Why hustle culture is killing the youth

‘Rise and hustle’. ‘Sleep is for the weak’. ‘Every minute you're not working, someone else is winning’. ‘The end justifies the means’. These are not fringe slogans of Silicon Valley dreamers but commonplace exhortations inundating our screens, embroidered into apparel, and etched into the minds of youths-calling them to action. Urgent action.

This is the hustle culture, a way of life and collective mindset that glorifies incessant productivity, idolises workaholism, and equates rest with complacent laziness. Among the youth, this is becoming a definitive benchmark and it’s time we sat down for a cost-benefit analysis.

In recent times, statistics concerning suicide among young people are breaking records. Unfortunately, the youngsters dying by their own hands carry the causes of their deaths away with them.

The ones who survive say, through bitter tears, that they only want to die and end the pain of living. But is that all? Researchers and commentators attribute this ascent in suicide to, among other factors and mental health issues, depression.

According to World Health Organisation, suicide is the second leading cause of death among 15 to 29-year-olds. Many reports and commentaries, however, do not trace depression down to its roots, but they ought to.

As a young professional with a background in youth service, I’ve seen firsthand and learnt from costly experience how seductive the hustle culture can be. Promises of breakthrough, fame, young self-made status, and ‘early’ financial freedom.

For the record, I write this not from an ivory tower. A majority of young people-already navigating dangerously volatile economic headwinds, social comparison online, and dynamic career landscapes-are bombarded with reels of agemates ‘making it’ by building brands, launching lucrative side hustles from scratch, and monetising every waking hour.

Worse still is the lure of get-rich-quick schemes. On platforms like TikTok, YouTube, and Telegram, young people are fed a constant stream of hypnotising content about forex trading, crypto ‘investments’, betting apps, OnlyFans, pyramid schemes, affiliate marketing and dropshipping empires that rake in millions overnight, supposedly.

These conduits to wealth are put on too high a pedestal as modern success stories, implying that hustling smart is better than hustling hard.

On the surface it all seems empowering. But dig a little deeper, and you open a whole new can of worms. When and if these schemes get botched, which is often, the resulting emotional meltdown is crippling.

Lost capital, grief, shattered confidence, isolation and protracted lawsuits. An awful sense of personal failure that gnawingly whispers to the soul, 'Everyone else is winning. Why not you?'

Hustle culture isn’t empowering. It’s as exhausting as it is depressing. And it's killing us. One by one, day by day. Just read your daily newspaper.

Read: Understanding teen suicide and how parents can help

But wait, ambition has never been the enemy. Hard work, resilience, proactiveness, and self-discipline are valuable traits in any language.

My argument is that hustle culture crosses the line when it tells young people that their worth is directly tied to their output, and that downtime means falling behind.

You know what happens when easy money becomes the ultimate goal in the face of unbridled ambition? The values of integrity, patience, effort, and self-awareness get lost in the frenzy. And more often than not it backfires, causing so much pain in so many places.

Grind culture does not just drain souls and wallets, it distorts young people’s perception of schooling, value, effort, investment, compensation and reward.

It encourages blind risk-taking without resilience and promotes a vogue in which patience and long-term growth are seen as unlikely and implausible.

The result is a demographic caught between overwork, untenable urgency, chicanery and oversimplified success, constantly feeling like they are doing nothing, even when they’re doing everything.

Talk of long and scary sleepless nights, chronic stress, overindulgence, gnawing anxiety, distraction and burnout. Being under pressure to constantly outperform, compete, and keep up with the Joneses can lead to a sense of inadequacy, imposter syndrome and an early grave.

We are admittedly at a crossroads and the wise thing to do is make a detour- pause and reclaim balance as a value. Let’s start by encouraging rest over burnout, play and purpose over pressure, and emotional wellbeing over Sisyphean tasks as much as we celebrate entrepreneurship and grit among the youth.

Schools, youth programs, youth advocates, and families must promote healthy and realistic goal-setting, not just futile chasing of the wind.

Yeah, the future needs ambitious leaders, creators, and innovators, but it also needs wholly equanimous and grounded human beings who understand that sustainable success is built consistently over time and not in a viral moment. Most importantly, we must debunk the myth of overnight success.

At the end of the day, as Leo Tolstoy points out in his classic How Much Land Does a Man Need? an unrealistic pursuit for more by hook and crook can leave us empty-handed and at a greater loss.

Pahom, the man in Tolstoy’s story, runs himself to a tragic death trying to demarcate and claim as much land as he can - only to forfeit the whole of it and get buried alone in only six feet.

When rest and self-care become guilty pleasures rather than necessities, we need to get personal and ask ourselves; at what cost? And for whose gain?

The writer is a psychologist.