Taking the Red Pill Has Made Me Miserable
Do not leave your 9–5, you will regret it.
When Eve ate the forbidden fruit, she got what she wanted. The knowledge of good and evil.
Then she also got the side effects, becoming miserable knowing there was just as much evil as there was good in the world.
Hustle culture
I was 5 years into my 6 year undergraduate degree when I gave my opinion on side hustles for the first time.
Not because I didn’t know before then that side hustles existed. After all, my civil servant mother’s string of petty businesses had kept the family afloat when the meagre salary could not.
But the thing was, they had impressed on me that attending university and studying a professional course meant job security and financial stability.
I prided myself on my profession and laughed at the idea of having to chase a side hustle alongside.
My argument was that professionals should dedicate their time and effort to their profession. The society sorely needed it.
Doctors should just be doctors. Lawyers, just lawyers. Nurses should not have to run a hair business, nor engineers moonlight at a call centre just to make ends meet. People should earn a living wage in their profession.
So why am I out here side-hustling?
Could it be that my stance on the issue has changed? The scales have fallen off my eyes? Or I have just grown greedy and wanted it all?
I am not sure which it is, but at some point, I swallowed the red pill. I took a bite of the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden, and now I have awoken a hunger.
Was this a hunger born of capitalism?
Or a desire to not be defined by just 1 pursuit when I could be much more?
In or out of the matrix
People who are into self-development and hustle culture see themself as having exited the matrix.
The hustle bro looks at everyone else with pity. They say that non-hustle people are trapped in their non-ambitious life.
But maybe the normies, aka non-hustle people, are the fortunate ones?
The people who are content with their 9 to 5, looking forward to retirement at the age of 65. They sleep longer in the mornings and wind down every evening in front of their TV. Sleep in on weekends and stay out past midnight on Fridays. They have no care for morning routines or cold showers, neither do they meticulously follow bullshit online listicles that promise to catapult them into success.
The normies have cares and worry like everyone else, but they are not being chased by an insane drive to retire at the age of 30, to hit it big or to become millionaires.
There is no rest for the wicked
As I sit here, stuffy nose, heavy headed, feeling hot one moment and cold the next, I realise I cannot even do being sick right.
Instead, I am writing. Yes, I have slept more in the past day than I have slept in a single night all month, but should I still be creating while sick?
Thinking back over the past year, I realise that I have actually been doing a lot of solitary pursuits, which writing tends to be. Before work, after work, at weekends, and on holidays, I keep hammering away at a keypad.
The hustle bros will be proud of me. Give me a pat on the back for this. After all, the consensus in the productivity p*rn circle is that losing friends is a sign of dedication to the grind, right?
I can hear J.T.’s voice telling me I was not the dog on the hill but the underdog climbing the hill. I can recall David Goggins narrating running with a broken ankle, or Mel Robbins recounting how she lost it all and still found the energy to get out of bed and get back into the grind.
But as I hack phlegm through a sore throat, in between coining the perfect title and selecting the image that suits the story just so, don’t worry, the flu is not contagious via the screen. But as I keep on with the grind, I can’t help but wonder if this is a sign of a disease much more serious than a respiratory infection.
Once upon a time, whether sick or hale and hearty, I could waste an entire weekend online, going from one social media platform to another. But now, not even a cold will justify such frivolity. Not when the inner critique is alive and commenting.
Has self-improvement sapped all the fun from my life?
They say ignorance is bliss. But when you take the red pill and awaken like Neo did, you are no longer ignorant.
And the moment you lose that ignorance, there goes your bliss.
Welcome to life outside the matrix.
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