‘What Happens Next?’: Does Hustle Culture Drive Creativity?

Susan Carland:

Welcome to ‘What Happens Next?’. I'm Dr Susan Carland. Last week, we started to look at the demands of hustle culture and how burnout has become a norm for most people across all walks of life. But is this drive to achieve all bad? Can a better understanding of how to recharge help us keep working on the things that matter to us? And what can each of us do to keep burnout at bay? I'd like to welcome back comedian and broadcaster Meshel Laurie, philosopher Jakob Hohwy, Associate Professor of Management and Accounting Carly Moulang, and behavioural psychologist Joshua Wiley. Welcome to part two of hustle culture on ‘What Happens Next?’. Okay.

Meshel Laurie:
Well, hustle culture for me is an exciting – a more exciting place.

Susan Carland:
Not everyone finds the idea of hustle culture daunting. For some people, it actually suits their personality, lifestyle, and attitude. Meshel Laurie is a prime example.

Meshel Laurie:
Because to me, it's about creativity and it's about the excitement that comes from dreaming up a hustle. It's my favourite thing. And I remember sitting under a tree in a friend's backyard one day about six months ago. And he is another hustler. And the two of us, we both use that term, obviously, positively. And we're aware that some others don't. And I said to him, “What else can we do to make money?” And we both laughed like that. We were so happy. And we both said, “Isn't this fun? Fun. This is so fun. This is a fun life.” And so to me, that's the difference. The difference is the freedom, the excitement. Yeah, that's the difference to me. Busyness just denotes kind of exhaustion, running around, and probably for other people. But hustle, that's exciting. That's fun. That's what's next, what's around the next corner. And that's up to me. That's all up to me, and my creativity, and my imagination, and my energy. And that's exciting.

Susan Carland:
I love that. And I love your story. I love the symbolism of you sitting under a tree in your friend's backyard.

Meshel Laurie:
Yes, I never thought of that.

Susan Carland:
Because for listeners that don't know, Meshel is a very committed and accomplished – I don't know if that's the right word, accomplished – Buddhist. And so I love the symbolism of you sitting under a tree in a backyard with a friend. And then your enlightenment was, “How do we make more money?”

Meshel Laurie:
How do we make money? Because see, we already had a few hustles on the go. That was the fun bit. And it was like, “Oh, what else?” It's not like we had nothing doing, but it was just like, “Oh, what else?” We're just in a creative vibe. And the other great thing about that tree, I think what was inspiring me was that it was in the backyard of his mum's house. It was the house that he had grown up in. It was the house that he and his brothers had played cricket. They'd play cricket under that tree as children. This is a man who is now in his early 50s. And that's what was inspiring me. And he was telling me stories about hitting the cricket ball through that window right there, and his nan was sitting under the window – these great, beautiful stories. And this boy who'd hit the ball was running. And then when he realised it went through the window, he just kept running all the way up the driveway and ran all the way home.

There was something so inspiring and great about where we were sitting. It was a beautiful day, and yeah. So that's hustle culture. It's something about the freedom of childhood, and it never wears off. You've got to be a certain kind of childish idiot, I think, to enjoy it.

Susan Carland:
It sounds like you would say busyness, and our obsession with busyness, can be oppressive and misery-inducing, but hustle culture is exciting and liberating. And that's what you would see as the difference.

Meshel Laurie:
I see, in my life, certainly yes. Those are the differences. When I think about the times when I've been – described myself as being busy. Yes, I've been unhappy about it. It's been running from one thing to another that have been about things that have kept me away from my hustles, I think. Like, “Oh, I'm grumpy because I'm busy, because I want to get back to my hustles.”

Susan Carland:
Yes. So you see hustle as a passion project.

Meshel Laurie:
I do. Yeah. Even though, most of the time... certainly now, I've deliberately configured my life so that it's now really all about my hustles.

Susan Carland:
So you've written a book on being busy. What does Buddhism have to say about busyness?

Meshel Laurie:
Well, Buddhism says that everything is about your attitude to it. And so I suppose everything I've been saying is about that, isn't it? It's about my attitude toward work that I create, is that it's fun. So when I create my own work, my attitude is an attitude of excitement. And that ownership, and that feeling of being in control, and in charge of my own life and my own destiny, brings out an attitude of fun in me. Whereas when I'm working for other people, I struggle to find that attitude, to claim that attitude of fun and excitement.

Susan Carland:
Do you think people need to be anchored within the tradition of Buddhism, or yoga comes from Hinduism? Do you think people need to be anchored within those traditions to then get the benefit from what the spiritual religious traditions teach us about how to manage some of these stressful issues in life?

Meshel Laurie:
No, I don't think so. I think whatever works, really – whatever works for people. And His Holiness the Dalai Lama is the first person to say, "Listen, whatever works, works." And he advises people against adopting Buddhism really, and certainly as a religion. He always says, "Listen, work your own religion. They all teach the same thing, really."

Susan Carland:
Today's technology has made it easier to have a side hustle, says philosopher Jakob Hohwy, Director of the Monash University Centre for Contemplative Studies. How do you define hustle culture?

Jakob Hohwy:
Well, as something positive, first up.

Susan Carland:
It is positive.

Jakob Hohwy:
Yeah. I like it. I like hustling in the sense of being busy, having things to do. But then when you reflect about it, it becomes something negative of course, if you hustle for hustle's sake. If you hustle to signal that you're busy, it becomes kind of productive. But I don't like being bored, myself. I remember the days before email and internet and so on, I was sitting in my little one-bedroom flat as a student. I wanted to hustle and I didn't have any way of hustling as it was just too boring. I had to organise people physically. I had to write letters and receive answers and so on. I don't have to do that anymore. Now I can hustle when I want to hustle.

Sometimes we portray it as, in fairly superficial ways, it's something in the spirit of the times. It's something about us and our psychology, but it's also something about life being more and more difficult. So if you're a young person and you're caught up in the gig economy, you’ve got to hustle because that one job might not last, and the pay might change, or something better might come up, or you also have to do that startup and also take care of your band, and all those kinds of things. You've got to hustle. And that's a structural thing I think. And if we overlook that aspect of hustle culture, it can be easy to just kind of blame people for hustling in a fairly superficial way.

Susan Carland:
Is hustle culture the way we see it manifest in Western societies at the moment? Is it something new? Or was – did we have this kind of flavour of hustle culture 200 years ago in London?

Jakob Hohwy:
It was probably a different kind of hustling you did back then. And maybe it was not so important to appear to be hustling.

Susan Carland:
So you think maybe one of the distinctive elements of today's hustle culture is the performativity of it?

Jakob Hohwy:
Yeah, at least when I think about the negative aspects of hustling. When people say I was part of the hustle and bustle, that's a positive thing. I was part of life. I was participating, so that's fine. But when you have to appear to be part of the hustle and bustle, then that seems like a more modern thing. But the more I think about it – so yeah, going back in time, probably there was an element of also being seen to be busy back then. So I'm not sure.

Often we have this kind of myopic view of the present. Things now are different than they were, but actually, things never change. Everyone I talked to says that the young generation, they hustle, they're part of the hustle culture because they're on their phones all the time, and so on. That's probably not super different from the way it was in the past. It was – there's different ways of being busy and different ways of negotiating the kind of social interactions that you have to engage in as a young person. I'm always a bit suspicious when the younger generation is kind of blamed for being different than they used to be.

Susan Carland:
And by different, we always mean worse.

Jakob Hohwy:
Yes.

Susan Carland:
They're never superior to us.

Jakob Hohwy:
I think the younger generation now – it sounds a bit crusty when I talk about ‘the younger generation’ – but I'm super impressed and I'm not worried about them... I've got teenage sons, a 17-year-old being on Messenger with his friends and so on, constantly on. But I'm sure they're developing a way of negotiating that. I'm sure they have a very fine-tuned language to communicate when they're open for business, when they're not open for business, when they're just checking in, how you delay, how you phrase things on Messenger or whatever other – Snapchat, or whatever it might be. Yeah. I think that they're super impressive in terms of the way they negotiate all that social stuff. It can be stressful, of course. And some young people suffer, but this idea that they're all suffering because they're busy on their phones all the time... I don't buy that.

Susan Carland:
What do you think about the value of things to counteract this constant need for busyness, mindfulness? Is there value in that?

Jakob Hohwy:
There's clearly a huge surge in interest in mindfulness, and there has been for the last 10, 15, maybe 20 years. And it's becoming more and more industrialised and commodified.

Susan Carland:
Right.

Jakob Hohwy:
You can easily get apps for your phone where you can schedule in your mindfulness. And there's lots of big reviews and evidence that suggests that at least, in general terms, it's quite beneficial to engage in some kind of mindfulness meditation. But you also have to be suspicious about it, of mindfulness or some kind of panacea against the hustle culture. We would have figured out a way of doing it in a more natural way if it was just naturally beneficial. And maybe mindfulness is only beneficial when you allow it to resonate with a certain kind of cultural scaffolding that tells you what to do now that you've been mindful for a little moment, or you've trained your mindfulness muscle. You're really good at doing that kind of attention shifting or nonjudgmental, self-regulating thing that you do when you meditate. But how is that going to make your life better if it's separated?

Susan Carland:
It's amputated.

Jakob Hohwy:
Yeah, it's amputated, that's a good word for it, from a set of norms and cultures and values.

Susan Carland:
What do we do with that, then, in a Western country like Australia, where religion's not particularly dominant in our society? If meditation or mindfulness has been amputated from its original home, can we graft it here in a meaningful way?

Jakob Hohwy:
That's an interesting question. And it's something that we want to work on, certainly. I was in an academic business, how to solve that problem. And I think it requires a bit of a cultural shift probably. So big corporations now routinely try to tick a box in terms of their staff engagement by saying, “Here's a free mindfulness course that you can do.”

Susan Carland:
Yeah, lunchtime.

Jakob Hohwy:
Lunchtime. “Hurry, hurry. Don't eat your lunch. Come and do the mindfulness.”

Susan Carland:
And then back to work. Right.

Jakob Hohwy:
That's the kind of invitation that you talked about. And in order to overcome that, it has to be more of a contract between the staff and the organisation, where both parties come to this kind of event with something, with some resource. Where the organisation says, “I'm going to offer this. Put things in place. You can do the mindfulness over lunchtime and so on, but I'm going to uphold my end of the bargain. I'm not just going to have that charter of values and norms. I'm going to enact those in such a way that your mindfulness is supported, so you don't come back to your office and the emails have just grown even more, and you have to answer them.”

Susan Carland:
Yeah.

Jakob Hohwy:
And I think it's that cultural shift that has to happen, where mindfulness and hustle and all those things are seen in a context, where everyone comes to the party, something.

Susan Carland:
If you're not in a position to affect change over your entire organisation, there are smaller practises that you can build into your day, says Carly Moulang, an associate professor in the Monash University Business School.

Carly Moulang:
What I would suggest is to just start really small. And I've talked a little bit before about micro-steps. And there's a really good book by BJ Fogg called ‘Tiny Habits’. And this is also a philosophy that's sort of been taken up by Arianna Huffington as well. And the magic of micro-steps and micro-practises is that they're really small. So you need to sort of figure out, ‘What am I trying to achieve and what do I want?’ And I guess to give you an example from my case, in COVID, I knew that I had to be really careful with my mental health. I knew that this is something that I really needed to protect, but I had no time. Right? I had no time to devote half an hour to meditating or anything like that, so I had to develop a way to incorporate this into my life which required very little time, very little cognitive effort. And I did that by creating, like, a mindfulness micro-toolbox.

And so to just give you an example of one thing that I did to implement more mindfulness, is that I had decided to anchor it to an activity I did all the time. At that point in time, it was washing hands. I was washing my hands God-knows how many times a day. And I noticed that when I was washing my hands, I was worrying or I was thinking about something else. And so I attached my practice to that one task. And every time I washed my hands, I stopped. I took a deep breath. I noticed my breathing. I noticed the water. I noticed the soap, the feel of my hands. And that was my way of incorporating mindfulness into my day 20 times a day. And that has an effect on your wellbeing at the end of the day. And so for me, I think that it's a matter of deciding what you want to do, and then how are you going to implement that in a practical way and a way that also doesn't... it can't take up a lot of your time.

Susan Carland:
And I also imagine that it's important that, like you said, we need to do these things for ourselves, these little manageable things for ourselves, but we also need to have workplaces that are not putting unrealistic expectations on us. Is there a way we can have those conversations with our workplace that you would recommend?

Carly Moulang:
I think that that's really hard, because there have been times when I, myself, have been overwhelmed with all of the work that I have to do, and the problem is there's no one else there to pick it up for you. So I think it's really important for me to differentiate between what pressure I've put on myself, and what is a realistic pressure from my workplace. And so often, I find that the pressure isn't an actual deadline, it's me thinking I need to get all these things done in a day. But now, I stop and I reflect and I'm more conscious of what can actually realistically be done. And so I think that a bit of that is determining what is a real pressure with a real deadline, and what is it that I'm lumping onto myself on top of that. Because I think when you go to a workplace, it's much more difficult because they're also now dealing with limited resources. And so, yeah, I think that differentiation about what's coming from me, what's coming from them, and trying to prioritise what's most important.

Susan Carland:
What can you do if you're worried that you're headed for burnout? Dr Joshua Wiley is a senior research fellow at Monash University's Turner Institute for Brain and Mental Health.

Joshua Wiley:
Yeah. So I think one of the things I would say is to check in with yourself around your health and wellbeing, so to be mindful of your level of stress, to be mindful of your mental health. And there's not a lot of evidence here, but I am very much a fan of some of the quantified self and some of the biomarkers we can pick up on ourselves to also keep track of our physiological health. And for example, now, there's commercial chest straps that you can use to measure heart rate variability, which gives you an indicator of, kind of, physiological stress, a little bit. It's not perfect, but it's one of these noninvasive, low-cost signals. And you can just pick that up. So I think if you have some of these things, I'd be mindful of your stress, of your mental health, of your physiological health to the extent that you can.

And if you become aware of that, and then you are aware that these are not what you want them to be, or not at optimal levels. I'd say it's normal to have a little bit of stress, but if you find that you're under high stress, then really thinking about where to make some changes there. And that probably involves giving something up. But I like to think of it from that perspective. So rather than just thinking and saying, “Okay, you just got to cut some things out of your life,” which might feel very hard to let something go, and might feel very hard to not be in that hamster wheel, if you will, right? Instead, think about it as prioritising something else. So you're not just giving something up, you're approaching something else. And what you're approaching is a lower-stress, happier, healthier you.

And then seeing how to make that happen. And how that's going to happen will look really different for different people, because it would be very individual: What's most difficult for you, what's most stressful? What is it that's keeping you in that? What's keeping you from being able to have that rest time? Whether that's sleep, or whether that's just quiet time that actually brings down your psychologically and physiologically, that stress and that always on, that gives you that time to just shut down. But for different people, that might be really different. Some people might be running, and that's actually very relaxing for them. And so that's a part that they keep, but they might have something else that they want to... I don't know, they're always trying to watch movies or something that are enriching, right? And that they maybe say, “Okay, well, that's actually just stressful. It means every night I get back from my job and I'm not enjoying this, and I can't wind down. Instead, I'm feeling like I've got to watch or read something deep.” And that's what they give up.

And maybe for someone else, reading that deep thing actually calms them from their job, so they want to keep that on. So I think it will look really different for different people. But if you're actually aware of yourself, and check in with yourself, and put your stress levels and keeping that in-check as a goal, as long as your needs are met, then it is also very important to me to keep this managed. I think that can help guide other decisions.

Susan Carland:
At one time or another, all of us have wished our brains would just give it a rest, give us a moment to take a breath and recharge our batteries. As Meshel Laurie says, “It's all about attitude.”

Meshel Laurie:
For me, there was just a really clear moment in my early 40s. As I said, when I had to think about my life recalibrating: What am I doing and why am I doing it? Why am I working this hard? There was a purpose to it some years before. What is the purpose now though? Am I still ambitious for these reasons? No. Am I still trying to achieve the goals that I was 10 years ago? No. Is it about the money? No. But it is taking away from my children. I'm really tired now because I'm older. It's taking away all these things that it wasn't before. I really sat with myself and thought, “Okay, life has changed, but I haven't changed with it. I haven't changed my mindset about what I want out of life. I'm still working to this old list that I drew up many years ago. What I want now is more time. I need more rest. What do I want out of life? I want more hustle. I want more fun.”

“I want to do more things that I want to do now in every day. I want to wake up and have more fun, have more rest, have more time at home with the kids and the pets. That's what I want. I want less travel. I want drive the least.”

That helped. “I want more time with friends.” I wasn't seeing any friends like you guys. I didn't have time to have breakfast with friends, all that. And things like, I have a girlfriend who just changed jobs. That in itself is so courageous. So she's making less money. For anyone to make less money is so courageous. Everyone will say to you, “You're crazy. You can't do that” She's my age. She's in her 40s. She has kids. She has everything we all have. Now, are they going to starve? No. They've added a couple of years onto their mortgage. They went to the bank, they reconfigured it. Are their kids going to go to school naked? No.

As I always say to my kids, there are families in India who live on a blanket. We are crazy. The standard of living that we think is necessary is crazy. When I was a child, we had one TV, one car, all that. The standard of living we've come to accept as normal and essential is insane, and we are working ourselves to death to achieve it. And it's not necessary.

Susan Carland:
Meshel, that is sensational advice. Thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it.

Meshel Laurie:
Thank you.

Susan Carland:
So there you have it. Maybe a culture that pushes us to keep striving also pushes us to keep creating and bringing new ideas into the world. According to today's experts, it's up to us and our employers to find a way to keep the hustle going at a healthy rate. You don't have to visit a Buddhist temple or become a yogi just yet – or ever. Building a practise that works for you is the key. Find a mindful routine. Take a closer look at your current definition of success, and cut yourself a little slack. Thanks for joining us on this examination of hustle culture. That's it for this episode and for this topic. 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.