Hustle Culture or Quiet Quitting: Which Wins?

Katie: Welcome back to The Money with Katie Show, Rich Girls and Boys, and buckle up, because today we are talking about hustle culture and all of the overcorrections that had spawned. I'm going to explore a few things that have been on my mind recently as a near 24/7 inhabitant of millennial and zoomer internet discourse. But what I'm really trying to get to the heart of is this: Is it actually aspirational to have a job or a life that requires very little of you, or is it actually kind of spiritually draining? 

In 2017, my colleague invited me to something that seemed at the time akin to camping out in tents in the middle of our company parking lot, and just about as fun. She asked me to come with her to a 6:00am workout class. This coworker, who was a few years my senior in both age and title and compensation, was not just suggesting that we attend the class together. She was teaching the class and she encouraged me that, “Oh my gosh, it'll be so fun!” I think she could perceive the hesitation and the suspicion written all over my face. And I privately wondered why someone who was clearly crushing it as a sales manager was putting herself through the undeniable agony of additional labor before dawn for money that she probably didn't even need. 

My internal voice wasted absolutely no time piping up. It was like, “That's not something you do. You are not a 6:00am workout person. You don't have that in you.” And I told her as much. I thought, “Hmm, that sounds like a lot of work. I'd rather sleep in. That's not me.” But she was a hustler and she was relentless in her insistence that I should give this a shot. And after a few weeks of badgering, she finally wore me down. So I set my alarm for an eye-watering 5:25am. I laid out my clothes the night before. I stumbled through the parking garage in the early morning darkness, and I attended her 6:00am class. And when I emerged from the class an hour later to a sunrise and the siren song of the mermaid mistress beckoning me from the Starbucks down the block, that little internal voice squeaked again. And it said, “Huh, this is an interesting development,” because I was blown away by how good I felt, how much more energy and optimism I had all day. 

And I'm not sure if it was the endorphins or the 350 milligrams of caffeine I ingested shortly thereafter. But after that morning, I was absolutely hooked. I attended another 6:00am class, and then another and another. And eventually I was going every single day. And a couple of years later, I found myself teaching a class…a 5:30am class…which was a true “started from the bottom, now we here” moment. Teaching classes even made me feel more confident in my abilities at work, at my full-time job. So it was a mutually beneficial feedback loop. And the studio environments that I frequented were really big on the idea of pushing yourself. And I totally bought in. More on that after a message from the sponsors of today's episode. 

Sponsored content: There's nothing quite like the sound of cheers. Whether you are celebrating a major life achievement or just toasting the end of a long day, that sweet hum always brings the vibes. Luckily for you, Vin Social is here to keep you cheersin’ all year round. They're a business-meets-lifestyle community for the curious, the adventurous, and the high-achieving. Want access to members-only dinners and tastings, virtual educational courses, and global bucket list travel adventures? Vin Social’s got you covered. And get this: They're inviting you—yes, you—to join their first cohort of members and enter a community of makers and innovators who are creating the future of wine, work, and health. Raise your glass to taking time to live life, celebrate the wins, and experience a more delightful journey to the top. Grab your front row seat over at vinsocial.vip. That's vinsocial.vip. 

Katie: It taught me that there are a lot of benefits to self-directed challenge. Maybe it shouldn't have been surprising that engaging in different work outside of real work seemed to have far-reaching positive consequences in my life. If you consider the research that journalist and investigative reporter David Epstein argues in his book, Range, that sampling activities, so spreading your focus across more than one discipline, whether in the realm of musical instruments or sports or more professional stuff, increases overall proficiency and your ability to learn quickly. And he points out that for every Tiger Woods, who began playing golf before he could stand and then went on to become, well, Tiger Woods, there's a Roger Federer, who casually played multiple sports for his entire adolescence and only settled on tennis exclusively later in life. He was ranked the best tennis player in the world for 237 consecutive weeks, but spent the majority of his adolescence just casually playing. 

But it's not just sampling and variety that were associated with those who would go on to become pros. There was also something about the way they were practicing and improving. Neither the famed pianist Duke Ellington nor the guitarist Les Paul ever learned how to read music. They were self-taught through trial and error. They don't know how to read music? That is crazy. Turns out that struggling at something, being bad at something new without being immediately rescued, typically facilitates better long-term outcomes. And the quote “hustle” that's required, the blood, sweat, tears, what have you, more often than not pays dividends, and sometimes literally, in the case of professional athletes and musicians. 

But there's another crucial element that matters in cases like Federer’s and Ellington’s and Paul’s, and that's a healthy level of obsession. I've written in the past, we'll link it in the show notes, about how I think obsession is kind of the cheat code…it's the magic that alchemizes struggle and trial and error into an enjoyable near-compulsion. If you do something enough, you will have no choice but to improve. And when you improve consistently over time, money kind of has a tendency to follow.

And what could be more fun than getting paid to do something that you would compulsively do anyway because you love it, right? Stories like these about elite athletes and musicians often invite claims about the importance of hustle and grinding it out. And while I would challenge the concept of grinding in these instances, because when you're obsessed with your craft, the effort does not really feel like a grind, in recent years, those sentiments have been met with more and more pushback. This is how we arrived here with a bunch of cultural messages about hustle, and the overcorrections that followed. 

Hustle culture is a phenomenon that anecdotally seemed to coincide with the Silicon Valley-fueled startup-obsessed tech boom of the 2010s. And it was cemented in WeWork taglines like, “Thank god it's Monday,” by the pre-disgraced Adam Neumann, and memorialized in Elon Musk tweets like the one that said, “Nobody ever changed the world on just 40 hours per week.” And the work-infatuated movement was frankly kind of easy to mock. Maybe it was the fact that most of the people that were parroting the “rise and grind” rhetoric all seemed to have a few obvious things in common, like wealth, whiteness, maleness…or maybe it was the utter self-seriousness of this hashtag #grindset mentality. But the cultural response was relatively swift and strong. And while there's no standard definition for what hustle culture technically is or isn't, I think you know it when you see it.

And out of curiosity, I googled “hustle culture definition” to see if there was an agreed-upon interpretation. And while the first page results really ran the gamut, there were a few key similarities between them. Namely, work being the most important thing in your life, the importance of working long hours and putting in the time, and chiefly the need for sacrifice. Today, hustle culture as promulgated on social media seems like a distinctly millennial trend. It's a vestige of girlbosses past and it tracks, right, because elder millennials who struggled through the early years of their careers in a post-Great Recession economic environment, they embraced hustle culture as the answer to their financial circumstances.

Meanwhile, Gen Z had a distinctly different reaction to the pandemic, which was their own coming-of-age global crisis. Side note: I would really love it if we could stop having global crises, because I'm 28 and I am tired. But Gen Z's reaction was a spurning, in many cases, of what the corporate world had become, which really was a Jenga-reminiscent Outlook calendar full of Zoom calls for meetings for planning more meetings. And comedian TikTok stars like Laura Whaley and Corporate Natalie capitalized on the feelings of collective corporate nihilism in viral videos that really mocked the inane nature of a life that's just back-to-back teleconference calls during a pandemic. They were saying the quiet part out loud: The world feels like it's crumbling around us and I'm making a PowerPoint about Fritos? 

My friend Jack Raines wrote a piece that we’ll link in the show notes that explained this aspect of the phenomenon really well, that Gen Z seemed to face a collective reckoning in the first couple years of their working lives, that the things they were doing: parroting corporate jargon on Zoom, punching numbers into spreadsheets, it didn't really matter in the broader context of what was happening in the world around them. And then a wholesale rejection of meritocracy and hustling followed.

Now, whenever a trend becomes popular in the zeitgeist, it's common to see an equally strong but oppositely positioned reaction. And I think “quiet quitting” is probably the closest term that we have for a hustle culture countermovement. It's a celebration of doing the minimum viable requirements to keep your job. Gen Z does not dream of labor, and it's obvious in sentiments found all over TikTok that state very plainly to a reception of hundreds of thousands of likes (we’ll link an example), “I don't have a dream job 'cause I don't wanna work.” 

So while hustle culture pushed the millennial obsession with work to one end of the spectrum, the quiet quitting movement pushes it to the opposite. That if you go above and beyond, you are succumbing to a capitalist trap; that grinding or hustling for something—anything, really—indicates you have been duped by this faceless other, The Man, as it were, into wasting your precious life energy, making someone else, or even in some cases yourself, richer or more successful. 

And to be totally fair, these beliefs are not unfounded. Wealth inequality in the 2010s in the United States has surpassed that of the Gilded Age, which was a famously unequal time. In 1913, the richest 0.01% of Americans owned 9% of the country's wealth. And as of 2021, it was 10%. For context, in the 1970s, the number was around 2%. So with the disintegration of organized labor as a political force forming the historical backdrop for the ultra-ultra-rich continuing to get ultra-richer at a rate that outpaces 99% of the country, approximately six to one, you would be forgiven for writing off hustle and grinding and labor in general as a fool's errand. 

The quiet quitting counterargument seems to suggest that hustle culture is an endless ladder to a meaningless destination. And if you've been tricked into climbing it, you have already lost. In some ways it's a romanticization of a pre-technological world, before apps harassed us with notifications at all hours, and before the implicit expectation to always be on plagued our psyches. And of course it's a little ironic that this fetishization of simplicity and Luddism is playing out on…yeah, you guessed it…an app. And writers like Laura Pitcher in her piece for Vice have already pointed out the flaws in the anti-capitalist strain of all this rhetoric—that the ability to opt out and slack off in the first place is really only possible if you are already operating from a place of relative wealth and privilege.

And writer Zoe Hu highlights another related but slightly different troubling variation of this response that we're witnessing unfold. And that's the resurgence of the fantasy of “TradLife,” where one, almost always a woman, renounces her participation in all the bummer trimmings of capitalism altogether, like commuting and emails, by saddling up a wealthy man and resigning herself to a life of bourgeois dependence. Typically this messaging is presented in such a way that it equates feminism itself, women's rights themselves, with hustle culture, and rejects all of it in favor of being a “stay-at-home girlfriend.”

But this is a vast miscalculation on the part of young women. It's an overcorrection from the “lean in” variant of girlbossitis. Hu writes, “By describing the misery of work, TradLife ennobles itself, but as an ethos, it also maintains a willful stupidity about modern capitalism's historic dependence on the family, a constitutive structure of capitalism through which property, debt, and economic interests are all consolidated. It was Milton Friedman, after all, who wrote that the ultimate operative unit in our society is the family.” End quote.

In other words, fetishizing the notion of being supported by someone else is not a radical rejection of capitalism. If anything, it serves to strengthen it. And because of current trends toward rebuffing hustle, it is relatively unpopular to point out where quiet quitting, too, falls short. Chelsea Fagan is one of the few individuals in this space whom I've seen discuss this openly, the way in which simply opting out at work usually just means that another overworked employee is going to have to pick up your slack. And she says, while it may improve your quality of life at an individual level in the short term, it doesn't create lasting workplace change.

We're gonna come back to creating lasting workplace change in just a moment. But in the meantime, get in, loser, 'cause we're disavowing capitalism. After we hear from the sponsors of today's episode.

Sponsored content: Paid non-client of Betterment. Views may not be representative. See more reviews at the App Store and Google Play Store. Learn more about this relationship at betterment.com/moneywithkatie. Volatile markets happen, but they don't last forever. Sticking it out long term and having a plan is often wiser than trying to pick your own stocks or time the market. That's why Betterment's automated technology is designed to help your investing goals. Whether the market's up or down, you can choose a portfolio built by the pros. Think Betterment, Goldman Sachs and BlackRock. Each ETF portfolio features a diverse mix of stocks and bonds, and offers automated tools to help your investing goals. Stay on track. Head to betterment.com/moneywithkatie to learn more. That's betterment.com/moneywithkatie. Investing involves risk. Performance not guaranteed.

When you wanna make money moves for your portfolio, like placing a trade, it shouldn't be complicated. It should be smooth as butter. The Fidelity app makes investing easy, with zero-commission US stock and ETF trades, no account minimums, and fractional shares trading. Fidelity, where nothing comes between you and the trade. That's smooth. Download the app free from the App Store or Google Play. Sell orders are subject to an activity assessment fee, from 1 cent to 3 cents per $1,000 of principal. No account minimums apply to retail brokerage accounts only. Fidelity Brokerage Services LLC, member NYSCSIPC.

Whether you're an investment management professional or you aspire to be one, you've probably wondered how to stand out in such a competitive industry. So here's a start: Set yourself apart with one of the highest distinctions in the investment management field, courtesy of the top-notch credentialing program from CFA Institute. You'll level up your skillset with lessons on ethics, market integrity, and professional standards of practice. With hands-on learning, a highly relevant curriculum, and achievement recognition that'll be an eye-catching proof point for future employers, the CFA program is ready to help you expand your knowledge and your possibilities. Go where the pros go, and learn more at cfainstitute.org/moneywithkatie. 

Katie: Because still there is this polarity: You are either for or against these lifestyles and these identities. You are either a hustler or you're a quiet quitter, and there's effectively no pithy nickname for someone in between, someone who might enjoy working hard sometimes at some things and then resting at other times, which is a balance that sounds strikingly commonsensical when described plainly, but that is often absent from the conversations that we're seeing on social media. Of course, that's the problem with social media: soundbites and admonishments. When you strip something of all nuance, you are left with little more than aesthetically fueled all-or-nothing propositions. You are either a capitalism apologist who is obsessed with rising and grinding so you can embroider your bootstraps at sunrise, or you're a staunch defender of balance and boundary-setting and doing as little as possible to get by. Even if that means, in extreme cases, giving up your economic autonomy, there is very little recognition, at least outwardly, that hey, actually, neither of these belief systems is healthy at either the individual or societal levels. 

Haley Nahman recently published a piece that articulated a component of this well. She says, “Having a job you don't care about that asks nothing of you is not aspirational. It's spiritually draining.” In the case of the anti-work countermovement, which is the extreme version of quiet quitting that suggests “unemployment should be for everyone, not just the rich,” there's a sleight of hand happening. It becomes easy to demonize working hard in general at anything as inherently negative or exploitative. The related anti-capitalist movement trends in this direction as well, positioning labor of any kind as manipulative and destructive. 

So is this over-correction actually a little self-defeating? When I look back on the periods of my life that were characterized by all the trappings of hustle, early mornings and late nights and a crammed schedule, one jumps out at me immediately: all of those years teaching group fitness, but it wasn't a miserable exploitative experience. On the contrary, it was one of the most meaningful, challenging periods of my life. Waking up several days per week between four and five in the morning to lead a group of people before my own workday started, it pushed me in ways that I had not yet been pushed, and it shoehorned me into better habits and time management that ultimately made me happier and led to success in other areas of my life. Now, I was never a competitive athlete. I'm far too scrawny and uncoordinated, but I've heard friends who were college athletes reflect the same sentiment, that even in periods of relative hardship, the experience produced a sense of lasting satisfaction and fulfillment.

And to me, I think it indicates that the human brain and the human body are simply not meant for extended periods of nothing but leisure. We crave a problem to solve. We crave a goal to work toward. And total aimlessness can feel akin to depression, in much the same way that unquestioningly embracing the idea that working harder is always better can lead to burnout and other damaging outcomes. So too can blindly supporting the idea that anything that requires worker effort must be bad. And these sweeping narratives, both of them are a little insidious, because they inform the lens through which we perceive our lives and make these decisions. They determine whether we see the world around us as full of opportunities or full of inconveniences. They inform our identities and how we think of ourselves. And hey, rejecting the corporate world, that's fine, but something has to fill the vacuum, and it might as well be something you enjoy. 

I gained so much from my years teaching: lifelong friendships, a deeper belief in my own ability, confidence, additional income. Though in the grand scheme of my life, the money was the least valuable outcome of the experience. The invaluable takeaway, though far less tangible, was the realization that the stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves are very powerful. And I told myself and others that I was not the type of person who could attend an early morning exercise class before work, let alone teach one, but biting off just a little bit more than I could comfortably chew is ultimately what led me to believe in my own ability to challenge the other stories I was telling myself about myself that “Oh, I don't have the education or the business savvy to earn a lot of money.” Hm, wrong. “I can't leave this company. I'll never find anything better.” Wrong. “I'm not the type of person who can juggle a lot of things at once. I'm too easily stressed.” Wrong. Had I written off anything that felt a little bit uncomfortable or unnecessarily tough, or maybe it took just a little bit more effort, I would not have experienced the growth that was required to stretch to fill those shoes.

And yes, sometimes that's going to require a little bit of hustle, but the challenges kept me engaged and motivated and happy. I felt expansive. And some researchers call this dedicated feeling of total immersion in something “flow state.” And it's characterized by certain approaches to your work that create an intrinsically rewarding psychological byproduct. It feels good psychologically. And even though I left Dallas and my fitness side hustle a few years ago now, I still reflect frequently on that experience whenever I feel self-doubt because it serves as proof that many of my limits are mostly imagined.

Now, make no mistake: An all gas, no brakes mentality all the time is usually just a recipe for crashing into a brick wall at a high speed. Rest is critical. Think about pilots, for example. There are literally laws that mandate them to have rest periods because they acknowledge how invaluable it is for those who fly aircraft to be well-rested before they embark on their next job. 

But let's talk about some measures that might help improve the state of work overall. Could employee stock ownership programs help balance the scales? The general cynicism directed at the conglomerate-y, faceless mega corps right now, raking in record profits? Yeah, that's probably deserved, but a sweeping disavowal of effort and striving and intentionality—and I'm looking at you, Stay-at-Home GirlfriendTok—is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Now, entrepreneurship was the answer for me, where I found my passion and drive really come alive, and then the money followed. And I hope that this rejection of the corporate status quo ignites the next generation to question the norms of this game and find new ways to make it work better for everyone, like providing employees true ownership stakes in the companies that they work for. 

Kim Jordan, the co-founder of New Belgium Brewing Company right here in Fort Collins where I'm recording this episode, recognized the need for employee ownership. She said, “In America, the gap between the haves and the have-nots continues to widen. And as we were building value in New Belgium, it was important to me that everyone in the organization got to realize a part of that value. Full employee ownership felt like the best capitalization strategy and the one most consistent with what mattered to me.” End quote. Kim and her husband founded New Belgium in 1991 in their garage. She was a social worker, and they really built it up from nothing with the help of their fabulous employees. New Belgium became a hundred percent employee owned in 2012, and has paid out more than $190 million to its employees over the years. And when it sold in 2019, all 300 employees received at least $100,000, and some received substantially more. 

Now, I see employee stock ownership programs like this one as a potential solution for both engagement in work and income inequality, because it gives sometimes very substantial equity in something valuable to normal people through their labor. Moreover, it does not mean that the founder of a business is not still going to benefit handsomely from their entrepreneurship. It is estimated that Kim Jordan is worth nearly a quarter of a billion dollars. But the idea that our ultimate goal in life should be unchallenged, constant comfort and leisure can be very dangerous. Hustle culture and its current iteration might fall short. But I do find it hard to reject the entirety of a mythos that suggests working hard by whatever name is important. There was something that we used to say in the cycling studio, that how you do one thing is how you do everything. And I can't help but think there is something harmful and self-defeating about embracing an ideology that encourages consistently doing and giving less. 

The truth is sometimes the ROI on hard work is exceptional. Sometimes the juice is worth far more than the squeeze, and I'm sure someone somewhere will classify all of this as internalized capitalism. But I can only offer what I've experienced myself, that all of the best things in my life required work, and in many cases, a lot of it. In many cases that work made my life more interesting and fun and fulfilling. It made it better overall. And yes, more lucrative, too. Crucially, I was choosing the domains in which I was toiling and struggling, and I think that choice has made all the difference.

All right, y'all, that is all for this week. I will see you next week, same time, same place, on The Money with Katie Show. Our show is a production of Morning Brew and is produced by Henah Velez and me, Katie Gatti Tassin, with our audio engineering and sound design from Nick Torres. Devin Emery is our chief content officer, and additional fact checking comes from Kate Brandt.