‘What Happens Next?’: Are We Working Ourselves to Death?

Susan Carland:
Welcome to another episode of ‘What Happens Next?’ I'm Dr Susan Carland. On this sliding doors podcast, we examine the biggest challenges confronting us today, looking at the future we face if we don't change, the future we could have if we do, and how we get the kind of future we all want. This week we're looking at a new topic, hustle culture.

Productivity hacks and optimisation have long been buzzwords of success. Business leaders and LinkedIn gurus are encouraging us to have side hustles rather than hobbies, and that we should be looking down on downtime. Is being busy the same thing as being productive? And what happens to our brains, our bodies, and our social networks if we keep measuring ourselves by our output? Are we hustling ourselves to death? Our guests today are Behavioural Psychologist Joshua Wiley, Associate Professor of Management and Accounting Carly Moulang, Philosopher Jakob Hohwy, and Comedian and Broadcaster Meshel Laurie. Welcome to part one of Hustle Culture on ‘What Happens Next?’.

Joshua Wiley:
Hi, my name's Josh Wiley and I'm a researcher at Monash University studying stress and health behaviours and health.

Susan Carland:
Joshua Wiley, welcome. I want to begin by asking you, what do you see as the difference between productivity and hustle culture?

Joshua Wiley:
Productivity is what's actually happening or what's getting done, and hustle culture, I think, is much more around the sort of sense or an urgency to be doing things, to be active, to be productive. So it's a difference perhaps between a sense of a need to be very productive versus the act or the product of being productive.

Susan Carland:
Right. So I often wondered, is hustle culture like the extreme manifestation of productivity? But you're seeing them as categorically separate.

Joshua Wiley:
I mean, they're certainly related to each other, but I think you can see them as separate. So there are some people who might be very productive, but they're not doing it in a sense of they have to be, or a sense of rushing or urgency. It's just, they enjoy their work and they're engaging in it, and productivity is coming out of that. And that, I think, is different from someone who's potentially in that hustle culture and that rush. I think there are also people who are really rushing and they're trying very, very hard, and they may not actually be extremely productive.

Susan Carland:
Yes. I think that's me. Hamster on a wheel, but getting nothing done. So then how do you define hustle culture? What do you see that as?

Joshua Wiley:
I think I would see it as around that urgency, that rush, that need to be doing something, that sort of striving for productivity which may equal productivity or may not equal productivity, but it's having that as the goal itself rather than, say, doing work that you're passionate about, and whether productivity happens or not is a by-product.

Susan Carland:
So we just always feel a need to be busy?

Joshua Wiley:
Yeah. A lot of people do.

Carly Moulang:
So I define it as a situation where we're constantly working. So we're working all the time and we're working everywhere.

Susan Carland:
Carly Moulang is an associate professor in the Department of Accounting at Monash University's Business School. Her research has found that the COVID-19 pandemic has increased stress and demands on everyone, especially women.

Carly Moulang:
So we're working in our offices sometimes, but we're working at home, we're working in cafes, we're working when our children are doing their sport. We're not having a lot of breaks while we're working. And so it's continuously go, go, go, all of the time. What I think that we see with hustle culture at the moment is, it's not so much a conscious choice that people are making. I think that since we've had COVID and we've had the pandemic, a lot of people have fallen into hustle culture.

Susan Carland:
Right. So is hustle culture really, is it the same thing as busyness, chronic busyness? Or is it a different flavour?

Carly Moulang:
I think it's a different flavour because it's primarily related to your work. So when I think about busyness, I think there's lots of busyness in life. There's your personal life as well. But hustle culture is mainly about working all the time, and sometimes we don't even realise that we're doing that. I think that particularly women have found that this has been a time where they've fallen into this culture, perhaps without really realising it. Yeah. And I see that there are particularly significant consequences for people that fall into this culture. So people, they start to see more mental health problems. We see more burnout in people, and we often see poorer workplace performance as well.

Susan Carland:
Which is ironic because people think like, “I'm just going to work all the time and my output will be amazing and my productivity will be amazing,” but it's actually opposite of that.

Carly Moulang:
Yeah, exactly, and it can't be sustained. It's just not something that you can do successfully over a long-term. There are going to be consequences if you're trying to do that, and those consequences are those mental health issues or the burnout that you might experience.

Susan Carland:
Why do we feel like we need to be busy all the time? Why do we have to be hustling?

Carly Moulang:
I think that there's a few things that have come out of the pandemic which have resulted in us doing this. One of the reasons is that the boundaries between home and life have obviously become very blurred. I think also that there are a lot of uncertainties still for people, and a lot have also faced the issue of how precarious their job can be, and in professions where this has never really happened before. We've seen this in academia, but we've also seen this in professional business firms like accountants. So I always thought accounting is a very safe job, but we saw these large professional accounting firms have redundancies very early on in this process. That creates a lot of fear and anxiety for a lot of people, and our response to that is to work longer and to work harder.

Susan Carland:
So if our response is to work longer and harder, what does that mean for our health or for our mental wellbeing? Joshua Wiley explains.

Joshua Wiley:
So mental health-wise, I think there's a – I think probably just even intuitively, kind of common sense. A lot of people will recognise the harms that come from that in terms of constant pressure, constant strain. We know what persistent stress, pressure, demands place on people, and what comes from that, and the things that tend to come out of that, higher rates of anxiety, higher rates of depression. And pretty much any mental health condition you'd want to look at looks lower. Just even things like our life satisfaction, our happiness, are undercut by that kind of constant push, constant need to do more, to be more, to be better, to do it all. That's on the mental health side, and I think those things are probably all, in our modern society, things that people are somewhat familiar with, at least a little bit, right? I think we all know about things like depression and anxiety, and that stress doesn't tend to help that.

Physical health-wise though, I think it's maybe not as well-known, but there can be a lot of downsides there as well. And this is going to differ by person, so I don't mean to say that everybody who's doing hustle culture has all of this going on. But when we're under stress, our bodies also respond. And they tend to respond – you get these physiological responses that have been conserved over a very long time and that were adaptive under the right circumstances. So that's worth thinking about: a classic stress response. If a tiger runs into the room, this physiological stress response I have is very adaptive. My body's primed to fight or to flight. You're getting a shift where I have more oxygen to my muscles. I'm basically ready, and my whole body's ready for that. You also get shifts in things like the immune system, ready to deal with potential wounds that I may have and to heal and respond to that.

But in our modern day, we're not responding to that, right? The hustle culture demands is not a tiger coming into the room. It's this need to be the best or to do a lot of things, to always be busy. And if we're getting that sort of physiological response to stress that's designed to help us in a physical threat to these more, kind of, psychosocial threats, it doesn't help the psychosocial side, because being ready to run really fast doesn't actually help me with my side gig. Having an immune response that's ready for me to get cut on the skin doesn't actually help me with anything that I'm dealing with in our world.

And so what you have then is this sort of physiological cost to the body. That transition is adaptive in the short-term for a physical threat, but it's not helpful for non-physical threats and it takes a cost in the long-term. It's kind of like if you have a car and you're slamming on the brakes a lot. That wears the car down. So if you're speeding up and slamming on the brakes and your body's doing this as it's responding to these stressors, that takes a big physiological cost on the body. And it can really run the gamut of pretty much every sort of health system, but particularly things like inflammatory conditions can be exacerbated and made worse by this sort of stress and this sort of hustle culture.

Susan Carland:
So much of what you're saying about hustle culture sounds like that it's about us being on at all times and always working, that rest is seen as negative – shameful, lazy. And so is leisure, that leisure is only okay if it's in some way productive. So my leisure is running a marathon. Why do you think we feel guilty about rest or leisure?

Joshua Wiley:
If you go back to some of that social comparison, it's hard to highlight and it's hard to, I don't want to say brag, because I don't think people are always intending to brag, but it's hard to just say you don't really have anything to report. You don't have anything to highlight and say, “Oh, I did this well.” It's just, “I did nothing,” or, “I did what I enjoy, which maybe is not even that good.” I think sometimes people will oftentimes talk about rest or these other things as guilty pleasures, like watching a show that you actually enjoy rather than a show that enriches your experience, right? It's like a guilty pleasure show. And why is it a guilty pleasure? Well, because it's not deep, it's not meaningful. It was just relaxing and fun. You don't come out of relaxing and fun with anything you can really say like, “Oh, this happened.” You don't have any output, any product, anything you can talk about. You just are happier and fun and feel better.

Jakob Hohwy:
I get the idea about leisure, that leisure is viewed with suspicion.

Susan Carland:
Jakob Hohwy is a professor in Monash University's School of Philosophical, Historical and International Studies. He's the director of the Monash Centre for Contemplative Studies.

Jakob Hohwy:
And leisure itself becomes something you have to hustle to do, which is interesting as well.

Susan Carland:
Yeah. Leisure itself must be productive.

Jakob Hohwy:
Yes. And you have to fit it in. You have to schedule your leisure. It can't just emerge naturally. You can't just have a relaxed day. You have to schedule it in. So those little moments of boredom are viewed with suspicion now. Boredom, it's an aversive feeling often, and often for good reason. There's stuff that we'd rather be doing. But sometimes boredom is good or you can train yourself to enjoy boredom more, take it as a little moment of leisure. And that we can't do anymore. Whether it's a Protestant work ethic – that's my own upbringing in Denmark, it's about as Protestant as you get, so that's very ingrained in me. But then again, Northern Europe has got really good structures in place to allow annual leave and the weekends are fairly protected and so on. So there's also some values there that might play against that.

Susan Carland:
What do you see as our future? What does our society in 50 years look like in this regard?

Jakob Hohwy:
It will be bleak, right? Because you're now torn between, on the one hand, looking after yourself, you hustle for yourself or you hustle for the workplace, and really what you should be hustling for is the younger generation, future generations, and the planet, and each other. So that whole element of a sense of common humanity or, it's a bit of a misused term, but compassion as well seems to get lost if those are our only options, between, “I'm hustling for myself. I'm doing mindfulness for myself,” or, “I'm working for the man.” Right?

Susan Carland:
Yeah. That's a really good point. Yeah. That these two things, the hustle culture and the mindfulness, it's still very self-focused.

Jakob Hohwy:
Yeah.

Susan Carland:
And that must be part of the problem.

Jakob Hohwy:
Yeah.

Susan Carland:
Someone who certainly knows about being busy is Meshel Laurie. She works in TV, radio, podcasts, writes in many publications, and parents six-year-old twins. She's also Buddhist. Meshel Laurie.

Meshel Laurie:
Being the busiest person makes you the most powerful person, I think, in a situation. It did in my family as a child. It made my father the most powerful person in our family, so he got away with lots of other bad behaviour. “Your father works 100 hours a week,” was what we heard all the time when he was behaving badly. And so I wanted to grow up to be my father because then you could do whatever you want. Everyone has to excuse everything else because you're the hardest worker. Unfortunately, my husband did not get the memo about that, and neither did my children.

Susan Carland):
Why do you think we do valorise, even idolise busyness in our culture?

Meshel Laurie:
It's just a thing we've created because it's associated with money. It's associated with power. It's associated with those things that we have made important. It's associated with that idea that hard work equals money. It's that idea that if the richest people in our culture are the hardest workers, then that would mean that nurses should be the richest people in our culture. That doesn't make sense. It's not true. It's not real. Just because people are poor, doesn't mean they're not hardworking, doesn't mean they deserve to be poor. Nothing is deserved. It's this idea that everything we have is deserved, we all deserve to be where we are. That's not true. It's just not true.

Susan Carland:
Do you think we have a problem or an unease socially with relaxing or leisure?

Meshel Laurie:
Yes. I was told that's laziness. That's the other issue. Laziness, when I was growing up, was a mortal sin. So for me to sit still, to be unproductive is very uncomfortable.

Susan Carland:
Where does that come from? Where does this idea that laziness or being unproductive is not just bad, but sinful? Where does that come from?

Meshel Laurie:
Well, again, I think it's associated with then earning poverty, earning bad luck. Then people who were poor were seen as lazy, certainly when I was growing up. They are poor because they don't work. They don't work hard enough. They don't try hard enough. Lifters and leaners.

Susan Carland:
You have a go, you'll get a go.

Meshel Laurie:
That's it. That's it.

Susan Carland:
Now bloody have a go.

Meshel Laurie:
That is it. And even the last couple of days I've spent at a Buddhist monastery actually, because I, again, was getting very wound up and having trouble sleeping and all of those things. Well, that's not why I went there. And just finding myself sleeping and wandering around and doing nothing is so weird and creepy. The monks were saying to me, “Sit. Just sit still. Just sit still. Look at the trees.”

Susan Carland:
It's interesting for me to hear you say that because you've been a really practising Buddhist for many years, many, many years. You've written books on it. It surprises me.

Meshel Laurie:
Well, it's a practise, not a perfect, we always say. But, yes, definitely, I struggle very much because I didn't grow up in the tradition and because I was raised very differently to the tradition. I was raised very much in a way that that taught me that non-productivity was bad, is bad. “Time to lean, time to clean. You should be doing something. Why are you sitting? Why are you sitting still? Isn't there something you could be doing?”

Susan Carland:
So during recent lockdowns throughout the pandemic, many of us believed it was an opportunity to step back and reassess the way we approach our lives, to slow down, spend more time with family and to not burn out. Well, not so, according to Carly Moulang.

Carly Moulang:
At the time of the beginning of COVID, I was working on a project with Dr Alessandro Ghio from the Monash Business School, and we were looking at how workplaces can better support professional women. At the beginning, we had started our interviews in March, and we interviewed three women normally, face-to-face. Then the world changed and our remaining 30 or so interviews were on Zoom. That's when women were really in the thick of everything. And so we could see then that it was impacting them significantly. But what we have done now is just recently in the last month, we've gone back to those women and we've asked them to write us a reflection of how they feel that the pandemic has impacted their careers. It was a period described by most women that we interviewed as the most stressful high workload period of their professional careers. I believe –

Susan Carland:
I think women listening to this are like, “That's right.”

Carly Moulang:
Yep, exactly. You see it leaving many of them utterly exhausted and burnt out. So women reported to us that they were working 12-plus hours a day and they were effectively donating four-and-a-half hours a day to their workplace as well because they couldn't accrue flexitime or anything like that because all those privileges stopped during that period.

Susan Carland:
Can I jump in and ask you, these women, were they all parents or were some of them not mothers?

Carly Moulang:
Yeah. Not all of them were parents. So we, in terms of [crosstalk]

Susan Carland:
Right. So even the non-mothers felt this?

Carly Moulang:
Yes. Yes, absolutely.

Susan Carland:
What was the unique pressure on women then that men were not experiencing if not childcare?

Carly Moulang:
Well, I think at that time, for women, if they didn't have children, it is possible that men were also feeling an increased pressure in the increased workload resulting from the bunch of redundancies that happened in these firms.

Susan Carland:
Right.

Carly Moulang:
So when it comes to the non-parents that we interviewed, it is possible that they were facing very similar challenges that the men were facing as well. So what they also found is that the flexibility that they had in being able to work from home, that was overridden by the expectation that they were then available 24/7. And they had a lot of communications in those times. So they had emails and then they developed groups and had instant messaging. And so they felt that that workload significantly increased in that time.

But also I think in terms of the women leaders, when they were working remotely they found it particularly challenging because they felt that they needed to also deal with a lot of the emotional burden that was going on in the organisation. So making sure that their staff were well, making sure that their teams were healthy and working effectively. And I think that that is something, that emotional sort of labour in organisations is still predominantly picked up by women in most workplaces.

Susan Carland:
Were there any other really interesting revelations from the women that you spoke to or in their diaries? Are they feeling better now?

Carly Moulang:
No, not necessarily. No.

Susan Carland:
Okay.

Carly Moulang:
So I'll give you an example of – one woman said to us that she concluded the end of last year by having damaged mental health, a damaged career, and a broken relationship.

Susan Carland:
Wow.

Carly Moulang:
So she was left completely devastated at the end of that year. A lot of women have also become unemployed for the first time ever in their careers. So one woman, who is a mother of two, said to us that she has worked for 20 years in a professional accounting firm, and this is the first time in her life she's been unemployed and has to rely on government subsidies for the first time ever.

Carly Moulang:
So, yeah, I think that another really interesting thing that came through to us and a really interesting reflection we received I thought was also worth mentioning is a reflection on resilience and wellbeing in organisations. So this particular woman said to us that she could see that she was spreading herself and her staff were spreading themselves way too far in order to cope with these unreasonable work demands and long working hours as well. And so she really reflected on, at what point does resilience actually become a weakness? At what point does it prevent us from recognising that it is becoming a barrier or undermining our health?

Susan Carland:
Like a toxic resilience.

Carly Moulang:
Yes, exactly. I think that this gets to the heart of some of the problems that we see underlying that hustle culture is that –

Susan Carland:
Just cope at all costs.

Carly Moulang:
Yes, exactly. And you get to a stage where something just has to give.

Susan Carland:
So what happens if we keep all of this hustling up? Joshua Wiley.

Joshua Wiley:
Federal government came out with new plans and new budget, right, that included stuff for mental health as well. One of the things that I think has been frustrating on the mental health front is that we've invested lots and lots of money and lots and lots of resources into mental health services, and what you see in the population is basically very stubbornly, persistently high levels of things like anxiety, depression, stress, burnout. Those we just have, and they haven't gone away, and we know more about them and we have services to support them. But part of – I think – why those are sustained is that as much as we make headway in helping some of them, we also have these sort of new habits, new patterns, new things that we do as a country, as a society, that are not actually moving us towards better mental health, better wellbeing, better happiness.

And so it's kind of like, you treat it, but then you also increase the risk factors, and you just end up in this stalemate. But we're kind of where we were decades ago. And so I think that, probably, things like hustle culture are feeding into that. Again, that's not necessarily for everyone. There can be people who do that and they're feeling great. That's fantastic. I think if people have good health – and I say that holistically, so not just health in their body or just health in their mind, but overall good health – and they're happy, then let them do what they want. But where that's starting to suffer, then I think we want to rethink, well, why are we doing this? Do we need this? Because actually, it's impacting on people. It's holding them back. It's making them unhappy. It's making them unhealthy, and can we do something about that?

Susan Carland:
Joshua Wiley, thank you so much for your time today.

Joshua Wiley:
It's a pleasure. It's really nice to be here. Thank you.

Susan Carland:
If you're feeling rundown lately, you are certainly not alone. Even before the emotional and professional baggage that the COVID-19 pandemic left us with, our society was headed for burnout. In a world where even your breaks feel like they need to be productive, it's little wonder that we're seeing a surge in mental health crises.

Is there anything we can do to deescalate the situation? And does hustle culture have any redeeming qualities? Find out in episode two of our series coming to your favourite app next week. That's it for this episode. A big thank you to all our guests and, as always, more information on what we talked about today can be found in the show notes.