I can’t hustle anymore.

I’ve tried. Some days I think I can return to my pre-pandemic level of productivity. It lasts for about a day.

After that, I need Odinsleep.

I’ve got friends who hustle. I zoomed with one last week. She’s working on all kinds of projects. Just talking to her made me want a nap. She doesn’t have any kids. She’s had a very different pandemic.

I’ve been thinking about the before times. If there’s one word to sum up our lives over the last ten years, it’s this one:

Hustle.

We worshiped this word, even if we hated it. Despite our lost decade, we were going to work so hard and make so much money.

We were going to find our dream job, or forge it from the molten steel of side gigs. We were going to accept ourselves, fall in love, and embrace minimalism. We would live nowhere, and everywhere. The word evolved its own meaning, a way of fixing everything broken in our lives. We were going to replace everything taken from us by hustling.

We couldn’t wait to be digital nomads. If we knew we’d never get to retire, at least we could work poolside.

Now for many of us, our hustle is gone.

What happened?

This is the hustle hangover.

The age of hustle culture is over.

Don’t get me wrong, some of us are working harder than ever. It’s just that we’re not celebrating it like we were a few years ago. Some of us aren’t hustling anymore because we’ve got kids, and no childcare. Some of us are rebelling. We’re rejecting hustle and lying flat.

I think we all know why.

We spent the last ten years busting our butts. Our reward was a pandemic. The whole time, we never stopped to think about why we were having to commit all this hustle. We considered those passive income streams extra money, even if we were using them to pay rent.

It never occurred to us that our hustle culture could just be a prequel to the dawn of neo-feudalism, an era where hustle became a permanent fixture of our lives, not the party we imagined.

We’re starting to get it, I think.

This is the hangover.

Everyone is ready to chill.

Here’s the unsettling thought almost nobody wants to say:

Maybe the world won’t end.
But maybe it will.

Certainly the world we expected is gone. You know, the promise of comfort and luxury for those who gritted it out long enough.

Enjoy the journey.

Enjoy the destination even more.

Yeah, sure.

The journey isn’t looking so hot right about now, except in the very literal heat dome sense. Let’s skip the usual arguments about the drastic steps we’ll need to avert a climate catastrophe. Been there. Done that. Beyond the tragic optimism, there’s a reality we’re all processing.

Maybe these are the good days.
The final days…

We’re contemplating a time when water doesn’t come out of the tap. The toilet doesn’t flush. The AC doesn’t work. The grocery stores stand empty. A natural disaster ejects us from the homes we’ve worked so hard for. The sight of another human puts us a little bit on edge.

Being a digital nomad sounds fun.

Just a regular nomad?

Not so much…

It doesn’t make much sense to hustle harder, or kill ourselves to get that promotion, or buy that dream home.

We’re thinking, maybe we should just chill. We should sit down in a room and read a book the old fashion way, or do absolutely nothing, while we still can. This makes sense. Slowing down has an appeal.

It’s good for the planet.

It’s good for us.

We don’t want to influence anyone.

Here’s the life of an influencer:

Crank out content all day long, every day.

Make videos. Post selfies in other people’s clothes. Write endless listicles about the personality traits of billionaires, which aren’t even true. Host a podcast. Sell stuff without selling it too hard.

Maintain a personal brand.

It’s lonely. It’s hell.

There’s an entire genre dedicated to videos of beautiful young women having emotional breakdowns and quitting this gig. And yet, we have generations 2.0 and 3.0 of the Kardashians all queued up.

There’s always someone waiting…

Except now I think a lot of us don’t care anymore. We’ve figured out the scam. The only way to live the influencer life is to endlessly flaunt it in front of people who don’t stand a chance of getting there.

You have to look happy all the time.

Who wants that?

Here’s what I think most of us actually want:

We want to be left alone.

Here’s our new defining word going forward:

Solo.

We crammed three decades of work into one, and we’re ready to retire. We can’t picture doing this for two more decades, on top of dealing with the slow collapse of civilization. We’re done winning friends and influencing people. The promotions and pay raises aren’t worth it.

We want to be left alone.

We want to be relentlessly ourselves, whatever that looks like. We don’t care if anyone judges us. We don’t care if we sound pessimistic.

We don’t care if we get the job anymore.

Let us be.

We want our time back.

Your life can only get so good, my darlings.

Maybe it’s just me, but I believe we’ve hit a wall in our self-improvement journeys. We became unstoppable forces of productivity and emotional intelligence, but we hit the immovable object of fascism and climate collapse. All the stoicism in the world won’t save us. It’s just the oxygen that’ll get us high as the plane roars down.

Nowadays, we’re forced to ask how much a growth mindset really helps when we can’t count on a third of society to do the basics. We can’t ask them to wear a mask, or get a simple little shot in the arm.

Mindset helps some.

It’s not everything, though.

We’re not going to get endless chances to fail and learn from it, and then try again. We might have a few years left, and we’re wondering how we’ll spend them. We’re not going to waste them at the office. Maybe we don’t want to spend them swiping left and right on dating profiles, either. We spent long enough chasing a life that was never meant to be.

We’re not doing it again.

We want a little hiding place.

We’re not going to stop living, just hustling.

We can all slow down. Instead of producing 64 pieces of content every day like GaryVee and friends, we’ll make one or two. We’ll try to save the planet, but we can’t be doing that 24–7. We’re seeking daily reprieve from a world of chaos. We’re tapped out.

We want a hiding place.

Bed will do just fine.

A few years ago, it was all about living outside your comfort zone. Well, that’s not very hard anymore. Now I think we all want to build a little nest — a place of safety and comfort, while we still have a chance.

Rest in peace, “hustle culture.”

You won’t be missed.