The Grey Areas: Why Both Hustle Culture and Dropping Out Miss the Point

Since I was 16 I am designing and building websites for other people than myself. There was never a time after that where I did not work for clients, even though I have worked in several agencies over the years. Designing and building websites paid for my studies and my own flat, for my iPhone, my MacBook, my iMac and everything else that I needed in order to keep doing what I love. However somewhere along the way, the industry confused “busy” with “productive”.

The false choice

Since I do not come from money I had to work for the things I needed and wanted. Although every once in a while I question myself if I really do enough I know that I have worked long and hard for what others would call success and sometimes luck.

But times they are a-changing. Working hard is what some might call hustle-culture these days as there is a tendency of lots of people to celebrate how hard they’re working, how early they get up, how long they can stay in an ice-bath and how many articles they have already both read and written before they’re even sitting at their desks. Hustle culture is definitely back and it is celebrated more than ever on platforms like Instagram and YouTube and sometimes also LinkedIn.

But there is also the other extreme. The antidote to hustle culture. The people who believe in less work and more travel. In growing their own food and taking care of their own garden instead of grinding all the time. People who want to work less and only so much that it pays the bills. People who do not give a damn about the companies they’re working for and only do it in the exchange of money and security. And because our society has become utterly divided in all kinds of matters, there’s not a lot of grey space in between.

The real problem

Both of those extremes miss the point. You should not have to choose between hustling day and night and dropping out, living in the woods. (Side note: I find it downright hypocritical that those who have declared war on hustle culture are the ones who perfectly stage their minimalism and purism on social media.) There must be a better way. A way that appeals both to people who closely link their purpose and fulfillment to their work and to people who are primarily focused on balancing their work with their environment.

I recently stumbled upon this YouTube video by Matt D’Avella “Hustle culture lied to you (here’s a better way)” where he introduces the thoughts and words of Cal Newport who wrote the book “Slow productivity” that basically argues to do less but more focused. We surround ourselves with too many things and we want to do them all at once. We want to follow up on every little itch of an idea which leads to being overworked and at some point completely empty inside. This definitely struck a chord with me as I am very much torn apart between the many ideas that I want to follow up on. Pursuing too many things at once however leads to maybe many outcomes but rarely good ones as they lack focus and attention to detail. Especially when working in an agency time pressure, hitting deadlines and delivering features very fast is quite common but if we’re honest — most of the times nothing good comes out of it and this is not money well spent. Doing less but with more focus ultimately might bring you further but right now we’re optimising for speed, not for quality.

With the growing acceptance and urge to introduce AI in companies, the promise of doing things faster is louder than ever. But should this really be the purpose of AI? Shouldn’t AI help us stay focused or support us with the profane tasks so we can pay attention to the things, the features that make a brand or product special? Couldn’t AI help us orchestrate creative processes better when we again might run into a lack of focus? Right now society is running into the opposite direction for sure.

We want to do more but in less time. We want to jump higher but with less effort and what’s the outcome? After the pandemic disrupted our 9-to-5 rhythm and paved the way for new ways of working a lot of companies are slowly but surely returning to pre-pandemic attitudes and processes and the result: a global mental health crisis. More people than ever before are burning out. More people than ever have issues with anxiety, with having not enough energy to get through the day and are afraid of what the future might bring. We live in a burnout pandemic and the huge transformational power that AI has, this will only get worse when more and more people are losing their jobs to AI and politics do not offer alternative ways and opportunities to give these people different careers and their purpose back. But what if we're thinking about AI all wrong?

AI opportunities

To leverage the power AI can unleash we should build one feature brilliantly instead of 10 features poorly. When we use AI for research, testing and data gathering we can design and build more meaningful products. Even small budgets allow for these kinds of discovery work. It is not anymore about doing more in less time but rather using modern tools to build less but better. This requires radical change both in the industry and in society.

For me personally change was never an issue. Since I am working in a field that is constantly changing, it is just something that you learn to deal with and most of the times appreciate as change can be exciting. But for us as a society change is difficult and in democracies around the world where implementing change takes longer than in other political systems we’re looking at an enormous challenge. What we now need is fewer bureaucrats and more people who embrace change and know what they’re talking about. We need more psychologists who know about the effects of change in both work and life situations and who can accompany this transition into a different society that is powered by technological advancement. We need people who can connect the extremes and find areas in between where people are enabled to strive and can show their true potential. But how can this be achieved when so many societies are attracted again by right-wing rhetoric and false promises that are both bad for society and the environment we live in? The solution is not choosing between extremes — to bring it back to the beginning of this post — to hustle or to quit. AI everything vs. AI nothing. Left or Right. It is about remembering that the most interesting conversations happen in grey areas. That even political opponents can relate to each other once they discover they want similar things but with different tools. That our best work comes from focus not intoxication. That AI should give us time to think (better), not just move faster.

We need to stop celebrating either burnout or dropout and start celebrating depth. Quality. Thoughtfulness. The radical act of doing one thing well. This is how we as a society get ready for the next chapter. However that may look like.