Is hustle culture turning us into mindless drones?
November 21, 2019This article stopped me from ranting on Twitter to my minimal followers.
BTW, follow me there: @fraeji
In the recent weeks of working as a freelancer in different companies around Dublin, I frequented every kind of office from the dreary, 70’s architecture boltholes to tech giants such as WeWork and Twitter, whose buildings gained international reputation as ‘the best places to work’ and whose gleaming windows, steel architecture and rooftop ‘hangout zones’ glittered in the Dublin skyline. Whenever I was lucky enough to gain access to these enormous vessels of creative activity, I was in constant awe of the perks these techies seemed to gain every day. They had eight different kinds of jam at breakfast! You could go into a relaxation room and colour in ‘adult’ mandalas, meditate and play with slime (I know). They had beer on tap on every floor and a pick ‘n’ mix in the micro-kitchens! You could use standing desks and take advantage of the hundreds of Apple products scattered around the building, yours to take as an employee. They had ping-pong tables! It was like a millennial playground which I could see myself staying in all day. I realised that you could basically live at work - the only thing missing was a bed (that I knew of, anyway). Otherwise, every other aspect of your life’s needs could be found in the office.
I know I am stating the obvious fact that these tech empires want you to feel exactly the way I felt when working for them; that the office environment should be so fantastic and almost homely that you voluntarily stay for hours and hours each day. And this definitely has its upsides; in fact I am mostly in favour of these types of cushy environments for work, because I believe that a healthy, comfortable work environment with work benefits such as healthcare, paid maternity/paternity leave and the inclusion of meals, gyms and subsidised transport can be exchanged for a potentially smaller salary. A study showed that 40% of workers in the UK would be open to sacrificing a portion of their salary in exchange for perks, and work schemes such as the Four Day Workweek have taken off and are currently being trialled across different industries. What is important to note is that these perks and more forward-thinking kinds of employment schemes tend to be focused more on higher-than-average paying jobs in sectors such as tech, investment and consulting. Thus, the concern is whether these ‘cool’ work perks are accessible to those working in lower-wage jobs, or if they are simply reserved for those who are lucky enough to be employed by these business giants.
The underlying question is whether these employment tactics are turning millennials into people whose life consists mainly, almost solely, of their work identity. It’s also worth noting that this obsession with work identity could correlate to the underlying fear of job security that our parents didn’t have to stress about as much. We are a generation of people who are super-smart, thanks to the vast amount of information and educational resources at our disposal, but there’s just not that many jobs to go around. It makes sense that we cling to our job and the identity that comes along with it, from the largest tech companies to the smaller start ups.
While working at Twitter, I spoke to a girl who told me she had moved over from France as soon as she got a job offer at the legal department at the Dublin headquarters. She left her ex boyfriend, her family and a very stable job as a lawyer (a difficult feat in France) at the drop of a hat, why? “Because it’s Twitter”, she said, “there was nothing that would keep me in France that would make me say no”. She said it was hard to leave everything behind at first, but she knew that a stint at Twitter would open so many doors for her that she couldn’t afford to say no. Her entire friend group is working with her, which means that she doesn’t have to socialise out of the office. I could only think of the positives and negatives of this situation, and she said these things with a hint of almost desperation, reassuring herself that this was the right thing to do, that it’s going to be worth it in the end. And she’s probably right, despite any personal sacrifices she had to make along the way.
It’s not abnormal these days to sleep at your desk, to spend hours of overtime each day in order to meet a goal. However, in most workplaces without a culture of work identity this would seem ridiculous. The company just has to enforce a shared sense of self with their workers and this becomes acceptable. The problems of work stress, mental health or the neglect of an outside social life aren’t taken into account in the long run. On the other hand, these offices are equipped to boost morale, sociability and make office life more healthy and fun. It’s a double-edged sword.