Hustle Culture: The Productive Disguise of Burnout

There's a particular kind of exhaustion that people have started wearing like a badge of honor.

Posting about getting little sleep, working weekends, or having no time for anything besides work has become a badge of honor. I fell into that trap myself years ago. I used to brag about working 60-hour weeks, taking evening classes, and spending my free time studying topics I found "interesting."

The assumption is that this is simply the price of building a better life. And if you're not exhausted, you're probably not working hard enough to deserve the success that still hasn't arrived.

What I got instead was anxiety, insomnia, and, eventually, burnout.

This mindset is usually sold as motivation, a roadmap to success.

"No one stays poor if they're willing to work 14 hours a day," says the productivity and entrepreneurship coach.

The problem isn't hard work itself. Hard work has always existed, and it always will. The problem is treating the human body's physical and mental limits as moral failings that can supposedly be overcome with enough willpower.

As if exhaustion were a character flaw rather than a perfectly normal biological response to excessive demands.

Hustle culture also tends to hide who really benefits from it. Spoiler: it isn't workers.

More often than not, the message that we should work ourselves to the bone comes, directly or indirectly, from people whose basic financial needs were already secured before they were born, and who benefit from a workforce willing to burn itself out for very little in return.

Companies love this narrative because it reframes poor working conditions, long hours, and inadequate rest as an employee's admirable personal choice, conveniently absolving the employer of any responsibility for the environment it created.

There's also a quieter effect on people who either can't, or simply don't want to, maintain that pace. Someone who sleeps eight hours a night, respects their own limits, and refuses to answer work messages after hours is often seen as lacking ambition or, worse, as someone who brings the team down. The weak link.

The exhaustion created by this cycle rarely appears overnight. Sometimes, as in my case, the warning signs are temporarily masked with more coffee and pointless vitamin supplements for deficiencies that never existed, but that I desperately hoped would explain my increasingly obvious decline in performance.

Eventually, your body keeps the score.

At that point, the very same hustle culture that created the problem usually offers the wrong solution once again. Another productivity course. Another time-management system. Another promise that the answer is simply to optimize yourself a little more, instead of acknowledging that perhaps the problem was never a lack of effort, but a pace that no human being was ever meant to sustain indefinitely.

The machine has to keep running. Replacing broken parts is simply part of keeping it running.

Doing Nothing: A Manifesto

There is a peculiar discomfort in staying still and doing absolutely nothing. It is not exactly boredom, but more of a physical restlessness, an almost automatic urge to grab your phone, organize something, or get a head start on a task that is not even due until the next day. Standing still, producing nothing, has become something that seems to demand a justification. And perhaps that is precisely why this gesture is worth defending.

Rest Isn't a Reward. It's a Right

There's an idea so deeply embedded in our culture that it barely raises an eyebrow anymore: the idea that rest is something you earn after you've been productive enough. It shows up in seemingly harmless phrases like "Get some rest, you've earned it." But beneath those words lies a specific belief, one that suggests our bodies are only allowed to stop after meeting a certain quota of effort.

The age of mass productivity drugs

“It's worth remembering that the mad person does not express only their madness. They also expose the insanity of the society in which they live.”
Eliane Brum, in Listen to the Mad

The Productivity Trap

I used to wake up at 5:30 every morning. The first thing I did was make coffee. I drank so much of it that I started calling it "a bucket", and then caught the bus to the hospital where I worked. I arrived already restless, mentally running through every problem that had come up overnight.

The Underground City of the Forgotten

Buenos Aires has two famous cemeteries: Recoleta, a well-known tourist spot with guided tours and paid entrance, and Chacarita, which is less well-known and still in use for burials, funerals, and cremations.

Toxic Positivity: A Very Old Problem With a Brand New Name

Many years ago, when I was around 12, my mother gave me a book she had loved as a child: Pollyanna. The story follows a poor girl who plays what she calls "The Glad Game," the goal being to find something good in every situation. At one point, she receives a pair of crutches as a charity gift. She doesn't need crutches, but instead of feeling disappointed, she celebrates the fact that she doesn't need them.