#grind #hustle #success

When students open up Snapchat stories during midterm season, they will find at least one of these words on their screen. Some of us probably can’t even casually mention how much sleep we got last night without someone jumping in, “Six hours? You’re so lucky. I got half of that last night,” as if it was a competition. Even if it was a game, there are only losers. Hustle culture takes no prisoners.

In the golden age of workaholism, students are told to make every second matter. We’re told to be constantly productive and to make sure “the grind never stops.” The result is “hustle culture”—the societal fixation with putting maximum exertion in your work, turning a typical work-life balance on its back and living a work-only lifestyle.

It’s worth mentioning that there are some obvious benefits to living a perpetually productive life. I would be lying if I said it didn’t help me get important work done. However, our culture’s obsession with being productive has some serious side effects that are affecting the physical and mental health of students.

For starters, hustle culture drives students to burnout. A state of exhaustion caused by excessive stress, burnout erases any sense of motivation and makes it difficult to work or function in daily life. John Cohen, a psychoanalyst that specializes in burnout, wrote, “[you] feel burnout when you’ve exhausted all your internal resources, yet cannot free yourself of the nervous compulsion to go on regardless.” 

Chronic stress wreaks havoc on our bodies. The immune system suffers, making infections more likely. Hormones released during stressful times can cause blood pressure to spike, increasing the risk of heart attacks. In the brain, stress impairs memory, slows down thinking, and reduces sleep. In 2018, nearly a quarter of Canadians over the age of 15 reported, to varying degrees, that most of their days are stressful.

Hustle culture has also led to a world of toxic productivity. So-called “inspirational” quotes embodying the hustle culture do more harm than they intend. Quotes such as, “if you aren’t where you want to be, it’s because you don’t want it bad enough,” seem inspiring at first glance, but they can be paralyzing, filling the reader with a sense of dread. 

We as students also play a substantial role in perpetuating toxic productivity. It’s discouraging to hear that peers are willingly not eating or sleeping to work on assignments. Our culture praises and almost idolizes the people that have sacrificed their own health for productivity: Bill Gates, Elon Musk, the person who says #ThankGodItsMonday.

We end up internalizing the feeling that we could be sacrificing just as much as, if not even more than, our peers. Hustle culture inspires us to succeed by constantly exposing us to what an unhealthy obsession with success looks like. We slowly become convinced by the people around us that our self-worth is solely dependent on our ability to get sh*t done.

In a world of wealth and social inequality, hustle culture sends a clear message to the disadvantaged: “You’re poor because you’re not working hard enough.” It promotes the idea that one can solve income inequality by simply working more hours, taking less vacation days, and taking fewer breaks.

As we allocate all our time and effort into our work, we leave nothing for self-care. Mental and physical health suffers. Relationships with others deteriorate. Every aspect of our life suffers because of the hustle, including, ironically, our own work. The resulting lack of sleep, chronic stress, and declining social support does your productivity no favours.

It’s clear that hustle culture needs to go, but it’s easier said than done. In an essay published earlier this year in BuzzFeed News, Anne Helen Petersen reflects on why we continue to strive when we have no motivation to. “Why am I burned out? Because I’ve internalized the idea that I should be working all the time,” she writes. “Why have I internalized that idea? Because everything and everyone in my life has reinforced it—explicitly and implicitly—since I was young.”

Changing an entire culture requires small and incremental steps. At the University of Toronto, faculty can play a huge role in pushing back against the hustle. Professors should be mindful of the workload students have. Professors that refuse to allow extensions for assignments are failing to acknowledge that students need time for self-care. 

The university puts on a deceptive mask when it promotes out-of-classroom learning or opens up work-study positions when they cannot provide students the time to be actively engaging in these activities. The university’s concerns for student mental health are moot when faculty are free to ignore the struggles students face on a daily basis.

Of the nearly two dozen courses I have taken, I can only name three that explicitly demonstrated a consideration for student wellness—two of which were taught by the same professor.

For everybody else, I encourage you to be mindful of your own role in hustle culture. I’m more than guilty of blindly promoting the hustle in the past and I wouldn’t be surprised if many others have been too. If you find yourself stumbling upon a lack-of-sleep-competition, consider acknowledging to your peers that these are unhealthy habits and it needs to change.

In no way am I endorsing a productivity-free society. Being productive and working hard towards something you’re passionate about can be incredibly fulfilling for many individuals. But being work does not need to consume every aspect of your life—you should still have time to focus on your own well-being. Hustle culture is dangerous because it can easily lead to unhealthy habits, not because productivity is bad. It’s important to prioritize your mental and physical health while hustling.