’ for free or do things that are way beyond what you’ve been hired to do to the point where it cuts down on your well-being it’s well within your rights to say ‘hell to the no‘.

And yes, I know that it’s nearly impossible to just say “no, direct supervisor, I will not do that because it’s almost five o’clock” or anything like that because the vast majority of people (myself included, just to be clear) need their jobs to make ends meet and you obviously don’t want to get fired, but that’s exactly what I’m complaining about. You shouldn’t fear for your job or your ability to provide for yourself or your family if you push back against ridiculous demands a bit.

I also know that this is not limited to lower level workers. Managers and supervisors also have plenty of shit to deal with, but because I can’t be bothered to write all that down I made a handy chart for you to see how the only people who aren’t getting any poop dumped on their heads are the people on top. Click here to see it.

In many ways, a lot of people are living in the best circumstances to live in since the dawn of mankind, so it might sound like people are just whiners these days, but the newer generations definitely have their own share of very real problems:

“Millennials also feel that their jobs have an outsize role in their overall mental health. Because of longer work hours and stagnant wages, millennials suffer from higher rates of burnout than other generations. Many of them have even quit their jobs for mental-health reasons.”

Hillary Hoffower and Allana Akhtar for Business Insider

Worse yet is when it’s the boomers who chime in with their experiences. “This generation is so pampered and lazy, back in my day we-”

Hold the fucking phone, grandpa. Back in your day, you bought a house and supported a family of four with a common 9 to 5 wage. It’s easy to stay late and ‘grind your way up’ if you’re making bank while doing it. It’s a bit less motivating if those four hours of overtime barely pay for a cup of coffee at Starbucks that you’re drinking out of your mother’s basement because you don’t have any money left at the end of the month to afford a place to live on your own and you don’t want to drink it at Starbucks because your manager might see you sitting there crying and think you’re slacking off. It’s not as if young people don’t want to work, it’s just that things like wage stagnation and an ever more expensive world in general can make it all feel a bit unrewarding.

But I’m not here to complain about how hard millennials have it. Life is not fair, and every generation has had its share of misery and unfortunate events. I’m here to complain about people who expect everyone to have the same messed up outlook on life as they do. You might think that that’s a bit rich coming from someone who has a website dedicated to complaining about people who have a different outlook on life than he does, but the difference is that no one reads this shit and that I’m not in a position to fire my readers or ignore them when a promotion comes up if they don’t ‘hustle’ enough.

Are you someone who is always thinking about work and your next move? Do you want to move the needle in your company and make an impact on the overall customer journey by rising at dawn to get toned before heading off to meet your quota at work? Do you incentivize your peers to stay after hours to make sure you’re all aligned so that you can properly unpack last quarter’s results? Yeah? Good for you, but please shut the fuck up about it.

I used stock photos by Sebastian Hermann (@officestock) that I found on Unsplash for the LinkedIn mockup and a stock photo by @linkedinsalesnavigator for Thomas at the funeral.