On Hustle Culture

I recently went on vacation to Ocracoke Island in North Carolina. It’s a little island on the southern tip of North Carolina’s Outer Banks. My wife and I like it because it’s not developed, and the beaches aren’t great - unless you have a 4x4 and are able/willing to drive out on the sand. Then they’re amazing. It’s basically like being on a private beach. At worst, you’re a hundred yards from the next vehicle. At best, and it happens often, no matter the season, you’re all alone. You can’t even see the next car. (If I knew a lot of people were going to read this I would definitely not be writing about it).                                

So I was sitting in the sand, drinking beer, and feeling bad for my friends who had different jobs than me. It’s sort of a new feeling for me. For big portions of the last decade I’ve been somewhat embarrassed because of the work I’ve chosen to do. Well, I’m a little embarrassed when I compare my work to a lot of my friends’ work - the friends from grad school who were in the MBA or MD or other high-paying professional degrees. I did a version of Yale’s non-profit MA. Technically through the Divinity School, I studied ethics for more or less half the degree and business for the other half. We used to say “industry matters” in my MBA classes - those of us going into NGO (non-profit, independent of the government) type roles would make significantly less than those going into for-profit roles.

I was hardly “going” into an NGO role. I had started my own non-profit with a mission statement to “make traveling the world an accessible way to educate everyone - for college and careers”. We ran cycling trips around the US and Europe that featured curriculum, service projects, and any other types of events that would get us in touch with the locals as we cycled through their town. The trips were real adventures - we didn’t have support vehicles if we broke down. We carried all our own tools and figured things out as we went along - for thousands of miles across a continent. I was studying ethics so I could teach college-accredited courses on the trips. And I was studying business because I didn’t know much about running a non-profit. The goal was to scale an adventure after grad-school to a large enough size so that I could make enough money to live from this otherwise experimental endeavor.

In 2015 I was doing research on how to get a large group on bicycles across a large distance. I hitched a ride out to Iowa for the (Des Moines) Register’s Annual Great Bike Ride Across Iowa (RAGBRAI) with the dad of a college buddy. He delivered RVs around the country and was more than happy to take me to the start of the ride in the brand new luxury RV he was delivering to a dealership out west. I just had to be careful not to mess it up because it had to still be brand new when he delivered it. RAGBRAI was fascinating, and it’s still one of the larger mass-movements of people across such a long distance in the country. But my adventure trip in 2016 failed to scale past a few people, and after basically all of my 20’s not making any money, I needed to do something that paid me for my efforts before I continued on to my next degree. That’s when my buddy’s dad suggested I take up delivering RVs for the summer before I started another graduate program. It was easy to get a job - just show up, basically. And easy to stop - just don’t take another RV.

That summer was pretty awesome. I made some money for the first time since I was just out of college. But more importantly, I just drove around and hung out with all my family and the friends I had made on the cycling trips. There was someone in every state and Canadian province. I went to whoever was doing the most interesting thing. I could do whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted. The only catch was that I had to drive there. And though I hadn’t ever realized it, I was completely indifferent to driving. I never missed it. I never hated it. Honestly, it was very similar to grad school, I just had to listen to the articles instead of reading them. It didn’t take long to realize I preferred this lifestyle to another grad degree in the humanities. A lot less work for more pay.

It felt like checking out. Like an F-you to society. If they wanted to reward me for not working, for not hustling, I was happy to drive around and go on adventures with my friends. But it was also a little embarrassing. It wasn’t anything with status. It wasn’t Yale. The companies I would drive RV’s for weren’t full of educated people. They weren’t doing interesting work. In fact, unless you were staying in the places the RVs were going and hanging out with friends or family like I was, it wasn’t a great job. But that’s when hustle culture started to wear thin for me.

So much of hustle culture seemed about status. Grinding for accomplishment. But it's often unclear whether a lot of the folks I would see on social media - folks who put their identities fully into their work - were doing anything useful. A lot of them seemed to have T-shirt companies. And a lot of them were selling a lifestyle that I was living. Spending a few months every year abroad. Traveling around and trying to look like they were doing whatever they wanted.

The difference was mainly that I didn't have the gusto to start a social media channel. I tried. I couldn't figure out how to trigger the dopamine responses in my brain. It just always felt like so much work. It's funny how spending time doing some things feels like work to some people and not others. I still struggle to do much to get peoples' attention. It's why I'm not in marketing or advertising, even though I find them interesting as industries.

At the same time I drove around this very ugly Toyota Yaris that I towed behind the RVs. It was always filthy. And because I put so many miles on it, I only fixed the functional parts on it. Not the ripped back fender or the major dents in the back door from metal pieces the RVs kicked up. I put nearly 350,000 miles on it. It helped me understand who in my life cared about status. I tell people it helped me mature morally. My wife still rants to me about the friends or family members who talked poorly about it. That's illustrative of why I married her.

One day I'll probably end up doing something that gets me more status than delivering RVs. Something more typical of a Yalie. It'll probably stress me out more often, have a less optimum pay-to-vacation ratio, and keep me away from my friends and family for more hours per year. It'll probably contribute more to society than moving an expensive house on wheels a few thousand miles. And that'll be ok. It's unlikely you'll hear me ranting about it on some hustle culture channel. I won't need to. I'll have built the moral underpinnings for which status exists in the first place. Which is why, if you don' already understand, it doesn't matter much to me whether I ever end up getting the status associated with the work I've been doing all along on my own journey.