We’re living in peak hustle culture now, at least I hope we are. I was struck by this thought while watching this dicussion between Arthur Brooks and Cal Newport on how to have meaning in a distracted life.
They passingly said “hustle culture” when describing the current moment, but then spoke of it as something that started in the early 2000s, something going on 25 years now. I mean, it’s obvious, right? We’re clearly fixated on hustle culture and min-maxing life, but also, it struck me as a fresh observation, this idea that it’s been going on for this long. And then I thought, have we reached peak hustle culture yet?
This moment won’t last forever, of that I’m sure. We’re now able to take a critical eye to the way the industrial revolution infected our view of everything. We can see how having schools be little factories for children isn’t the best idea. Or maybe we’re not all neatly divided into worker and owner classes. Or maybe a body isn’t so similar to a machine after all.
That’s the problem with metaphors. They’re great for writing, great for distilling complex ideas into understandable imagary. They make fiction sing. But that’s the thing — they’re fiction. We’re not actually all machines. Our brains are not really like computers. We don’t think in binary. The world cannot be understood that way. Not really. One day, we’ll wake up and realize it, or at least move on to the next thing and the process will start all over again.