episode 4: characteristics of hustle culture
What if a lot of what makes you successful (your ambition, working hard, your ability to do it all) was like a silent but deadly fart?
In this deeply personal and candid episode, I share the story of how I finally woke up from hustle culture. SPOILER ALERT - It only took me a casual 2 decades. From my days as a tireless immigrant student chasing every opportunity, to the burnout that followed me across jobs, cities, and even my own business—I lay it all out.
But the real turning point? Getting fired from a job I didn’t even need. Ha!
Here’s the episode outline:
Defining hustle culture - what to look for when assessing where you stand in the matrix
Defining 'feeling good' as the opposite (or perhaps more balanced) replacement for hustling
The signs of dysfunctional achieving vs functional efforting
The long arc of overachieving and the price I paid for it: from 17 years old to now (35 years old)
Learning the hard way in every area of my life: relationships, jobs, mentors, courses, etc.
When pushing became a pattern, even in my spiritual business
THE GRAND FINALE - the comically dysfunctional workplace that finally mirrored back the true cost of over-efforting
The next episode is the part 2 finale of the hustle culture series. This is where I reflect on my experiments with feeling good in 2025 and present some rituals for you around waking up from hustling.
This episode is pure story. In the next episode, we ritual!
characteristics of hustle culture
Defining hustle culture in one sentence: hustle culture anything that requires prolonged stress in order to sustain itself. Two key words here are requires and prolonged.
Defining hustle culture in another sentence: hustle culture is a dysfunctional exercise in being worthy, where folks engage in worthiness gymnastics and have a constant compulsion to earn something in order to deserve it.
Here is a checklist to identify hustle culture behaviors and thought patterns. The goal of this list is to identify hurtful behaviors you maybe engaging in, so that you can bring them more into balance.
there’s no rhythm, pace, or flow - living life at an unnaturally fast pace
quality sacrificed for quantity
meaninglessness, lack of joy or humor, overly-serious
never feeling good enough despite all the qualifications and experience
you’re always holding your breath
life cannot surprise you because everything is so tightly controlled, planned, etc.
pushing, striving, achieving, climbing, performing
trying to be successful using someone elses’ success metrics
pressure and urgency politics
rated, graded, evaluated, measurements, metrics, ranking - everything reduced to a number made up by someone else
no room for nuance or context or complexity - over-simplification and over-reduction to meaninglessness
industrial, cookie-cutter, standardization practices
many levels of hierarchy. but no real leadership
the grind, the rat race
‘work hard, play hard’ - more like work hard, check out harder.
until next time,
may you welcome the dignity of feeling good
Dilshad
Listen to the show on your favorite platforms