The Toxic Grind
vadimkravcenko.com
vadimkravcenko.com
I’m not sure how to reorient myself. It’s extremely disturbing to look back and think that all the good stuff was a side effect of spending enormous energy trying to outcompete others for opportunity. I don’t want to keep doing things this way, but I also don’t know how to change.
I can't tell you what will work for you, but I've decided for me that real change happens in small sections in myself and in people. It looks small and incremental, and the world seems large but sometimes that's enough... well, it is for me and that's one of the changes I've made to me... most of the time. It doesn't seem to be working as well, lately with all of the chaos in the world. I'm working on it, though =)
Human default is pretty biased towards cooperation, what with our speech and long childhoods and social organization, but of course, as the great success of science these past few hundred years shows, sometimes you need the loners pushing towards a hard to find insight.
Of course, if you don’t care about solving problems or making things more pleasant and interesting and just want to optimize the number of dollars in your banks database, then maybe you wouldn’t care about the most efficient way to solve problems. In which case, good luck, but there are reports from people that have pursued that path that it doesn’t hold a candle to contributing to a Great Common Task.
[[Citation Needed]]
This isn't true in the industry at large. To the degree it's true among the HN demographic it's true early in careers. People don't do that forever. If you have a family, you like the stability of a place and don't want to have to spend all of your nights and weekends grinding Leetcode and networking. Once you're in a senior position, it takes time to build the connections and reputation inside a company to be effective, and constantly moving is a disadvantage. Even if you're done being promoted, many people reach a point where they're earning enough to support their lifestyle and have other priorities. I have plenty of friends at companies like Microsoft, Google, and smaller boring companies HN doesn't care about that absolutely could switch jobs for another 20-40% in comp but would have to work twice as many hours a week to do so, and that's a bad trade.
Too bad there is not normally the structure in place to better reward co-operation rather than competition.
On one end you have the sigma grind who work all the time and on the other those who don't do anything and complain.
Both are toxic in their own ways since accomplishment is so critical to self-worth. Yet, at the same time you have to listen to your body and rest.
I find that the happiest people don't read the hustle culture and just focus on their family and are happy with what they have.
The problem is some of us can't help but work so we have to accept that grinding is better than self-loathing. For some that's a false dichotomy, for others it is truth. That's sad.
The key is to look for where you get the most return on invested energy. There are times where work is a thankless grind that doesn't care if you put in 20 hours or 80. There are times where putting in an extra 5 hours leads to a promotion/accomplishment of note. When you have 40 hours of spare capacity, binging netflix is not going to make you happy in the long term.
At the office, expecting everyone to want and be able to put in 60 hours a week is going to be a problem. I did this for my first 3 jobs, and it caused friction with those who are putting in their 30/35. Ultimately, it lead to me burning out and changing jobs rapidly for 5 years - because I wasn't getting out of my job something commensurate with the extra investment I was putting in.
I think something often missed is you have to learn what makes you happy. I feel like that should be a top priority (and it may very well turn out to be work that makes you happy). If you can figure out what brings you happiness and joy in your life then you can get started maximizing it.
I'm 46 and have done enough to look back and identify the happiest moments in my life, derive a pattern, and then work to maximize the chances of more of those moments. For me, it all revolves around relationships either with my kids, wife, family, or friends. Not once do my happiest moments involve a screen or my work so I don't chase those things. I work, and work hard, to provide for myself and family but that has never brought me joy. For me, working and work success is how i pay the bills and that's it.
I’m so freaking glad to be out of the rat race.
For the record, I spend a significant amount of time, “working.”
I use the quotes, because what I do, doesn’t really feel like “work.” It’s a joy. It’s what I always wanted to do.
I also get up at 5AM, walk three miles, and “work” until bedtime, seven days a week. No one pays me, and I’m fine with that.
There is always a “grind” phase of my “work”; particularly when I approach release (I am in that phase, now, on my main project), but you always need to do that, when you ship anything. I still get great joy from shipping, so the “grind” is worth it.
I had to be forced into this position. No one would hire me, so I had to retreat.
Thank Cthulhu.
For me, the 9-5 routine every single week is a toxic grind, with weekends off and all. My preferred work routine covers about the same hourly total, but it's basically three weeks on nonstop, one week off to recuperate and relax and do other things.
This is clearly not for everyone, but I think it has some similarities to how our ancestors lived. Say you're a Polar Inuit, and the caribou are migrating. You hunt caribou around the clock, then relax, store the product, take it easy for a while. Say you're a simple farmer, and it's harvest time, or planting time - you work around the clock to bring in the harvest/plant the crop, then take it relatively easy for a while.
In the modern world, if you're working on something complicated, there's this 'loading time' factor just to get the situation into your head. If it takes a few hours to get up to speed, and you have to do that every day, it's just wasted time. Get up to speed, work straight through with it all in your head, get some food and sleep, and the next day - you're still up to speed. This is far more productive (for complex work) than the awful 9-5 routine, and weekends surrounded by crowds of people are not that great, either. Much better to have a whole week off afterwards.
Where this goes off the rails is when some boss says, no, you don't get that week off, I need you to work like a slave every single week. This is a problem with the hierarchical nature of most modern human societies, and typically said boss is out at 2:00 every day for that important golf game where the important deals are made and the important cocktails are drunk, can't miss that. The construction boss who shows up at the site to 'oversee' for an hour or two is the classic example of this.
In our current society, the only real option for this kind of approach appears to be self-employment, which has a whole other set of problems.
doesn't work if you have family.
there are other ways to get up to speed faster.
for me it is the layout of windows on my computer. as long as everything is exactly the way i left it the day before, and there are no other concerns i need to deal with. then i can get back into it quickly. that's why i really hate turning off my computer, and i'd like the idea of computers permanently keeping state, so i don't have to worry about keeping it running.
People are starting to wake up to it though. I've seen several social media parody accounts pop up to make fun of the garyV types.
Do we have to swing the pendulum so far in the opposite direction to be calling it, in all cases, a mental illness?
If you do that you will become insane and quite literally die. You will also fail at hustling because the vast majority of people are not in physical condition to maintain this level of output.
Working "hard" is neither a small thing, nor is it sustainable over time, so I simply don't do that. Instead, I set my goals and timelines, have my team hold me accountable, use my good working hours to hit those goals with rock-solid reliability, and not force myself to work outside those good hours. There's no need to grind or panic at all, and I have plenty of non-working hours to pursue all the non-work things that matter to me.
After that I feel like I do better work for the rest of the afternoon.
I don’t post on social media much but maybe I should…
Perhaps the folks not “hustling” don’t attract or ask for much attention?
I was more than a little horrified when I found people were serious…
I contend that the rat race exists not because of collective delusion but because of basic economics.
I want:
1. to have a family
2. to provide security for my family
3. to provide a reasonable education/upbringing for my family
All of these things are becoming more expensive if you take the traditional route.
The Fed is aware that in today's 'cancel culture' a lot of public outcry that finally realizes the Fed's activities weaken it's future if political will becomes too strong. Thus it needs something to 'point to' for those whose brains freeze up when 'numbers' are involved.
With a lot of young people opting out of having kids and trying to find their own way in life, it would make sense that the anti-work and anti-hustler culture is much more prevalent in younger people (millenials being first). Its a generational shift first of all driven by oncoming climate disaster due to over population and will be felt through wars and hungers. Why should young people contribute to such a society and create more suffering in the process.
I am not an anti-natalist, but if we start talking multi-generational that's what it comes down to
I think it's a combination of delusion and basic economics, with a huge pinch of cultural heritage.
Almost everyone in the tech industry is constantly bemoaning how many open many open positions they have and how hard it is to hire people.
Doesn't seem very zero-sum to me - unless you want to become CTO at Facebook or something.
This may be less clear in tech and for us cause the boom times have been very good, but imagine a scenario like the big company in your small town is hiring, and that's your path to potentially a steady income. You don't know when they are hiring again, and your town's opportunities are limited.
In any case the idea that there aren't zero sum competitions in life (another example is competing for a certain romantic partner, something I didn't even mention which i realize is implicitly perhaps behind a lot of this among young people) is a myth that a lot of people push because they simply don't like competition and competing I think. Not only are there zero sum or approximately zero sum games in life, they are among the most impactful ones.
What you're describing is modern day insanity.
It's telling that conservative groups that rail against the sins of lust, gluttony, sloth, and envy usually leave out pride, greed, and wrath.
Nobody is actually promoting to work from when you wake till late at night to make a dollar. Even if you go fully into hustle culture the goal isn't to drink on a yacht - it's to accomplish important self goals like writing a screen play or publishing a book.
That seems to assume work has just one purpose. That strikes me as false, in that different persons can have different purposes for doing work.
Can you elaborate?
The world has far, far, FAR more productive capacity than actual problems needing to be solved, but since everyone has to do something to make money, we dig holes for someone to fill them in, create checkboxes so someone can check them.
"We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living." -- Buckminster Fuller
https://www.newsweek.com/every-us-company-4-day-workweek-ful...
Doesn’t make the authors point any less valid though I do think this mindset applied to self improvement is less harmful than pure work
"Being “off” and doing other hobbies when not at work."
for many people, side hustles are their hobby. Side hustles don't have to be your hobby though.
As usual the author, who invariably lives in the white collar tech-bubble, and therefore is bombarded with "hustle culture" stuff in their LinkedIn etc...sets up a strawman and then attempts to dismantle it:
>This is a universal longing in a capitalist world — getting ahead of others is the holy grail of life. Why else would you be living if not to have more material things than others?
I'm pretty well read in philosophy and economics and I have never once ever heard a serious and well considered argument that material wealth accumulation is a normative goal for any system.
Someone please point me to a large subset of people or even one serious philosopher who would make this claim.
Further, even the hustle culture people (of whom I'm no fan) don't even make this claim.
Here, this is what the American people value in life according to Pew: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2018/11/20/where-americ...
Of course every single author of one of these pieces inevitably gives the literal exact same advice on what SHOULD be considered the priorities and wouldn't you know it looks eerily similar to what people self-report as where they find meaning.
Yawn. As a community lets promote better stories to the top.
>They’re not glorifying the process of achieving this wealth, not the journey, just the end result, just pure “Here’s my yacht, bro”.
Kind of takes on a whole new meaning for someone growing up in a yachting community who aspires to work closely with chemicals regardless.
No. There is no playbook or inevitability playing out. "Late-stage capitalism" is just lazy cynicism by a different meme.
I believe in continued failure until success. Letting failure die.
Capitalism in it's current form has it's incentives mis-aligned. When aligned correctly, and not solely chasing the highest returns or Internal Rate of Return - capitalism can be the most potent force I feel on Earth.
Why? Because it aligns humans incentives (do better, provide more for self & family) with growth.
Humans are bell curve like all other species. Nature rewards either strength, physical advantage, or mental advantage.... and there is constant competition. That's just the way it works in human nature.... humans are wired that way.
You either participate, don't, or find a different way. Griping about it accomplishes little. The gorilla that is sad he's not a silver back gets his skull crushed.
Grinding hard is being sold to people as some kind of normal that everyone should participate in. And people buy into it, myself included. Maybe I'm not a so-called Silverback and I think this article (short essay?) is trying to validate that it's OK.
In the end, I do agree with "either participate, don't, or find a different way" but I think it might be a tad dismissive to call this "griping" unworthwhile. In order to push back against the culture of grinding, we gotta start somewhere, even if it's by "griping".
Humans who are not part of a group do not live long or well. Competition is just an artificially set up arrangement to find good solutions where the answer isn’t that obvious, like the allocation of goods and services in a multi-producer, multi-consumer money based economy. Free markets can work quite well when they avoid concentration of power in large corporations that start to violate the axioms of a free market, or when the corporations can overwhelm the government and stop regulation. But the sense of competition of all against all they seem to inspire is not accurate.
An example - although people disagree with Musks's methods, an alternate version of Tesla/SpaceX that treats employees more well rounded like, would be a great model. Advancing society, and helping those involved in creating it.