Unrooting internalized hustle — Jennifer L. Phillips, Ph.D.

Last week, “antiwork” went viral. After reading coverage in the NYT and Rolling Stone, I found myself deep on the /antiwork Reddit forum where people are, to put it lightly, pissed. It was eye-opening:

There are about a gazillion posts like this on the forum. It would be too easy to write them off as fake or point fingers at rogue managers. Together, they illuminate a growing sensibility that our economic structures are dysfunctional.

Even folks who aren’t hate-tweeting their employers are feeling the strain of relentless work culture. There’s a nagging concern that:

Even a dream job is still a job, and in America’s relentless hustle culture, we have turned our jobs into prisons for our minds and souls. It’s time to break free.
—Farhad Manjoo, New York Times

The antiwork movement challenges the philosophical foundations of our work ethic and identity. This can be deeply uncomfortable. Wholly inconvenient. Disorienting, even. However, we should take its questions seriously:

What if paid work is not the only worthwhile use of one’s time?
What if crushing it in your career is not the only way to attain status and significance in society?
What if electing to live a life that is not driven by the neuroses and obsessions of paid employment is considered a perfectly fine and reasonable way to live?
—Farhad Manjoo, New York Times

I took a vacation from this blog and my newsletter in August, and it freed up significant time. So much so that I became uncomfortable.

I realized that I didn’t really know who I was without a full plate of professional work. I didn’t know how to be bored, and I missed the built-in purpose of an obvious career goal. In other words, I was haunted by antiwork.

The experience was unsettling, and I wish I could tell you that I’ve resolved it. That will take more time—and I’m (trying to be) OK with that. I understand that I’ll never get there by grasping. We can’t undo hustle culture with a counter-hustle.

There is active work ahead for organizers and activists, around labor policies. However, we must also unroot the internalized hustle. And that is quiet work. Slow work. Long work. Hidden work. You could even call it antiwork.

Yes, it feels weird.

Yes, it can get boring.

Yes, please. Keep going.