Several days ago I found myself going down a YouTube rabbit hole which landed me at the channel of a guy who really loves his long-standing career in the Army. I can’t say I’ve ever had much interest in the military, but his passion for it was cool to watch, and he had some very interesting stories about how it had shaped his life, and probably saved him from an early death.
In one of maybe 3 videos I watched, he was wearing a shirt that read “nobody cares – work harder”. I immediately found myself annoyed with this, as it’s basically the mantra of hustle culture. I understand that different people are drawn toward this way of thinking, and it tends to be very common (and, perhaps, valuable) in a military setting, but it’s also somewhat dehumanizing. Fundamentally, I believe that everybody is valuable, no matter their output – economic or otherwise – but some people (predominantly men) often think that hard work is salvation, perhaps because it gives them a sense of purpose and value. I don’t buy it.
Rather than complain about this here, though, as I’ve often done before, I wanted to reflect on it a little more deeply and honestly, because over the past few years, I’ve learned that while I’m not otherwise a competitive person, I’ve somehow accepted this lie, deep down, that my value hinges on my output or knowledge. It has basically taken the joy I find in learning and transformed it into this crushing pressure.
I have a few examples from this past year.
After being rejected for a job I applied for last year, I was faced with the heavy truth that I simply wasn’t qualified and needed to learn more. This was otherwise fine, except that I didn’t have a clear direction for where to take my studies, and so spread myself very thin over dozens of books and projects. I kept up a good veneer of working hard, but I fundamentally burned out to the point of non-functioning. Months passed by before I even knew what had happened.
Late last year, I didn’t bother to take a break after one certification, and immediately jumped into the material for the next. I was so exhausted by the pressure to get through this material that I essentially got nothing done for a good 4-6 weeks. I really struggled to get through it, and by the time I was ready to take the test, I actually failed because I had been treating the process as a heavy chore rather than something I willingly chose to engage with. During the test, I had something of a mini-meltdown as the prospect of failure loomed in my mind, and with it, the fear that I simply was not cut out for this work and that all my time had been wasted. Well, I did fail it, but I then passed it two weeks later. I think the sentiment was a bit overblown in the moment.
As an inherently curious person, I love learning, but when it comes to forcing myself to “learn harder” or whatever, I simply break down and cease functioning. Some people consider that weakness of character, but I don’t know how they could possibly substantiate this. Weakness of what? For what reason? Is there anything even essential about suffering for your “career”?
A lot of my distaste for hustle culture comes from the fact that it is so highly praised in our society but is otherwise so destructive. I can criticize it as much as I like, but a piece of it is still inside of me, and I don’t yet know how to get it out.
Partly, I’ve come to accept the fact that simply indulging my curiosity will likely keep me learning for the rest of my life, and that might possibly be the only thing I need to succeed in cyber security. The less I try to take on, the more I get done, it seems, and that’s not some trick to “increase my output”, it’s just to acknowledge that slow, steady progress is more valuable than cranking it for 3 months just to burn out and give up.
And I’ve actually seen an interesting defense of hustle culture, namely, that it teaches you what you are capable of. It teaches you your limits. Many people will simply never learn this, so a little bit when you are young is not the worst thing in the world. That’s interesting to me. However, the dehumanizing element is ever-present more broadly speaking, so I still think it’s pretty awful.
I did actually learn my lesson, though, and took a good long break after passing that most recent certification. It seems I’m also getting better at picking a day – typically Saturday – and going so far as to avoid reading (to some extent). I think it’s worked quite nicely.
But I think there’s still a deeper concern here. Despite the occasional necessity of hard work (medical and law school come to mind, and of course other things at times, especially when changing careers or trying to increase one’s income out of necessity), most of this is a sort of “auto-exploitation” (as per Byung-Chul Han), in which hard work is used as a drop-in for self-esteem, regardless of its practical merits (of which there are few)(that is, there are few merits to hard work for hard work’s sake). And that is, there could easily be a spiritual component to this, the ingestion of lies about one’s value and identity, and perhaps only God can heal it.