The Uncanny Valley of Hustle Culture

When time is commoditized, work is dehumanized

When I think about how I used to work, I wonder if I was in a kind of fugue state. 

Get about 6 hours of sleep. Spend significant time in the morning molding myself into an Acceptable Business Woman (outfit, hair, makeup). Definitely have coffee (usually on the go), sometimes eat breakfast. I’d then spend an hour, usually more, commuting by car or transit in a place with some of the worst traffic in the world and a crumbling public transit infrastructure. Trying to accurately time either was (and still is) a Sisyphean act of self-harm. 

Photo by radiographie

Once at the office (or often before that, before even getting out of bed because all of our work tools eventually had mobile apps that we put on our personal devices), it was a cannonball into the deep end of piled up emails, Slack messages, dashboards, updates, a constant stream of interruptions,2 and of course, a totalitarianism of meetings. 

I think about trying to keep up with all of those messages during all those meetings and I realize that my attention was never fully attentive.

I think about all the time spent talking about and getting approval for things I was going to do and all the time spent reporting on what I had already done, leaving precious little time for the actual doing of things right now. 

I think about the constant context switching and trying to jam any kind of deep work (or god forbid, lunch) into small pockets of time between meetings or during canceled meetings but much more often after hours. I remember literally hiding from my coworkers (even those I genuinely liked) in small, out-of-the-way conference rooms so that I could think for one fucking second. 

I think about dragging myself to the gym at 7pm and eating dinner at 8pm because I couldn’t do either of those things that kept my body healthy and alive any earlier. How I’d scroll through email and Slack messages at 9pm or later while ambiently absorbing whatever was on TV.

I think about all the unpaid work I did to secure my career against precarity—speaking gigs, blog posts, “pick your brain” meetings, and all that time networking and writing free content for LinkedIn.

I think about how my days passed in a blur. I also think that I’ve lost my capacity to work that way ever again. 

So now, when I think about how I used to work (or really how I used to live), I wonder how I actually did it.

Was I so numb? Or was this just so normalized, expected, and encouraged I didn’t think to question it? 

The circumstances of my life also contributed to my ability to make work such a singular focus. I had very little care work I had to do on a day-to-day basis—I am able-bodied, have no children, healthy parents, a (mostly) stable extended family, and a coequal partner. The things that made me very lucky also made me the perfect worker—minimal distractions and time constraints that could impinge on work, either temporally, physically, or mentally. 

When I began to work remotely during the pandemic, the digital communication increased exponentially and the potential hours for the performance of work expanded accordingly. While I was mercifully able to eliminate a commute that added hours of unpaid frustration to my day, I added hours of time spent in the uncanny valley of Zoom and Slack. 

It’s such an alienating experience, to be beholden to people who can make you feel the full range of human feelings—anger, glee, frustration, belonging, fear—who are essentially avatars. Getting a condescending or funny comment on a messaging app evokes real emotions, even if that message is on a screen that you can turn off.

I’ve heard stories of mass layoffs where those left behind would watch the Slack avatars of the doomed disappear one by one, like a digital Black Death.

Reality and unreality gets mixed up and reordered. There’s a reason why “IRL” is juxtaposed against “internet,” “digital,” or “online.” We recognize there’s an unreality to digital worlds, but at the same time they inflict tangible consequences. The LARPing of my job was essential to earning real money to purchase real things. The work itself happened in flat, urgent, blinking little boxes on a screen while my body was in a room in my home with my dogs and blankets and scented candles.

I could get so wrapped up by what happened in those little boxes that I disassociated from my reality.  It’s like my head was severed from the rest of my body. My mind was in the computer and my body (when I remembered I had one) was…elsewhere.

I have been privileged in the last year to have had a taste of a more humane schedule and working life.

I now understand how brutally my time and mental energy had been commodified and how much I desperately needed to reclaim it from the clutches of corporate productivity culture. For example, being able to get all the sleep my body needs has been a revelation. As someone who has always struggled to get enough sleep at the “correct” times, being able to rest when I needed it has been a godsend to my mental and physical health. 

Being able to take breaks in my day to have tea or walk my dogs without the backdrop of productivity performance anxiety is such a lighter way to live. 

I have a pace to my working life that includes much more time to think, research, and create. I have a largely self-propelled strategy and to-do list that allows me to create when I am productive and stop when I feel that power waning. It is, by any definition, the most efficient kind of productivity. 

Thinking time, because of its interiority, appears to the capitalist like you’re “doing nothing.” It is difficult, if not impossible, to quantify the impact of your thoughts. That’s why hustle culture wants you to hustle through thinking.

Thinking, by nature, is an exercise in trial and error, in if-this-then-that, a trying on and taking off of different ideas. Maybe we wouldn’t have to move so fast if we didn’t break so many things. 

But until our economic system decommodifies time, it will continue to chip away at our security, our environment, and our well-being. 

I no longer feel like I am in a half-waking work-induced stupor.

I have reclaimed my time and with it my sense of embodiment and personhood outside of selling most of my waking hours to someone else for money.

But that doesn’t mean I’m not working or that I’m “lazy.” I’m not “anti-work” as it were, I’m against the grind of toxic “productivity,” hustle culture, burnout, and the predatory capitalist system that has not only plundered our pockets but our minds.

The work I am putting myself into now is partially what you see here: writing, deep reading, engaging in dialogue with other thinkers and writers. And there’s other work too, some that includes an exchange of time and expertise for money on my terms, some that includes sharpening my hands-on skills in gardening, herbalism, food, fermentation, and fiber projects; and some that reaps other, non-monetary rewards for myself, my family, and my community. 

I feel so much more whole, and—to borrow a word from the scientific management priesthood—much more effective at all of these things. 

The questions I face now are: how long can I make it last for myself and how can I help liberate others?