Hustle culture and the burnout generation

“Thanks for promoting this issue!” wrote a respondent of our ‘Hustle Culture’ survey last week. “Let me share this survey with my colleagues, I’m sure they all have a thing or two to share,” wrote another. Another confessed to us that she felt so much lighter after spilling her guts in the survey about her experiences.

When we decided to do the survey we knew that people would have something to say about hustle culture, but we were surprised to learn that people feel that strongly about it.

At the end of the survey, we ended up with a collection of thoughts, grievances, experiences and stories from respondents across 27 different industries, with the majority of them coming from the tech, media and retail industries. And each one of them is all too familiar with hustle culture. Hustle culture does not discriminate.

Let us start with the definition of the term. Hustle culture can be understood as a fast-paced environment that feeds off long working hours and a restless sense of striving for some type of goal. And boy is that definition appropriate.

Our survey found that 83.8% of the respondents find working overtime to be a normal occurrence, while 69.6% confess that they regularly work on weekends. Moreover, 60.8% of them feel guilty when they do not put in extra hours at work. When asked about the number of hours they spend working per week, we were surprised to learn that one respondent spends an average of 100 hours working per week, while a handful of them work between 75-80 hours per week. Given that the widely accepted benchmark of a ‘full-time job’ is 40 hours per week, the numbers we mentioned are highly alarming.

The prevalence and the normalisation of hustle culture are fascinating. After all, it is not as though putting in more hours equals higher productivity. A study by Pencavel (2014) found that the relationship between working hours and productivity is nonlinear: below the 48 hours threshold, output is proportional to hours; above the threshold, output rises at a decreasing rate as hours increase. This paper also suggested a different reason for an optimising employer to care about the length of working hours: employees at work for a long time may experience fatigue or stress that not only reduces his or her productivity, but also increases the probability of errors, accidents and sickness that impose costs on the employer.

Then why is hustle culture sweeping the world?

It could be because in recent years, social media posts promoting ‘the hustle’ have taken over everybody’s feeds. These posts come in many shapes and forms, from ‘motivational’ quotes telling us to pursue our dreams, to posts from friends and acquaintances discussing and showcasing their many projects and business ventures. Surely we are all familiar with the now viral quote of “don’t stop when you’re tired, stop when you are done”?

There seems to be an idealised concept that if you are working constantly, you will see instant results. These constant affirmations and reminders of opportunity will either motivate us, or burden us with (more) unnecessary stress.

Unfortunately, the consequences are real on workers’ mental and physical wellbeing. Most of our survey respondents do not think that hustle culture is a sustainable concept, “I think my co-worker almost got hospitalised because of the load of his work and he kept it a secret from our peers. Imagine if people finally speaks up about this torturous culture,” one of them told us.

And what would happen if people do start to speak up? “They (management) said ‘If you think you are overworked, it mean that this is not your place. You are not meant to work here.’ instead of trying to find the effective solutions for all of us,” shared one respondent.

For some, rejecting hustle culture feels like a mental challenge to overcome, “It is an unhealthy culture, but it seems as though we’re rejecting challenges by not working overtime,” a respondent confessed. And shying away from challenges is against the very essence of hustle culture.

We interviewed an ex-human resources staff member from a local tech company, and she shared that the HR team is usually very aware of the high rates of employees who are working overtime and beyond their designated job scopes. Sometimes, the HR team is able to help some of them find a solution, usually in the forms of promotions, pay raise, or simply discussions with their supervisors.

However, since cases like these are happening at an alarmingly high rate, not everybody is going to find a solution that satisfies them. “There are many disgruntled employees who could not be provided with a decent solution, and it is just part of the risk. Either the supervisor is not open for discussion, or there is no budget for a pay raise,” she said. “At the end of the day, there will be more people whose issues remain unresolved. It has become some sort of a culture that this is how things work at start-ups. People usually end up accepting what they’ve been given,” she added.

It is a culture. A culture that seemed as though it is built on hard-work and a go-getter mentality. A culture for which Elon Musk is the poster boy, with his recommendation of “80 sustained (working) hours a week, peaking at about 100 hours” mentality. In reality, it may just be performative workaholism. Boasting about your hustle now seems as important as doing the hustle itself.

It is not as though this matter is unregulated by the law. The job creation bill revises various provisions in the Manpower Law. The provisions regarding maximum hours have been changed to a maximum of four hours in one day and 18 hours in one week. Workers must give their approvals to work overtime. These do not make hustle culture any less prevalent, though.

One of the biggest issues with hustle culture is that it only looks to the future, which means people are missing out on living in the present. We are enslaved by internal and external pressures, such as deadlines, work demands, or pleasing colleagues or clients. We grow so accustomed to being on autopilot that we may not be attuned to our surroundings or ourselves.

Ultimately, as cliché as it sounds, the solution is to teach ourselves to work smarter, not harder. That means taking into consideration our mental and physical limits, setting boundaries and putting one’s wellbeing as priority. Millennials (and in a few years, Generation Z) are a young workforce who is willing to work to pursue their dreams, they just need some clear boundaries.

‘Work-life balance’ is a common theme when our survey respondents are asked to conceptualise a ‘healthy workplace’. “A place that encourages growth and really appreciates your efforts. Not pushing you too hard but able to make you feel intrigued at your job,” a respondent shared his version of a healthy workplace with us. Another respondent added that allowing employees to have proper amounts of downtime will ultimately be beneficial for the company itself, “with that freedom, we would be more considerate over our work and not feel forced.”