"Hard work will always pay off" is one of the many sayings people like to say, or at least assure themselves with, that the hustle they're doing at the moment will eventually lead to success in the future. Despite how cliche it sounds, it is true that success won't come to those who don't work hard enough to achieve it. However, many people misinterpret that working hard means working overtime, forgetting weekends, and having no rest. Therefore, the longer work hours they do, the more restless nights they go through, they believe that success will come in no time.
The current owner and CEO of Twitter, Elon Musk, has been a huge proponent of hustle culture. In case you missed the news, Elon Musk demands that Twitter's employees work at least 80+ hours a week, which means double time. He doesn't care whether they have to sleep at work, and working from home is of course prohibited.
The term hustle culture itself is often misinterpreted as a requirement to work overtime every day even though you're not paid for doing so, make yourself available for work 24/7 to the point of skipping meals, and put work above everything else including your personal life. People who believe that hustle culture will propel them to success are willing to do more work than they're paid to do and have the tendency to look down on people who choose work-life balance.
People who romanticize hustle culture believe in the idea of not stopping themselves when they're tired, but stopping once everything is done. However, with the fact that working is an endless cycle, you will never find yourself being done with work unless you stop it to focus on your personal life. Finding oneself trapped within hustle culture somehow shapes a person to have unrealistic expectations about themself that small achievements wouldn't be as satisfying as how they should be. They will feel like they shouldn't celebrate these things as they feel there are more to complete.
When it comes to productivity and outcomes, you have sky-high expectations of how you have to achieve them. You are willing to give everything you've got to get the best results. When you know your potential and your maximum limits, you will not allow yourself to reach for anything lower and smaller than that. This is the point where you should realize that you're being toxic to yourself.
Once you're already in your toxic hustle cycle, you will start to have unhealthy competition with your co-workers. As a result, you will try so hard to compete either to make the best outcome or work overtime. This somehow brings you nothing but mental health problems. Burnout also happens to be one of the results that you may get by applying hustle culture in a professional environment. Research shows that increased stress and burnout can even reduce one's professional productivity.
The World Health Organization (WHO) defines burnout as a syndrome which is an effect of chronic stress. So when you're practicing hustle culture and end up experiencing burnout, this will actually make you become unproductive and your work will be delayed.
So, when Elon Musk tweeted "there are way easier places to work, but nobody ever changed the world in 40 hours a week", that's a huge red flag people should stop romanticizing. As we all know, working is a way to make a living, but can you really enjoy the income from your hard work with unhealthy mental and physical conditions, and a mindset that makes you feel like you're never enough?
(DIR)