Hustle Culture Existed Long Before “Workism”
I find it painful to be so critical of Derek Thompson’s essay “The Religion of Workism Is Making Americans Miserable.” I’m an admirer of Thompson, and I find his powers of analysis to be remarkable, his essays to be insightful, and even his Workism essay to have many truthful observations in it, especially as his essay pertains to fraudsters like Elizabeth Holmes and Adam Neumann.
However, I have found many deceptions and fallacies in his Workism essay, which I have already pointed out.
To add to my criticism of Thompson’s Workism essay, I would like to refer you to a YouTube channel called Wisecrack. One of the videos, “Hustle Culture: Why We Can’t Stop Working,” not only gives us a more relevant and accurate analysis of job burnout but makes many of Thompson’s observations seem even more unoriginal and erroneous.
To begin, being overworked and burned out is nothing new. The narrator of “Hustle Culture” observes that hustle culture started in the Industrial Revolution with the advent of electricity when the lights were on all the time.
Poor people were told in the 1800s to “bootstrap” their way out of poverty. “Bootstrapping” originally meant to do the impossible: To jump over a fence while holding one’s ankles, but over time “bootstrapping” evolved into something positive: self-reliance and determination, virtues to mask the exploitation of the poor.
So Workism is just a morphed version of bootstrapping. Thompson is appropriating an old concept and making a new term to give relevance and novelty to his essay.
The Wisecrack narrator goes on to say that people of color and marginalized groups have been oppressed by bootstrapping since early American history, long before the tech start-ups Thompson mentions in his essay.
In fact, it is people of color who termed “hustle culture,” which white people have appropriated to be a good thing.
However, the Wisecrack narrator emphasizes that hustle culture is not a good thing. Hustle culture refers to an exploited group of people being forced to hustle simply to survive.
Survival of the poor and the exploited toiling under conditions of systemic injustice is the real Mother of Workism, not the quest for religious meaning, as Thompson falsely claims.
The racism that informs bootstrapping and hustle culture is abundantly evident when the Wisecrack narrator points out that an 1800s white doctor George Beard was worried that overworked white people were suffering from neurasthenia or “American-itis,” the condition of job burnout and mental fatigue, and he recommended that white people get more rest.
However, this white doctor made no such recommendations for people of color because this white doctor falsely claimed that non-white people were made to be overworked and that their limited brain power was such that they could not suffer “overworked minds.”
So let us pause and make it clear that bootstrapping and hustle culture was uniquely exacted against people of color and then the terms were appropriated by white people to make bootstrapping and hustle culture sound like positive traits like “self-reliance” and “determination” when in fact they were about racism and exploitation. Derek Thompson would have been well served to put his Workism idea in this context, but he did not do so.
The Wisecrack narrator goes on to observe that over the last 40 years American workers of all races have suffered from declining unions, wage stagnation, and economic necessity to survive through hustle culture. They are overworked to pay bills. They are not seeking religious meaning, the core focus of Thompson’s essay.
When the Wisecrack narrator discusses people who are spending long hours in the tech industry, he doesn’t make the claim, like Derek Thompson, that they are enticed by religious meaning. Rather, the narrator correctly observes that tech workers spend long hours at work because their bosses demand it and they are enticed with lavish perks.
Concluding Remarks:
The Wisecrack narrator points out so many accurate insights about Hustle Culture that contradict Derek Thompson’s essay:
- Systemic injustice and racism are the Mother of Workism, not the quest for religious meaning.
- Long before white people appropriated Hustle Culture from black people to brag about their work ethic, black people were hustling just to survive.
- Perks and pressure from bosses in tech companies, not the quest for religious meaning, forces tech workers to work long hours.
A Study of “Why Are People Pretending to Love Work?” by Erin Griffith
Performative Workaholism Becomes a Lifestyle
"How can I manipulate my workers?"
Imagine being the owner of a company such as WeWork and your underlying sentiment toward your workers is this: “Everyone of them is a wet dishrag and I want to squeeze out the last drop of every one of them until they’re dry and brittle to the point of death. But I’ll make them complicit in their own demise. I’ll make them actually virtue-signal their way to their own exploitation.”
How could someone do this? This seems to be one of the more salient questions in Erin Griffith’s essay “Why Are People Pretending to Love Work?”
Griffith observes that we now live in something called Hustle Culture in which the highest virtue is working yourself to the bone and chronicling your self-exploitation on Instagram as if it’s a good thing.
So we have these forces causing job burnout:
- Ubermensch ethic (being a Superman)
- Virtue signaling “your journey” on social media to show your “work rapture”
- Toxic positivity
- Groupthink
- Pseudo-spirituality
In fact, today’s young employees want to curate their lives as being in a constant state of “work rapture.”
We will notice that these “super employees” use several cliches to reveal the toxic positivity that fuels their work.
As Griffith writes:
“The current state of entrepreneurship is bigger than career,” reads the One37pm “About Us” page. “It’s ambition, grit and hustle. It’s a live performance that lights up your creativity … a sweat session that sends your endorphins coursing ... a visionary who expands your way of thinking.” From this point of view, not only does one never stop hustling — one never exits a kind of work rapture, in which the chief purpose of exercising or attending a concert is to get inspiration that leads back to the desk.
Ryan Harwood, the chief executive of One37pm’s parent company, told me that the site’s content is aimed at a younger generation of people who are seeking permission to follow their dreams. “They want to know how to own their moment, at any given moment,” he said.
“Owning one’s moment” is a clever way to rebrand “surviving the rat race.” In the new work culture, enduring or even merely liking one’s job is not enough. Workers should love what they do, and then promote that love on social media, thus fusing their identities to that of their employers. Why else would LinkedIn build its own version of Snapchat Stories?
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Hustle Culture is rooted in both the ideology that your work is your Higher Purpose and that you are supposed to be in a constant state of elevated endorphins, a rapturous bliss of never-ending work and exercise. Even your leisure activities become ways of taking the experience and applying it to your work. Your job subsumes everything into it because your job is the apotheosis--the highest point--of your existence.
There is also a certain vaingloriousness and “look at me” to Hustle Culture. You show yourself hard at work in the office, perhaps giving a PowerPoint presentation, running on a gym treadmill, or going through a grueling Peloton workout--and all of these activities are recorded on video for your Instagram.
Make the Sheeple Work for You So You Can Work Less
When work’s octopus tentacles reach into the very core of people’s private lives--their dreams, their aspirations, their most intimate relationships--then there is no life-work balance, there is no private space, there is no life outside of work. The employee has given up their boundaries in order to be both a “team player” and someone who self-deceptively believes they are achieving their dream. Meanwhile, their boss is squeezing every last drop out of them without appropriate recompense.
What the sheeple don’t realize is that their bosses work less even as they champion Hustle Culture to their employees. This is part of the Hustle Culture scam. As we read:
“The vast majority of people beating the drums of hustle-mania are not the people doing the actual work. They’re the managers, financiers and owners,” said David Heinemeier Hansson, the co-founder of Basecamp, a software company. We spoke in October, as he was promoting his new book, “It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work,” about creating healthy company cultures.
Mr. Heinemeier Hansson said that despite data showing long hours improve neither productivity nor creativity, myths about overwork persist because they justify the extreme wealth created for a small group of elite techies. “It’s grim and exploitative,” he said.
Elon Musk, who stands to reap stock compensation upward of $50 billion if his company, Tesla, meets certain performance levels, is a prime example of extolling work by the many that will primarily benefit him. He tweeted in November that there are easier places to work than Tesla, “but nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week.” The correct number of hours “varies per person,” he continued, but is “about 80 sustained, peaking about 100 at times. Pain level increases exponentially above 80.”
Mr. Musk, who has more than 24 million Twitter followers, further noted that if you love what you do, “it (mostly) doesn’t feel like work.” Even he had to soften the lie of T.G.I.M. with a parenthetical.
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Hustle Culture Started During the Early Days of Google
We read that Hustle Culture started in the early 2000s during the start of Google and other flourishing tech industries. The CEOs realized that creating Hustle Culture meant they could get more hours from their workers and even get them to bring coffee, breakfast, and lunch to the office. Doing gopher work became part of the desirable Hustle Culture. This trend has now spread to other industries and has become part of the mainstream. What’s insidious about this trend is that the upper management gets all the profits. Wage growth for workers has been stagnant over the last four decades.
The Pseudo-Religious Aura Around Work
Like Caroline Chen, Griffith posits that a decline in religion has created a spiritual vacuum that people are trying to fill by injecting meaning into their jobs. As she writes:
Perhaps we’ve all gotten a little hungry for meaning. Participation in organized religion is falling, especially among American millennials. In San Francisco, where I live, I’ve noticed that the concept of productivity has taken on an almost spiritual dimension. Techies here have internalized the idea — rooted in the Protestant work ethic — that work is not something you do to get what you want; the work itself is all. Therefore any life hack or company perk that optimizes their day, allowing them to fit in even more work, is not just desirable but inherently good.
Aidan Harper, who created a European workweek-shrinkage campaign called 4 Day Week, argues that this is dehumanizing and toxic. “It creates the assumption that the only value we have as human beings is our productivity capability — our ability to work, rather than our humanity,” he told me.
It’s cultist, Mr. Harper added, to convince workers to buy into their own exploitation with a change-the-world message. “It’s creating the idea that Elon Musk is your high priest,” he said. “You’re going into your church every day and worshiping at the altar of work.”
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If you surrender to the idea that work is your core source of meaning, you have no value of self or dignity outside of your job. This is a toxic relationship between you and your boss. You are now dependent on the job for meaning, belonging, and self-worth. You have no life outside of the job. You don’t even have an identity. This makes you vulnerable to depression and exploitation. You need to face the reality that going to work is “not going to church.”
Inevitable Burnout
If you join Hustle Culture, eventually you will crash and burn. Hustle Culture simply is not sustainable. Not that your boss cares. He or she will throw you away like an empty soup can and replace you with a new can of soup.
Griffith points out that a lot of this burnout is a result of inflated expectations from graduating college with overwhelming student debt and believing that a job must be glorious to have suffered so much financially, but in truth, every jog is full of drudgery. As Griffith writes:
The logical endpoint of excessively avid work, of course, is burnout. That is the subject of a recent viral essay by the BuzzFeed cultural critic Anne Helen Petersen, which thoughtfully addresses one of the incongruities of hustle-mania in the young. Namely: If Millennials are supposedly lazy and entitled, how can they also be obsessed with killing it at their jobs?
Millennials, Ms. Petersen argues, are just desperately striving to meet their own high expectations. An entire generation was raised to expect that good grades and extracurricular overachievement would reward them with fulfilling jobs that feed their passions. Instead, they wound up with precarious, meaningless work and a mountain of student loan debt. And so posing as a rise-and-grinder, lusty for Monday mornings, starts to make sense as a defense mechanism.
Most jobs — even most good jobs! — are full of pointless drudgery. Most corporations let us down in some way. And yet years after the HBO satire “Silicon Valley” made the vacuous mission statement “making the world a better place” a recurring punch line, many companies still cheerlead the virtues of work with high-minded messaging. For example, Spotify, a company that lets you listen to music, says that its mission is “to unlock the potential of human creativity.” Dropbox, which lets you upload files and stuff, says its purpose is “to unleash the world’s creative energy by designing a more enlightened way of working.”
David Spencer, a professor of economics at Leeds University Business School, says that such posturing by companies, economists and politicians dates at least to the rise of mercantilism in 16th-century Europe. “There has been an ongoing struggle by employers to venerate work in ways that distract from its unappealing features,” he said. But such propaganda can backfire. In 17th-century England, work was lauded as a cure for vice, Mr. Spencer said, but the unrewarding truth just drove workers to drink more.
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Backlash
Griffith observes that the tech industry is losing its angelic halo and becoming a target of scorn. Much of its mining of private data, spreading weaponized misinformation to threaten democracies around the world, and doing these perfidious activities for profit is exposing tech industries for what they really are: not sanctuaries for meaning but ruthless money grabbers. As we read:
Internet companies may have miscalculated in encouraging employees to equate their work with their intrinsic value as human beings. After a long era of basking in positive esteem, the tech industry is experiencing a backlash both broad and fierce, on subjects from monopolistic behavior to spreading disinformation and inciting racial violence. And workers are discovering how much power they wield. In November, some 20,000 Googlers participated in a walkout protesting the company’s handling of sexual abusers. Other company employees shut down an artificial intelligence contract with the Pentagon that could have helped military drones become more lethal.
Mr. Heinemeier Hansson cited the employee protests as evidence that millennial workers would eventually revolt against the culture of overwork. “People aren’t going to stand for this,” he said, using an expletive, “or buy the propaganda that eternal bliss lies at monitoring your own bathroom breaks.” He was referring to an interview that the former chief executive of Yahoo, Marissa Mayer, gave in 2016, in which she said that working 130 hours a week was possible “if you’re strategic about when you sleep, when you shower, and how often you go to the bathroom.”
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Meaning on a Silver Platter
In some ways, it’s more difficult to exercise your independence and critical thinking and create a life for yourself, one that doesn’t require self-curation on Instagram or the validation of your co-workers. In some ways, it’s easier in the short run to be a sheeple who gets exploited at work and pretends to be happily part of Hustle Culture, but in the long term, this phony existence will cause you to crash. You’re better off leaving Hustle Culture sooner than later.
Review:
Defining a thesis:
A thesis is a meaningful claim or argument that is the central focus of your essay, that you can defend with credible information, that will outline an essay of 1,200 words or more, that is challenging enough to be appropriate for college-level writing, that has high stakes, and that defies simple analysis.
- The thesis or claim is the central focus of your essay. It is the reason you are writing your essay. To stray from your thesis is to betray your original intention.
- The thesis is based on an informed opinion based on credible research. Your research has been peer reviewed and is rooted in reality. To look to “research” based on a fever swamp of unproven conspiracies and misinformation is to present an essay that is disconnected from reality. We live in an age where even facts and reality itself are disputed. This is a very specific crisis called the epistemic crisis. You can read about this crisis in Jonathan Rauch’s book The Constitution of Knowledge.
- A strong thesis may have reasons contained in the sentence. These reasons are also called mapping components. They outline your essay’s body paragraphs. Observe the following example: Working from the home is more viable for most companies because working from the home saves your workers from commute time, doesn’t expose workers to illnesses resulting in lost work time, reduces work theft opportunities, reduces company expenses such as heat, AC, lighting, etc., and takes advantage of the technology that’s cheaply available to make your employees’ home office an efficient business office.
- The thesis can generate an essay that is 1,200 words or more means the thesis is demonstrable: You can defend the thesis with reasoning, logic, examples, and research.
- Your thesis has high stakes. You present an argument and the listener or reader doesn’t feel compelled to say “So what?” Rather, you have chosen a topic that is relevant, vital, and urgent to the human condition.
- Your thesis defies simple analysis. You are avoiding the obvious and factual such as “What the world needs now is love.” Rather, you are focusing on debatable topics.
Sample Thesis Statements
Sample #1
Workism is a social disease.
Sample #2
There are many causes behind the social plague of Workism.
Sample #3
The foundations of Workism--origin stories, Groupthink, toxic positivity, a sense of work mission and purpose, and the Ubermensch ethic--are based on a fraud designed to exploit employees.
Sample #4
Workism is the natural byproduct of immersing yourself in a job that gives you purpose and turns you into the kind of Ubermensch you hunger to be. In other words, McMahon’s essay assignment, which castigates meaning, higher purpose, and Ubermensch-driven work drive, will result in apathy and mediocrity at the workplace.
Sample #5
Contrary to the way McMahon has framed Workism for his English 1C writing assignment, Workism is a desirable ideal based on meaning, higher purpose, and a strong work ethic.
Sample #6
Workism is one of those gussied-up fabrications whipped up by social justice warriors and work-hungry journalists to hide the fact that it isn’t Workism that drives most American workers; it’s the hyper-competitive capitalist system, which makes survival in the workplace a zero-sum game.
Sample #7
While most American workers are too busy trying to survive in the workplace to indulge in this thing called Workism, there are rich techno-brats who hide behind Workism as a tool to exploit their workers, conjure fake meaning to the masses, and to give themselves a fake halo of “spreading goodness around the world.”
Sample #8
Workism is one of the most cunning and insidious methods for exploiting masses of young workers who hunger for belonging, meaning, and a framework to give incentive to their need to outwork their competition.
Sample #9
Workism is just another name for the workaholic that has plagued society since the Industrial Revolution. There’s nothing to see here but a few journalists trying to make online magazine click bait.
Sample #10
To lump together all workaholics with the devotees of modern-day Workism and make the claim that all work addiction is the same and therefore poo-pooh the very notion of Workism is to be blind to the very specific and distinctive type of employer manipulation used by today’s fraudsters, and this blindness does a great disservice to the modern-day workforce.
Sample #11
I stand by my claim that workaholics throughout the last one hundred years are the same as the devotees to modern-day Workism and that McMahon’s assignment is complete BS because the pseudo-spiritual underpinnings of the business world have always been with us. Long before the social media age and the era of the smarmy, unctuous Tech Bros, we’ve had the gospel of quasi-spirituality inspiring overwork and making “the job” the apotheosis of human existence. Look, for example, at the 1952 Norman Vincent Peale book The Power of Positive Thinking, the 1982 Thomas Peters book In Search of Excellence, and the 1989 Stephen Covey book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, and you will see that decades before the Tech Bros hit the scene and the term Workism was bandied about, there was already a canon of “Holy Business Book” texts telling Americans they couldn’t be successful in business unless they fused their spiritual character with their workplace personality as a way of rationalizing their worship of blind ambition and working themselves to death. So, McMahon, I don’t care about the writers Derek Thompson and Helen Anne Petersen who would have us believe that Workism is “a thing” when in fact it’s just lipstick on the pig of workaholism. Come on, McMahon, gives us a real assignment.
Sample #12
When we look at the type of grift performed by fraudsters Elizabeth Holmes and Adam Neumann, we see that Workism is a very specific type of worker exploitation that owes its effectiveness to the social media tech age. Therefore, McMahon’s assignment is legit.
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