rise and grind is dead. and artificial intelligence killed it

Hustle culture is entering its twilight moments thanks to public disgust and the rise of AI that can do almost all the grinding for you.

We’ve come today to pay our disrespects to hustle culture and the many awful things it’s done to us. True to itself, it doesn’t know it’s dying even as its armies of hustle and grind influencers sing its praises in punchy broetry, like sirens in black v-neck t-shirts beckoning people who want to be successful and make a difference to the wreckage-strewn cliffs of burnout. But the fact of the matter is that “rise and grind” has rapidly given way to “we only get one life to live.” And even more importantly, automation and AI models are making grinding all day completely irrelevant and unnecessary, though one could credibly argue that it’s a sign of inefficiency and poor boundaries.

You see, the biggest problem with hustle culture is that it promotes workaholism, one of the addictions Western society actually praises you for having thanks to religion, of all things. The expression “idle hands are the Devil’s playthings” comes from colonial settlers who took an especially dim view of humanity. In their eyes, we were all sinful, immoral lumps of flesh whose only path to atonement was through a life of little more than toil, asceticism, and prayer. We were supposed to work for the sake of working. If we didn’t, we were evil, lazy, lost souls who’d inevitably use our free time to do things the puritanical settlers did not approve of. Which was basically everything.

In the age of industrialization, these attitudes carried over from the countryside to the factories. Since the machines could run all day and night, people could now toil all day and night. Obviously this was not going to be sane or sustainable as people were now being treated like the disposable cogs in the very machines they were supposed to be running, and they became very justifiably upset. Cue some labor riots, deaths, battles, and political organizing, and we got unions which settled on a 40 hour work week with five, eight hour days as the official standard for our divinely mandated toil, thanks to a slogan by Welsh socialist Robert Owen.

the hustle (sort of) loses its religion

That brings us up to our age, when the vast majority of the world focuses on services, research, and technology, but the people who run said world have yet to catch up and have simply transferred the factory model to knowledge work, which has been a really big problem with the rise of automation that was always intended to make this model obsolete and free humanity from work for the sake of work. But traditions tend to die hard, misanthropic religious traditions doubly so, and we’ve ended up with millions of people filling time and space at work they don’t want to or don’t need to do, leading to absolutely staggering levels of waste and disengagement.

Enter hustle culture. It’s the secular version of the religious fervor that once started to die down, one in which instead of working to live and create, you find your meaning in work. You just toil so capitalism smiles on you and grants you financial absolution — in which you should still spend endless hours working — rather than to save your soul so a capricious god finds your sacrifice worthy of an afterlife with harps and white wings, instead of pitchforks and horns. Really, it’s the same thing, one is just taught in a fiery sermon, the other with agitprop posters glorifying working yourself into a state of total disassociation and slogans like “thank God it’s Monday.”

Okay, fine. Say you work day and night. What exactly are you doing? Humans are only productive for a stretch of four hours of highly focused deep work, after which there’s only diminishing returns. So, if your biological limitation is half of a standard workday to do really creative, new things at top notch quality, what happens to the other half of the workday? What happens for the rest of that 10 to 14 hour day that hustle bros tell you that you should be putting in? How much of that time and effort is wasted? How much could be done by an assistant AI that just needs a template and a schedule for sending out emails, following up on leads, and analyzing key data in real time?

you can’t outwork ai, only outthink it

In a world in which machinery does the vast majority of hard labor and is only getting better at it and more widely deployed, in which computers can do a year’s worth of a human’s paper pushing work in the span of a few days, in which apps and AI can take over menial bureaucratic tasks, and in which you could be replaced with a chatbot in the blink of an eye, the only thing you should be focused on is fostering curiosity and creativity so you can be ten steps ahead of any machine or AI, so much so. you use it to turn your ideas into prototypes faster than ever. And you’re not going to be able to do it in an office chair “grinding” all day and night on meaningless busywork.

You need to go to new places, see new things, talk to new people, read, and yes, even daydream so your brain can roam and make connections it couldn’t as you try to cram yet another YouTube tutorial on affiliate linking into your eyeballs, or a podcast about Killer Productivity Method Alpha down your ears. As any gamer will tell you, grinding is meant to teach noobs who just started playing a game’s basic mechanics and pad the first few levels. If you actually want to level up, you have to stop hustling and grinding, and start thinking strategically, maintaining a good work-life balance, a strong social circle, healthy food and exercise habits, and plenty of rest and sleep.

After all, this is how we evolved to become the apex predators of planet Earth. We are thinkers, explorers, creators, tinkerers, scientists, and adventurers, we’re not mindless machines that serve Capitalism® because religious fundamentalists and oligarchs of the British Empire decided that not working around the clock was a sin, and we spent the next half millennium justifying that decision in increasingly absurd ways. Apps, AI, and robots were created to free us from thankless, repetitive, soul-sucking toil meant to last forever and a day, and we should be learning how to use these tools to find real meaning in our work and lives instead of just maximizing hours behind screens.