The Dangerous Fetishization of ‘Hustle Porn’
melmagazine.com
melmagazine.com
But there is a lot wrong with the idea that you need to work until your health is impacted to succeed; if you need to work that hard, something else is off - the idea isn't good enough, you're attacking it in the wrong way, whatever.
To me this ties into the gross, pervasive trend of wantrepreneurism. Shark Tank, Zuck, Elon Musk - being a founder has never been sexier, never been more interesting or lucrative. In the wake of that, WeWork and GaryV and a whole bunch of people are selling the idea that regardless of how bad your idea is or how unfit you are to be an entrepreneur, all you need is access or hustle to succeed. And that's awful, awful advice.
As income inequality continues to grow, I expect this to get worse and worse.
Hustle is fine. The requirement to give 110% at every moment of every day to succeed means, anyone with two neurons to rub together will just cheat. Not hard to find conspirators when everyone is in the same situation.
Wake me up when Gary does a video on unit economics. Or cohort analysis. Or CAC/LTV. Or literally anything to do with business other than the idea that regardless of how unfit you are, how unsuitable your idea is, or how damaging the attempt will be on your personal finances or health, hustle is all you need.
The winds are increasing against him. It's going to be interesting to watch him flip and suddenly preach realism, once he calculates that his adoring masses are going to appreciate that message more on the basis of his "authenticity". (And I wish I could use about fifteen more air-quotes around that word.)
If you're at one of those rare crossroads where you do have a genuine choice, your inbox is probably going to be close to zero already. I think cause and effect here are getting switched.
Is this some sort of twisted Truman Show dystopia where everyone is pretending to worship him and seeing if I am foolish enough to believe them?
He curses a lot, so you know he’s authentic.
...and don't forget the fact that seems almost taboo to say these days: you just don't have the ability.
I think about it in the same way I think about "American Idol": Simon Cowell became a notable figure simply because he was honest with people; he dared to tell people that they were wasting their time pursuing singing.
Right now, Gary and all of these other hustle porn types are Paula Abdul. And they'll keep telling people that all they need to do is work harder, up until the point that it becomes to professionally more lucrative for them to stop being Paula and start being Simon. When we get to that point, they'll flip in a second. And their fans will eat it the fuck up.
In reality, people often have to be forcibly dethroned from their views. Having a judge say no thanks will not have the appropriate effect.
The issue is emotional commitment, not accurate assessment.
In the first case, rudeness can be helpful and in the second case it won't hurt their feelings. Seems like a fine choice to me.
Assuming you meant 'But you have to be brutal to have the desired effect of getting through to the terrible singers, plain honesty - considerate, respectful honesty[0] wouldn't work', well, he didn't get through, did he. Instead they thought he must be just being rude deliberately and didn't mean what he said. He made it impossible for them to hear him. Mostly.
Anyway.. I was making another point, not that Simon became notable 'simply because he was honest' but because he was rude; whether it was effective (at getting terrible singers to realize they're terrible) is another thing.
[0] See the book Crucial Conversations, it's largely about how to be honest with people, in important situations people usually aren't, while being respectful and considerate.
Are you implying those people are auditioning ironically and know they are bad singers?
It does not seem rude to me to try and change the course of someone's life who is _drastically_ underperforming.
Is the definition of rude hurting someone's feelings? That doesn't follow the implication that rudeness shouldn't happen; sometimes people need their feelings hurt to inspire positive change.
It does not seem rude to me to try and change the course of someone's life who is _drastically_ underperforming. - Leaving aside what underperforming could mean - so, if he means well, it's just not possible for Cowell to be rude, no matter what he says? I think that's just not what the word means to people (apart from you).
That doesn't follow the implication that rudeness shouldn't happen; - I can't parse that, sorry.
I always tell my Jr. Engineers that if you have to work THAT HARD to accomplish your daily tasks then you need to go back to school or go for a more newbie-friendly position.
Having discipline is the same thing as having force of will.
I don't want to pass any judgement nor assume the answers to any of these questions - I'd like to see/hear/read discussion on it.
I don't think that this is very productive thing to say to someone. If the Junior Engineer is still able to produce, why do you care how much they struggled with it? If a person truly wants to grow and then struggling on problems that are on the edge of their comfort zone sounds like the perfect way to do it.
If their abilities are effecting project timelines, quality, profitability, etc then I can understand having that conversation with them but I really don't see the harm in someone challenging themselves professionally.
Using our tools of simplification, abstraction, automation and domain knowledge, it's critical to teach your juniors how to be optimistically lazy and do less. That's how we raise great engineers. Otherwise, we're just raising mid-level programmers who only know how to throw lots more code at their problem, and as I hope we all know by now, more code never results in fewer problems.
But either way it doesn't change the fact that it is one's personal responsibility to chart a course through those circumstances.
It's pretty well known that the most successful teams are often those that function well as a team, complementing and supporting each other, even if they lack superstars. They need people who fit into their "lesser" niches. Sometimes it's not about hustle, hustle, hustle. It's about execution, execution, execution. The small fish you caught tastes better than the big one that got away.
Know your pay-offs. Gambling your health to enrich someone else, while you scrape by with pennies, is a last resort. Gambling your health for tremendous gains is a fair choice.
These are gambles humans leaving Africa and navigating the oceans made. (The cost of loss was death.) It’s a risk we’ll face expanding to the Moon and Mars and Alpha Centauri. Be thoughtful about the risks you take—not all are offered equally—but don’t discard them outright for being risky.
There's no moral judgement necessary as each individual can, and should, make that call for themselves. I only wish more had more opportunity to do so.
It didn't rain? Must not have shaken the stick hard enough.
It means ritualistically imitating some advanced technology and thinking of it as magical way to get wealth and prosperity (based on primitive tribes building fake-airports and thinking that will bring the associated goods westerners coming to their land with airplanes had). And yes, it can involve all kinds of "rain dances or other backwards stuff" too.
"The name derives from the belief which began among Melanesians in the late 19th and early 20th century that various ritualistic acts such as the building of an airplane runway will result in the appearance of material wealth, particularly highly desirable Western goods (i.e., "cargo"), via Western airplanes."
They didn't imitate it "for the sake of it", they genuinely thought they would receive cargo by building runways.
So while it's not about rain dances and shakalaka sticks the previous commenter was on the money about the term cargo culting.
Explained the upvote because I don't want you to be confused.
The guy who ran the company into the ground through gross mismanagement was one of the speakers at SubSummit this year.
Such 'hustle'...
Really? To whom?
Being rich has always been sexy. Being busy working 70 hours a week not so much. Ask any partner of a workaholic.
And on top of that, the guys come from an already well off background. They were able to invest all the time they wanted in their personal projects, as mundane problems like paying the rent were never issue to them.
A million times this. Many, many, founders come from upper middle class families or better. Many of them have, or were earning, ivy league educations when they dropped out to run their funded businesses full-time. A good chunk of them have already exited at least 1 startup and are independently wealthy if they chose to live in most of the US, if not any city in the world.
It's easy to pour yourself into an idea when you're not worried about making your car insurance payment, making rent, hoping no personal emergency happens that you'll have to put on a credit card, it's a whole different story when you're lower middle class or lower and have no cushion. When you have no family to fall back on when things don't pan out.
Hustle is sexy when you have an exit, when you have a safety net, when you have a support system. Hustle is tantamount to slavery when you don't have these things. When hustle is a means of survival it can quickly become toxic, demoralizing, soul-crushing and even dangerous to your health but when you come from a position of means it's just a challenge, another way to get that adrenaline and endorphin release.
For a third connotation that is close to the GP's, think of a coach telling his players to hustle on the basketball court. To me, that means they need to play hard and quick, not that they need to try more to bend the rules, take advantage, etc.
That's interesting, I always assumed the coach was actually suggesting they try to bend the rules and do whatever's necessary to win, but your interpretation makes more sense.
You could play the game without hitting the ground, but if you wanted to hustle and win, you had to get your clothes dirty.
You weren't breaking any rules, just doing what other people wouldn't.
Well, if we're going with Yiddish slang, the term would be freier, meaning "sucker" (https://www.haaretz.com/.premium-word-of-the-day-freier-1.52...).
If other people want the hard-working founder lifestyle, and if they find these videos motivating and useful, I don't see why we should try to tear them down. People don't need to be criticized or psycho-analyzed just because they have different life goals and dreams.
Edison famously said that genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. Was he fetishizing Hustle Porn as well?
edit: Thanks for the name fix
> But there is a lot wrong with the idea that you need to work until your health is impacted to succeed
Yeah but that's the thing: people tell you it makes totally sense to work long hours if you have the time, no commitments in life etc. Those people can be parents, 'peers' (whatever that means), people on the Internet... My bosses - during the times in which I was regularly employed - rarely told me such things. But to come back to the point, nobody of these people tells you to work while you're seriously sick or to work yourself to death. They tell you to work yourself into a higher position, wealth, etc.
So by the time you're health or social life are affected, it's already to late. I mean this is not a process where you turn one day to the other from healthy to sick. It's a gradual process and you realize it when it's years to late.
> To me this ties into the gross, pervasive trend of wantrepreneurism. Shark Tank, Zuck, Elon Musk - being a founder has never been sexier, never been more interesting or lucrative.
I've heard the term 'wantrepreneurism' but the people you mention are highly exceptional and super successful. Chances that you can copy them are for various reasons next to 0,0000%.
> In the wake of that, WeWork and GaryV and a whole bunch of people are selling the idea that regardless of how bad your idea is or how unfit you are to be an entrepreneur, all you need is access or hustle to succeed. And that's awful, awful advice.
In my experience this is not true. I mean when you encounter people working in the startup scene running accelerators etc., there are not tired to tell anyone how selective they are, that this stuff isn't for anyone, brainstorm any aspects of your idea that might be stupid. When you listen on the people on the videos, you realize that this is also the whole point of this hustling porn: either you have incredible luck or you work like crazy so you become successful. That said, I think the original Medium article which popularized this topic recently was much more on point: https://medium.com/@nateliason/no-more-struggle-porn-202153a...
Unfortunately many in our modern society are caught up with tying the idea of "accomplishment" with work and "productivity". Accomplishment is a completely subjective idea, as is personal satisfaction and happiness. I've found that most people who seek to lose themselves in their work or derive satisfaction out of being as "productive" as possible are usually very unhappy people overworking themselves in an effort to distract themselves from their unfulfilled lives. I am not referring to those who truly enjoy what they do, and thus can "work" all the time and find actual fulfillment. People like this (artists, writers, ect) would be engaged in this "work" whether or not they were getting paid. I'm referring to the people who put in an extra 20 hours of overtime at an office job they don't particularly like, or work a "side hustle" in their few, spare hours because they have been convinced that if they aren't being "productive" all the time that they are being lazy, or that their time is being wasted.
For most people work is a means to an end - not something that can or should define you as a human being.
His main message is to be self aware and to be patient. In fact, in many videos he clearly makes the case that entrepreneurship has become glamourous and he warns against the dangers of faking it till you make it mentality.
It is clear why people latch onto the narrative. Working insane hours is a way to conceal incompetence.
When your boss or employees come knocking and sees the complete waste you have made of your task, you can point at your complete lack of social life and how much you have martyred yourself for your company as proof of your competence. "I can't be a fuck-up, look at how hard I worked!" THAT is a participation trophy.
I have a revolutionary new form of hustle: It's called taking care of yourself and getting an education AKA "Growing Up".
I do weight training after work every day. I eat healthy. I cook food with my girlfriend. I read multiple programming books a month ( Shout-out to Uncle Bob!). I read multiple other types of books a month. I meditate. I go to bed on time and get up on time. I work on side-projects. I even find time to smoke some weed and play video games with my friends!
And I am extremely productive. I'm constantly learning. I measure twice and cut once instead of hopelessly flailing at a keyboard long into the night. I do not need to martyr myself to make sure everyone around me knows how hard I am working, it's just obvious from the quality of my work.
I don't think I slack off, I just recognize that I'm going to get more out of doing weight training than I will spending another hour on the same code-base I've been hacking on for the last 8 hours.
To be clear: I hate working out. HATE. IT. It is so boring!
Dunno about that; you're supposed to have breaks so the muscle has time to repair itself unless you're just not pushing.
A VC lecturing everyone to work their asses off reminds me of this:
www.jwz.org/blog/2011/11/watch-a-vc-use-my-name-to-sell-a-con/ (not direct-linked due to a referrer-prank):
> Michael Arrington posted this article, "Startups Are Hard. So Work More, Cry Less, And Quit All The Whining" which quotes extensively from my 1994 diary. He's trying to make the point that the only path to success in the software industry is to work insane hours, sleep under your desk, and give up your one and only youth, and if you don't do that, you're a pussy. He's using my words to try and back up that thesis.
> I hate this, because it's not true, and it's disingenuous.
> What is true is that for a VC's business model to work, it's necessary for you to give up your life in order for him to become richer.
> Follow the fucking money. When a VC tells you what's good for you, check your wallet, then count your fingers.
To be clear, hustle isn’t just hard work — it’s showing that you’re working hard. It’s Instagram posts about how much you have to travel for work, it’s LinkedIn and Medium memos about how if you’re not working yourself to the bone you’re not doing enough. It also smacks a little bit of “work at all costs.” And if you’re not struggling, you’re probably not working hard enough.
Sadly, this has been going on for years, even before social media gave it an outlet for fetishization. Accelerators like Y Combinator and TechStars as well as VC and angel communities are a big part of the problem, emphasizing questionable demonstrations of "progress" as a condition for getting into the program and getting attention from investors like Gary V. I've seen it in graduate business programs, too, thanks to lecturers drawn from the investor class and academics who push students to learn how to appeal to them.
Some call it "startup theater," but "hustle porn" works, too.
A woman called in saying she was working three jobs where one was her main income, and she had 2 side opportunities. Her basic question was which one to pick. He told her 'eat shit' for the next couple years and take no vacations, just completely grind out her existence and nothing else.
The guy is seriously a maniac recommending this approach. He doesn't consider at all the risk of burnout, and how a real burnout can set you back so far. There's zero balance to his approach. I've also found it amusing there is no talk of what you should do when you retire or get the money you are aiming for.
I did this for three years. It sucks, and my god is it a roll of the dice with your health, wealth and happiness. But for me, at the time, the risk of breaking was worth the chance at stability and autonomy.
It’s terrible universal advice. But if wealth and power matter to you; and you diligently save, take sensible risks, and remain health- and mental-health-wise grounded, it can skip you up quickly. (Important, for me: having friends I could spend evenings with, eating macaroni and drinking cheap wine. Also, don’t do this if you haven’t found product-market fit.)
This is basically the survivor fallacy: you didn't win because you risked ruining yourself, you won because you got lucky. Risking to ruin yourself just meant you increased your chances of winning (while also significantly increasing your chances of losing).
Teaching people they'll be successful as long as they're willing to "eat shit" for years may create a handful of winners but it will also cause a ridiculous amount of ruined lives (not to mention families and relationships).
Imagine playing Russian roulette with only one empty chamber but afterwards everyone who survives also gets a toin coss to determine if he also wins a billion dollars on top.
Sure, if you win, it was totally worth it because you came out of it unharmed and you have a billion dollars.
If you win the roulette but lose the coin toss, hey at least you were ever so close to winning the billion dollars. Maybe you'll write an inspiring blog post about how waking up before dawn and doing push-ups helped you come that far and about your plans to win that coin toss if you get another chance in the future.
Or you are sour about losing the coin toss and traumatised from the roulette but people now just lecture you about how you held the coin wrong and you should be lucky you even made it to the coin toss because if you fumbled the coin toss you really weren't skilled enough to win the roulette or you should have played for a few more rounds after nobody else was left because then you'd have definitely performed better at tossing that coin.
But if you lose the roulette, you're probably in no state to lament to anyone how terrible of an idea it was to play in the first place.
And if you look at the really successful ones, you'll notice they actually sometimes shot themselves but their parents or family were rich enough to make sure they wore a bullet-proof helmet.
It's luck. Risking your health and social life just slightly increases the number of coin tosses while loading more bullets in the chamber. Look at how many entrepreneurs are putting themselves out there and working themselves to death, then look at how many are billionaires -- heck, look at how many are millionaires. The rest that just vanishes? At best they gave up and decided to do something else.
Totally agree. Telling people to "eat shit" is terrible universal advice.
> if you lose the roulette, you're probably in no state to lament to anyone how terrible of an idea it was to play in the first place
Agree again.
That said, just because something depends predominantly on luck doesn't mean it is never worth it. Terrible universal advice can be decent advice to specific people. If, as you said, you are fortunate enough to have downside protection from family, it can be less risky than it generally is. On the other hand, if you are sure you'd be happier having tried and lost than never tried at all (and know just how bad this flavor of losing can be), it may be the only choice.
Most people aren't like that. But some are. My point is to avoid over-correcting. Don't "eat shit" because a shithead on the Internet told you too. But if you really feel that's what you must do, don't not do it because someone on the Internet told you not to.
Side note: anecdote comes to mind. Advice is a person talking to their younger selves.
I mean, you can do some back-of-the-napkin math and at least get a ballpark figure on the worthiness of an endeavor. 'Expected Value' is the term in stats. It's not too convoluted to run through the math here, but you can expand it as you need. Yes, things like 'freedom' and 'autonomy' are hard to quantify, but you can estimate them somewhat.
Or more simply: if you have a few tens or hundres of thousands of dollars you can fall back to even if everything goes wrong, it's worth the chance to become a millionaire/billionaire. If you don't have that safety net, you'll most likely ruin your life unless you're extraordinarily lucky (i.e. lucky enough to win even without the advantages nearly all the other winners already had).
Meritocracy is biased towards affluent starting positions.
In fact, just read the whole book of Ecclesiastes if you want some sobering realities on the nature of the hustle, the grind, the striving for material things:
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ecclesiastes+2&...
Because if you're a failure, it shouldn't be our job to provide for you or pay for your recovery, right? Right?
/s
It's a nice bedtime story, yeah, but people look at this crap for inspiration and guidance. "I want to be like that guy" except nothing in the story can be replicated to recreate the same outcome.
EDIT: Is "envy porn" a phrase yet?
There are probably smarter ways of increasing your luck though.
I got nowhere fast in life by just sitting around waiting for things to happen. I had all sorts of excuses on why I wasn't succeeding, the article likes to supply plenty, and they are just poisonous thoughts.
then i lit a fire under my butt. I wanted to be a principle engineer, so I did research by looking at profiles on linkedin and found a masters at a great school would make that path easier. I spent time waiting in the subway, nights, and weekends studying and applied. I got rejected. I kept improving my application, I got accepted.
I changed my mind on what I wanted to be and wanted to be a data scientist, preferably a top tech. lots of rejections, lots of no response. took me years of trying different things and spending my nights and weekends doing kaggle competitions and learning. eventually I got what I wanted.
hustling alone didnt get me where I wanted to be, but resting around on my laurels and blaming other things for my lack of success would have done nothing. worse than nothing, it would have made me a bitter failure.
the article suggests the hustle culture is a symptom of a failed work system because people are afraid to loose their job. I disagree. I think its because many recognize we are in a rare window in time that we can do so much with our effort. we may have to change our expectations, we may have to fail a bit before we get there, but if we keep trying better things will happen.
There is an extreme amount of entitlement and apathy in the US today as well.
So while extreme "hustle culture" is bad, and working yourself to death is very bad, the idea that you might have to "work Saturdays" in your 20's to get ahead also should not be considered an "extreme" position.
But to many people working even 40 hours a week is considered "too much work", being away from facebook for more than 2 hours is a burden, etc.
/s
If you're under age 30 and working long hours building a dating site app, some iOS or Android game with pay-to-win mechanics, or writing software so that peoples' clicks on ads can be tracked better, are you really doing anything to improve the world?
There should not be an extreme sense of urgency and deadline-looming rush when what you're developing is a third rate clash of clans clone.
But I read all the time how the video game development industry pushes people like this, until they burn out. There was a huge scandal about the 3D artists employed by a studio which produced the animated comedy movie "sausage party":
https://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=sau...
With the benefit of age and 20 years of experience in the industry, I'm not going to go into "emergency rush" mode for anything short of an ACTUAL emergency.
I was trapped by the hustler-porn during 2012-2014, got a job due to it, amassed some good money and it didn't make me happy at all. I was trying to think of myself as a better person because I struggled more and I was creating the struggle out of nothing just to overcome it and thus I, though I never admitted that to myself or showed that to anyone else, was actually amassing my pride trying to rise myself above others, thus falling myself into pride in the negative sense.
Article is very brief and not detailed about the alternative to hustler lifestyle. I guess it's simple - "do ya thang", don't overwork, value living, value some joys, sleep well and just be a _somewhat_ good man I guess. Not everyone will become a millionare. And "_somewhat_ good" is a keyword heere, not "100% good", but "_somewhat_ good"
I'd also like to highlight and cite 3 great things been said in the article, which pretty much sum up (as I think about it) what Hussein tried to say in it:
>When you believe the normal state of affairs is to feel like you’re struggling to make progress, you’ll be less likely to quit something that isn’t going anywhere.
>the myth that “if you work sufficiently hard, you’ll be one of these major influencers and one of these top people.”
>So some people end up thinking they have to do particular things that their colleagues don’t do to justify why they haven’t wasted their day.”
In all serious, this "generational" bullshit stereotypizes people, similarly to how racism tries to solely define people in terms of their skin shade. That's total bullshit, there are completely different people among people born in 1980-1998 and some were already growing with tech, some didn't, some born in 1999 haven't seen tech to this day, some did, some've grown with it. Some of those born in 1960-1980 grew with tech too, they also are very prey-fallible to these types of "motivational" videos. And it's plain ridiculous to call someone a "young, cause millenial" cause they were born in 1980 but a 1979-borns are "not young, cause boomers". "Generational racism" (I'd go as far as to define it like that) just doesn't add anything to any conversation, enforces stereotypes and need to be fought against.
I encourage you to fight against it too. Generational racism wont do any good to people. Thanks!
people set unrealistic individual expectations.
survivroship bias. It's not that these business leaders are superior people, but many of them are lucky. Hustle helps, but so does luck, whether it's having a really high IQ (for tech jobs), family wealth (when starting business and having a safety net if the business fails), or 'right place at right time' (a domain name name + some simple coding could have made you rich in the mid-late 90's ,whereas nowadays you need a full-scale app with tons of stuff to maybe have a shot at a small amount of funding or a small acquisition).
I'm not constantly peppered by this phenomenon on my feeds. In fact, lately I've been find more of the opposite: the growing culture of valuing 8 hours of sleep, mental health, and the like. This trend seems to be especially strong in the world of entrepreneurs. YC's Startup School had a talk on "How To Win" [1] - all about how to stay sane and healthy as a founder. Podcasts like ZenFounder [2] are teaching more of the same and building up that field. And I haven't even read it yet, but the popularity of books like It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work [3] represent a growing movement of successful people - who I'd say still work quite hard - that avoid these pitfalls and are very loud in teaching others how to do the same.
I'm sure, as the author suggests, there're people who take all the motivational talk to an extreme. But there's an alternative that I hope many of us are following: don't just blindly work hard - because working hard is important - but work smart, too.
[1] https://www.startupschool.org/videos/53
[3] https://www.amazon.com/Doesnt-Have-Be-Crazy-Work/dp/00628747...
"Hustle Porn" was quite popular in tech several years ago. It lost its luster and it's no surprise that the hustlers have now moved into broader markets.
“No amount of grifting or endless working” will help alleviate the gender pay gap, which, according to the World Economic Forum, won’t close for another 200 years
I read on here all the time that the “gender pay gap” doesn’t exist. So which one is it?
The second one is the wide chasm between what men make on average and what women make. If you find it confusing why these two are different, consider nurses vs doctors. These two jobs vary by pay and gender balance, and for this combined population women make less money on average. This is something we probably want to be concerned about as a society, but likely cannot solve it with enforcement of existing laws as it has myriad factors like degree selection, gender role norms, employer selection, time in workforce, labor participation by age, overtime availability, and everything in the first category. I call this systemic bias, because there's not one bad actor we need to punish here. Rather, it emerges as the a rational equilibrium, in response to societal level pressures -- not all of which are rational themselves. This is the sphere where we cross our fingers that maybe Computer Engineer Barbie will adjust things a percentage point while we search for the hundred other, much harder things we need to do to unbias society.
So, re: "grifting or endless working." Not a prescription for solving systemic gender bias. Getting up early for your teaching job or working more hours as a nurse won't solve the fact that you're not an engineer or surgeon. A few dozen more women in VC funded executive positions won't move the needle either.
But in general, you should probably take what folks on HN say with a grain of salt.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_pay_gap_in_the_United_S...
Anyone that has a deeper understanding of Gary V, Simon S, know that that they have quite a bit more background than just a message of go hustle yourself to the ground. I don't necessarily agree with everything they say, but that's where my (your) personal judgement comes in. Nobody is has all your answers.
Alas, the kids/family, once you have a deeply rooted family, that will take over. Time will start shrinking and it becomes harder and harder. Not saying it can't be done or others don't favor their mission over their family, just that it's an issue, so address it.
Don't blindly ignore the encouragement to work hard and don't ignore how that affects you.
People kind of get the wrong image of him since they tend to hear only the 'hustle' stuff of working your ass off for a few years on some project. But he has a ton of other advice too, and much more "sensible" ones at that. Not too long ago he changed his eating habits, lost weight and promoted healthy living. I believe he's also put emphasis on getting enough sleep. He's said multiple times that he knows a lot of people who make 50k a year and are happier than many millionaires. I think he usually gives the "eat shit and work hard" type of advice to people who are asking him for a formula to success on their business. And it is true, you have to work hard to achieve something exceptional.
Talking about 'hustle', I think it really depends how you define it in the first place. You can do a bad, BS hustle by working to get Internet points and validation from strangers on social media. Or even worse, do something to con people out of their money. To me a positive hustle is putting in constant work, not being afraid to sell and market your stuff, and most importantly, starting before you are ready.
I'm not a zealot of the Vaynernation but I have found some of his messages helpful. One of his key principals is to document your journey. I love this idea and I've recently gotten over the fear of doing it myself, posting VLOGs and doing things more publicly using my real name (you can search this username and find out more). Another message is that "you could die tomorrow". Sure, this is a bit dramatic and cliche, but it did give me courage to push on with doing some things that I might have procrastinated on.
Overall, I find Gary's content useful for the most part, especially his insights on social media. If you just know him from 'hustle hustle' type of things, I suggest you try to dig a bit deeper to his videos and blogs. He does know his stuff.
This Hustle Porn is just one area where people can be led astray, and they all come back to this same principal of belief that there are people who have everything together.
A more generalised solution is simply to compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not who someone else is today.
edit: last sentence
It's true that much of the "hustle" advice is rarely actionable business strategies, but that's not much different from listening to music or having faith in a religion and finding guidance and support within. There's also endless amounts of education material for the people that seek it out, and if the push they need to do so comes from a cheesy video or quote then more power to them.
Is the judgement really necessary in all this? I find that much more counter-productive.
Try working in a field where this isn't true, and tell us if you still think this is the best time ever to be a human. Do high school teachers (who have to compete with the internet) think 2018 is the greatest?
Things are better now than they've ever been. There's still poverty, war, famine, disease, etc. but way fewer people die to those things than at any point in history. 80% of the world's children get their vaccines. Girls go to school almost as long as boys. Child mortality is dropping sharply in the world, etc.
So does things still suck for the person who gets terminal cancer? Of course it does. But humanity is doing great.
Work ethic is great and shows through. But you don't get far ahead when you Karōshi [1] yourself. If it hurts, stop.
As others said, why? Give us some reasons.
In N(1) space and N time
This is completely irrelevant to the article being discussed.