Hustle culture is toxic

I asked AI to define hustle culture, and here’s what it told me.

Hustle culture is a mindset that equates hard work with success, and encourages people to always be working to achieve their goals. It can manifest in the workplace as overworking, rushing around, or working long hours without being able to stop. Hustle culture can also lead to people equating busyness with productivity, exhaustion with accomplishment, and self-worth with professional success.

In the circles I follow, hustle culture seems to be on the way out. It’s rightfully been labeled toxic, and many of us are asking, “To what end?” There also seems to be a rise in appreciation for things like rest and simply enjoying life, and I’m here for it.

The good in hustle

But there are reasons why we are drawn to the idea of “hustle,” and some of these reasons are good. Within “hustle” is an appreciation for self-discipline and diligence. Reading the Word, we see God compels us to pursue these things.

Take Proverbs 13:3, for example

The soul of the sluggard craves and gets nothing, while the soul of the diligent is richly supplied. - Proverbs 13.3

It might be toxic to hustle, but it’s also toxic to crave, crave, crave.

The Biblical solution to craving is to know what we want and apply diligence.

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines diligence as: steady, earnest, and energetic effort: devoted and painstaking work and application to accomplish an undertaking.

On the surface, diligence sounds a lot like hustle. What’s the difference?

The bad in hustle

Hustle is toxic because it’s Godless.

Hustle is the belief that it is all up to us. It’s a frantic kind of work because, deep down, we feel that our significance is on the line. It’s a manifestation of the prideful thinking that we can become godlike apart from God.

Free to be diligent

As we settle into our relationship with God, as we trust Him, and as we believe Him, our internal world gains a greater sense of harmony and peace.

We realize we no longer need to hustle to earn our place. We’re free to spend our lives in the pursuit of valuable things, knowing God is with us and for us. We can end our days wonderfully spent and beautifully exhausted, knowing God honors, values, and blesses our contribution.

We also gain the kind of humility that allows us to rest. In a relationship with God, we are reoriented to the reality that the world was spinning before us and will continue to spin long after we’re gone. We can admit the truth that, on their own, even our best efforts don’t account for all the provisions and blessings we have and will receive.

With God, we can appreciate that all of these good things in our lives are gifts. Gifts are meant to be enjoyed, so we enjoy them. Part of God’s gift to us includes our talents, skills, opportunities, and capacity to do good work. As the proverb says, diligently doing good work is good for our souls. So we do good work to honor the gift, to honor the giver, and just because we want to.

I worked harder than any of them

The last thing I’ll add is that craving is a kind of misery that compounds and intensifies. Diligence, on the other hand, is satisfying even if we never obtain the object of our diligence.

That’s why I said that, with God, our internal world gains peace and harmony. Life might not go our way, but having God Himself and doing things His way enriches us on the level of our souls more than anything we might gain.

As Christians free and fueled by Christ’s love and grace, we are enabled to be among the most diligent workers. For example, Paul can say in 1 Corinthians 15:10, “I worked harder than any of them…,” with sincerity and without boasting because his sense of validation and self-worth isn’t found in how hard he worked.

I’m glad that hustle culture is waning. I pray that a much better culture of diligence will rise and take its place.