The Eternal Curse of Never Being Satisfied

Reflections on hustle culture in our modern society

I was catching up on the phone with a friend the other day. He lives in San Francisco and has everything one could ask for: a nice job in tech, a six-figure salary, and he’s well on track to be promoted.

He followed the Hustle Culture script to the letter — early morning routines, networking coffee chats, daily motivation podcasts.

He did everything that was asked of him.

And yet, he feels like something is off.

The promises of a high-paying tech job are failing to live up to the expectations.

He feels like his life is currently in a limbo state. His days are filled with existential dread and a feeling of emptiness. He constantly questions whether all of this stuff has a meaning.

He wants a change. He wants to find something that can help him feel more.

Hamster Wheel Syndrome

My friend’s situation is not unique. He is feeling something that everyone in our generation has felt or will feel at some point.

The slog. The feeling of emptiness. The existential crisis.

All of these are perfect words describing the zeitgeist. The midlife crisis that seems to be happening earlier and earlier despite the fact that our life expectancy has considerably increased.

The expected baseline reset from a run on the hedonic treadmill.

If one thing is true about the past decade, it is that we’ve seen an insane rise in the popularity of Hustle Culture as our collective social media use has increased. A lot of us drank the Kool-Aid and decided to keep working harder and harder in the chase of better.

None of us took the time to define what “better” means and yet we all threw ourselves into the hustle.

We got rid of the hobbies and started seeking the side hustle that could bring us passive income. We collectively wired ourselves to feel guilty about spending leisure time and all became productivity hackers. We looked for everything single trick in the book to fully optimize our time and leverage our actions in the hope of doing more.

Our timelines and feeds became polluted with the Lambos, Ferraris, and pictures of luxurious lifestyles. The soundtrack of our lives became composed of Gary Vee rants and other gurus trying to get us to do more. Why? No one knows but apparently, the secret to life resides in doing more.

We slowly subscribed to the Hustle culture and fell into the Hamster Wheel Syndrome. We worked harder and harder but got nowhere.

As we were all heads down overworking and busying ourselves in the search for more, things were starting to get worse on a global level.

We wanted the nice Cancun vacation but got rewarded with a Global Pandemic. We wanted the fancy cars but got rewarded with a crumbling public transportation system. We wanted the best education for our kids but got rewarded with Zoom calls.

Needless to say that all of this has led many people to give up on the system. We fell into the Great Resignation as workers decided to opt out of the labor force. The number of people pursuing higher education has started to stagnate. In some places, life expectancy has even started to decrease.

What is the solution to all of this, though?

It would be foolish of me to say that I have the answers to the problems raised by Hustle Culture while being a part of Hustle Culture myself. However, my guess is that it starts with resetting our own expectations. If we take my friend’s case as an example, we see how this chase for more has rewired his brain. No matter how much more he gets, he will never be satisfied because more was never the answer.

Hustle Culture made us believe that more would help us but that is not true. The answer seems to lie closer to being able to define and know the value of “enough”.

In a world where we are taught that we should always strive for more, being able to know the value of “enough” is just as important.

I am not here to claim that chasing more is always a bad thing. What I want to tell you is that seeking more is not always seeking better as Hustle Culture would have you believe. Oftentimes, knowing the value of enough and restricting your area of satisfaction is better than seeking more.

As Naval Ravikant likes to say, “Desire is a contract you make with yourself until you get what you want.” By always seeking more, we often let our desires take over and this leads us to set unreachable expectations. The types of expectations that no reasonable person in normal times would set. But it is much too common to see people in Hustle Culture set these expectations without realizing it.

If I can leave you with one thing it would be this:

Define what enough means to you. The faster you can do that, the better. If you don’t define it, society will define it for you. And the issue with that is that you may end up chasing something that can never be reached just like a donkey chases a carrot.

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