Things No One Tells You About Toxic Hustle Culture

Side hustles do not exist, and your simplest pleasures of life might disappear.

I sat down on my old covered couch holding a Casio calculator from college to estimate my savings across bank accounts. It was not much, which frightened my wife.

It is her dream to buy a house. But, saving money for the down payment has been a struggle. Increasing rent, rising grocery costs, increasing gas prices, and growing insurance premiums chip the savings while our income is stagnant.

“We need to save more!” She sighed with frustration.

“I know,” I slumped my back.

I have a decent life, and I make enough money to support my family, at least for now. But increasing living expenses have forced me to look for other income sources.

That’s when I started thinking about side hustles. Everybody else on the internet seems to have additional sources of revenue. So, I Googled what felt like for months on “How to earn extra money?”

All the answers I found were pretty standard; work more, sell your old stuff, create an online course, start making YouTube videos, write online, so on and so forth. People across the internet gave the same ideas packaged in a different format, yet nothing clicked with me besides writing. So, I joined Medium. But writing online for money came with a cost.

Before Medium, I journaled often. They calmed me. It was one of my hobbies like taking pictures, exercising and playing pool. But these days, I write with hopes of a few extra bucks, not solely to ease my mind. I catch myself checking stats and earnings as if extra 20 dollars a month will get me out of the financial rot.

I have noticed a big difference between these two forms of writing. Since journaling was my amusement, it was liberating.

On the contrary, writing online with hopes of views and earnings as a side hustle has been exhausting at times.

Constantly searching for topics that might do better than the last one and not writing about issues you want because the piece might get fewer views is a fundamental problem.

I imagine all side hustles are difficult since we are essentially creating a new business into existence. It is hard to do such a monumental task on the side. I am not sure why do we even call it that?

It’s not a side-hustle. It’s a second full-time job.

Yet, articles and videos that provided these ideas rarely mentioned the grind. Perhaps we all have to experience the struggle of a side business ourselves. In any case, internet contents serve business ideas as things we can complete in an hour while walking our dogs in the evening.

I put away the calculator and turned on the Netflix. I used to enjoy TV shows and movies more than I do now. These days, I browse endless streaming content while writing an article on my laptop. I still like Netflix and chill, but I enjoy it less. My attention is elsewhere.

After browsing streaming content, I clicked on the Hindi Movie, Three Idiots. There a character, Farahn, chooses to pursue engineering instead of wildlife photography because his family forces him to do so. I realize, at that moment, my other avocations have suffered because of similar “monetize your hobby” culture.

“You are good at taking pictures. Why don’t you become a photographer?” Or similarly, “You are good at writing. Why don’t you write a book?”

Many people have asked me these frustrating questions. I tend to ask them, why can’t we do things for fun without thinking about making money out of it?

Maybe I don’t want to make money out of my hobbies. We create art when we do things just for the enjoyment of it. I have learned that trying to monetize every hobby I have only made me a bitter person — a guy devoid of soul.

Monetizing our hobbies is not glamorous as people make it out to be.

Don Johnson recently wrote in one of his articles,

“worrying about money at any age is a drag.”

That’s what happened with my life precisely. I have been roping money into all of my dreams, and it created a life I could barely carry.

I turned off the TV and decided to write about my life: a life where there are little to no boundaries between work, side hustles, and hobbies — a life where I am stressing about poor finances while watching Netflix with my wife.

“I am going to bed,” my wife got up from the couch and headed towards the bedroom.

“Two more minutes.” I smiled back when she turned.

I know my stress is partly because of skyrocketing living costs and other factors. But, the anxiety is also because of societal pressure that the best life is where you are your boss and have tons of side income with no worries about money. And that is wrong.

Not everyone wants to own a business and be their boss. Some would like to have a small job that pays reasonably with a decent work-life balance, and that’s okay.

You might enjoy my other narrative.