“Turn Things you Enjoy Into Side-Hustles” is a Nice Way of Saying “Use Your Hobbies to Afford Food”

Hustle ‘till you die.

I make decent money at my day job. It pays the bills, more or less, and my salary and good budgeting practices have enabled me to avoid paying credit card interest for nearly two decades. Still, I work at a nonprofit, so whatever I make will likely never be as much as I could’ve made had I gone into the for-profit world.

To top it off, my raises are, more or less, at the whims of our agency’s board, which generally means a 2% COLA regardless of what inflation is. I suspect that my income this year will be technically lower than it was three years ago once economic factors are taken into account.

So, I do other things to make extra money. I write here, I do a handful of apps that pay me little bits here and there, and I occasionally pick up contract work. I do this, more or less, to help make ends meet. My partner and I have been cutting back lately thanks to all the foundation work that needed to be done on our house, but I still need to pull in a little extra money.

Those who read my work know that I am absolutely not a fan of American work culture. Whether it’s climbing the corporate ladder forever or the so-called “hustle culture,” it all feels like an elaborate scam to me. Hustle culture in particular takes the things that we love — writing, music, crafting — and demands that we monetize them, as opposed to just doing things that we like for fun.

The thing is, it feels like these days you have to pick one or the other (if not both) lest you starve. Traditional wisdom goes that if you’re not constantly seeking more money, you’ll have to settle for an “average” life. Instead, if you’re not constantly seeking more money, chances are pretty good that you’ll fall into poverty.

To me and many others, it seems like we’ve glorified the side-hustle lifestyle so much that it has become a requirement to survive. In a world where a family used to be able to operate with one breadwinner and a spouse who managed the household, we now live in a world where many households need four incomes to survive — two jobs and two side hustles. May the gods have mercy on you if you have kids on top of that.

The article I linked talks about how this used to be the case for two-income households. As I said, America used to be a country where one breadwinner supported a spouse and 2.5 kids on a job that required a high school diploma. And, while I’m not trying to glorify a past where men were men and women weren’t people, it’s easy to see the quintessential example of the modern take on this lifestyle: Homer Simpson. No, really.

Homer Simpson got a job at the town nuclear plant right out of high school, where they trained him how to do everything that they needed him to do without a degree. Using the income from that job, he can support Marge, Bart, Lisa, and Maggie, plus a dog and a cat, in their two-story home in the suburbs with two cars in the driveway.

Can you imagine that happening today?

Most jobs that enable that kind of living situation require at least a two-year tech school degree. Heck, the job that Homer does probably requires at least a four-year degree these days. As for the lucrative factory jobs that used to abound in America, the ones where you just needed a high school diploma to apply, those have gone overseas thanks mostly to Ronald Reagan.

You read that right. Reagan encouraged the sort of freewheeling capitalism in the 80s that led to the whole “greed is good” mantra and the notion that corporations should only do things that produce profit for their shareholders. Well, paying Americans the modern-day equivalent of $25 an hour to make something that they can pay a Chinese worker $5 an hour to make isn’t terribly profitable.

It’s a bit more complicated than that — a lot of economic factors went into shipping American jobs overseas — but the start of the process was in the 80s during Reagan’s administration. However, if you want one person, in particular, to blame for shipping jobs overseas, it’s pretty safe to blame good ol’ Ronnie boy.

So, we live in a world that more or less requires people to hold multiple jobs, or a job and a side hustle, just to get by. Most well-paying jobs require a degree, a degree requires loads of debt, and that debt requires you to have a side hustle once you get out of college to pay it all off. And, if you were fortunate enough to make it through college without accumulating a bunch of debt, you might still need a side hustle to make it in a world with 9% inflation.

All of this is on top of a bunch of corporations that are more vested in making a buck than in ensuring their employees are happy. So, imagine the corporate bosses’ surprise when a bunch of people start quitting to demand a better wage, better benefits, and better treatment. Then a bunch of other employees decide that bending over backward for a company that doesn’t care about them isn’t worth their energy and decide that setting boundaries at work is the way to go.

Of course, they call it things like “the great resignation” and “quiet quitting,” which put more of the onus on the workers and not the companies that mistreat them. I’ve come to prefer terms like “the great reshuffle” in place of the former and “acting your wage” in place of the latter. Both of them are more about workers setting healthy workplace boundaries and letting managers know that modern work culture is, by and large, pretty terrible.

The whole “greed is good” mantra and the notion that corporate profits are held higher than everything else has, more or less, led us to this point. Many workers need to work that extra side hustle to make ends meet or afford to save money, and we are tired of it. So, people are quitting bad jobs for better ones and demanding higher wages along the way.

There is also more interest in unionizing than there has been in a long time, which as a former UFCW worker, I consider a positive thing. There are negative things to be said about unions, sure, but without them, we wouldn’t have the 40-hour workweek, two-day weekends, and OSHA, among other benefits. More union activity is a net positive as far as I’m concerned.

We have landed ourselves in a world where side hustles and second jobs are necessary for many of us to get by in life. The things that we used to do for fun and enjoyment — playing instruments, making art, or pursuing other creative endeavors — are now often required to be money-makers too. If you have a talent or skill of any kind, hustle culture demands that you should be monetizing it, and the modern capitalist hellscape we live in requires you to monetize it if you want to continue treading water.

I just know that I and many like me are sick and tired of being told to “hustle harder” and encouraged to turn our hobbies into income. These are things that we are often already doing, not because we want to “rake in the big bucks” but rather because we need to put food on the table.

I started writing here because I had grown to dislike writing for fun and wanted to rekindle my joy of writing. The result of this experiment is that I have, in fact, rekindled my joy of writing, but it is colored by my vigilant eye on the income it produces. There are times when I am too depressed to write much of consequence, but I always make sure to write some serious stuff every week because the algorithms like it, and I make more money that way.

I hate that. I love writing, and writing articles like this makes me feel both fulfilled and useful, but I hate treating this as a legitimate side hustle because if I don’t, I run the risk of falling behind financially. This is supposed to be fun, and it still mostly is, but feeling like it’s “write or die” is a bit stressful.

So, what can we do to escape this nightmare? I have ideas, but they are unpopular at the legislative level, particularly among conservatives. Universal healthcare is a good place to start — my healthcare costs are around 15% of my paycheck, so any tax rate less than that is a win for me. Plus, I suspect that the out-of-pocket costs of my meds would decrease precipitously if one nationwide entity could negotiate the prices with pharmaceutical companies.

Universal basic income would also be nice — an extra $500 or $1,000 a month would help prevent me and many others from having to make difficult choices in life. UBI has a lot of critics that say that it would encourage people to not work. However, a lot of people who have received UBI checks say that it encouraged them to do things like start businesses because they didn’t have to worry about their income in the early days. I feel like pitching it as “encouraging small business development” is a good way to bring more people over.

There are quite a few ways to remedy this situation we’ve found ourselves in, and they all have varying degrees of political and popular traction. I don’t claim to know what the best fix is here, although I suspect shifting more toward European-style democratic socialism would be a good start. Still, with the level of stress that many workers face in making ends meet, I feel like we are going to have to do something soon or run the risk of societal collapse.

I don’t want to have to hustle my whole life until I keel over from a heart attack. I was promised a world that would be better than the one my parents had, and so far it has not been delivered. Millennials are, by and large, poorer than previous generations thanks in no small part to that whole 80s “greed is good” culture and trickle-down economics, the latter of which has proven to be a massive failure for the middle class.

I want to be able to work my 40-hour job, come home, and relax with my hobbies. What I don’t want is to be told that monetizing those hobbies is my best way to success. Hobbies are supposed to be fun; I don’t want to be required to take something I do for fun, do it until I hate it, and beat its corpse until it spits out a handful of pennies just so I can eat.

And, I know that many other people feel the same way. There will always be people who thrive on the hustle and feel the urge to work 80 hours a week because that’s how they’re wired. I just don’t want that to become the norm to get by. Not everyone is built that way and not everyone wants that.

Right now, the things that we are doing are having at least some effects. “Acting your wage,” the great reshuffle, and the current push to unionize are having positive effects on the American work culture and I hope that we as a society can keep the momentum going. While our corporate bosses and American oligarchs continue to pull the strings, there are far more of us than there are them, and numbers bring power. As I am fond of repeating, none of us is as strong as all of us, and together we can change this broken country.

Be well and fight the power out there.

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If you want to learn more about how terrible the modern system is, check these out: