Hustle Culture Told Me Rest Was Weakness. It Nearly Cost Me My Family.

Photo by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash

Hustle culture is the belief that your worth is proven by how much you work: always on, always producing, rest treated as weakness and slowing down treated as falling behind. People also call it grind culture or toxic productivity. And the reason it’s so hard to put down isn’t ambition. For most of us, the hustle is a way of outrunning a feeling.

Maybe you check email before your feet hit the floor. Maybe a day off makes you more anxious than a workday, so you fill it with a side project until the guilt goes quiet. Maybe you’re sick of the “rise and grind” posts, exhausted, and you still can’t stop.

Not long ago my wife Teale told me I had to get my act together. I couldn’t keep working sixteen hours a day. I was frightening her. The same month, my outrigger canoe coach told me the state I’d come back to the start of the season in was unacceptable.

I had multiple AI agents running on any given day, getting in each other’s way. I was working on five separate projects and I wanted to do ten. There’s a name going around for people like that: AI vampires, so productive that sleep feels like too high a cost. Exhausted and ecstatic at the same time. That was me. The delirium of being productive almost cost me my relationship, my lifestyle, my community.

And I teach people how their nervous systems work. I still almost lost the run of myself.

The part of me that does this has a name. I call him the Bull. He always promises the future. Once this project is done, then you can rest. Once the book is out, then you’ll be safe. I’m in my mid-fifties. I have enough data to know the other shore almost never arrives. The Bull just switches contexts and keeps running.

What’s really going on

If something in you eased at that line, or rushed in with the list of what’s still undone, notice it. Both make sense.

In my book I call this fiat work: work cut loose from the truth inside you and backed by fear instead. On ground like that, worth is never established, only re-earned. You perform it every day, from zero. That’s why hustle culture feels so normal and so exhausting at the same time. Effort doesn’t build into the felt sense of enough. It evaporates, and tomorrow you start again. Busy but not settled. Exhausted but never finished.

Most of the time we’re not really working for money. We’re working against shame: the old feeling that we’re not enough, that if we slow down someone will pass us and we’ll be found out. I watched a collapse live in my father, and somewhere inside me it never feels far away. One rest day. One bad market. One new industrial revolution the size of AI. That’s how close rest sits to danger when a part of you is guarding that door.

And success doesn’t fix it. In my twenties and thirties the Bull hustled and performed and produced, and every night, after the performance ended, I felt the same emptiness I felt as a boy sitting in a dark daycare. You can succeed at fiat work and still feel like nothing.

There are three ways a nervous system answers that pressure. The Relentless one works harder, sixty, eighty hours a week, striving to reach a future where the present is finally enough. They’re still working eighty hours a week as a billionaire. The Reluctant one is just as frightened but recedes: procrastinates, goes flat, gets defensive. Plenty of us yo-yo between the two. Hustle culture celebrates the first and shames the second. They’re the same wound.

So I don’t look at someone hustling and assume vanity or greed. I ask a simpler question: what does the future feel like in their body? When the future feels unreliable, grinding isn’t a character flaw. It’s intelligence under pressure. And none of this is a sneer at hard work. There’s real dignity in the double shift worked to keep a family fed. The question isn’t how hard you work. It’s what the work is backed by. Whatever your version is, you make sense.

The loop, on your situation

Coaching is how we go from where you are now to where you want to go. We only address the past when it emerges in the present. So take one moment this week when you couldn’t stop, and walk it through this.

Get ground in your body first

Feet on the floor. One breath out, a little longer than the breath in.

What happened

One plain sentence, the way a camera would have seen it. “I opened the laptop at ten on a Saturday night.” Not “I’m a workaholic”. Just the event.

Where it lands in the body

A buzz in the chest. A tight jaw. A pull in the hands toward the phone. Is it okay to stay with it for one breath, with permission to stop any time? And now what do you notice?

Who’s driving

Is it the Relentless one, or your own version of the Bull? Which coin is it holding: “not enough”, or “too much”, the fear that if you stop you’ll be a burden? It took that job because, once, it was needed.

Trace it

Only as far as today needs. When you were young, who in your family got to rest, and what was said about them? Then the wider layer: who taught you that busy means good?

Feel it and tell someone

Under the drive there’s usually fear, and sometimes grief for the years you’ve handed over to it. Let it be a feeling, not a verdict. Say one true sentence to someone safe: “I don’t know how to stop.”

One creative action

One protected hour this week where nothing needs to get better. Phone in another room. Small enough that the Bull can’t veto it, real enough that he notices.

How to step out of hustle culture, honestly

Most advice on hustle culture gives you a list: set boundaries, define your own success, take intentional rest, use your time off, stop multitasking. None of it is wrong. But a boundary set by the same frightened part tends to become another project, and now you’re grinding at rest.

So start with the body. Notice what actually happens in you when you stop: the itch, the guilt, the urge to check. Don’t fix it. Stay with it a breath longer than is comfortable. Then ask the Friend’s question, the one the hustle never asks: what do you need right now? Sleep, food, a walk, a person, nothing at all.

Next, look at what your work is backed by. Survival action says, “I have to get this now, or I may never get it.” Thriving action says, “I can invest, because tomorrow exists.” The aim isn’t to stop working hard. It’s to work from ground instead of from panic.

And keep people around who will tell you when you’ve lost the run of yourself. None of this is advice to leave a job; that’s yours to decide.

One thing to do tonight

Write down the sentence your Bull uses. “Once this is done, then I can rest.” Under it, write the last three times you heard it, and whether the shore ever arrived. Then put your phone in another room and give yourself twenty minutes where nothing needs to get better.

Would therapy help with this?

If the hustle is costing you sleep, presence and patience at home, but you’re still functioning, coaching is often the right size of help.

But if you’re in full burnout, if you can’t stop even when your health or your family is paying for it, or if the drive is covering a low mood that won’t lift, please work with a licensed therapist where you live. Physical symptoms like chest pain or sleep that won’t come back belong with a doctor. If you’re thinking about hurting yourself, call or text 988.

The path

What I’ve just walked you through is the Empathi Method. For an individual, it’s built on my Proof of Work of Being Human protocol: building sovereign ground inside yourself. On the Work ground, the plainest sign of progress is being able to rest without guilt.

There are two ways to keep going. You can start now with Figlet, an AI coach that’s there at 2 in the morning, on the Work ground, the next time you’re at the laptop at midnight. Or you can get on the list for the book and the live program with me, where we do this work together.

You don’t have to earn the right to stop. The shore was never the point.

I go deeper into this in my book, Proof of Work (Greenleaf Book Group Press, February 2027).

Common questions

What is another name for hustle culture?

Grind culture, toxic productivity and burnout culture all describe it. Underneath every name is the same idea: your worth has to be re-earned every day through output.

Is hustle culture toxic?

Hard work isn’t. What makes hustle culture harmful is that rest becomes a threat, effort never adds up to enough, and the people around you absorb the overflow.

How do you know if you’re caught in hustle culture?

Notice how you feel when you stop. If a free evening brings guilt, restlessness or the urge to check your phone, a part of you is still working, even when you aren’t.

The Friend, and its question “what do you need right now?”, come from the teaching of Aftab Omer at the Institute of Imaginal Studies, where I trained.