Time to Ungrind

If you’ve ever worked three straight nights without sleep, downed multiple energy drinks to keep from fading in class, or bought pills off someone to stay up (or to crash after), you’re a victim of the hustle culture that tells us we aren’t enough.

How is hustle culture hurting us?

Most creative thinkers say a good night’s sleep, a quiet walk, and even stepping away from the project for a while are way better ways to be creative than staying up mindlessly grinding. That’s true for architects and engineers, physicists and doctors, and, of course, writers and artists. Lack of sleep eats away at our ability to think through processes and concepts.

Lack of sleep isn’t just hurting our creativity—it’s killing our productivity, too. With packed schedules and too much to get done, some people try to power through, pulling all-nighters and cramming. But there’s tons of evidence to show that we are least productive when we tackle projects like this. So we end up doing less by trying to do more.

So what is all of this lack of sleep and all those energy drinks doing to our bodies? Stress and sleep deficiency are directly linked to depression, which just makes all these issues worse. We feel like we aren’t doing enough, or we aren’t grinding hard enough, and we look for unhealthy ways to get things done.

“[Hustle Culture] creates the assumption that the only value we have as human beings is our productivity capability—our ability to work, rather than our humanity.”
-Aiden Harper

If you’re stressed out, burned out, or checked out, use these four steps to fight back against Hustle Culture.

Explore our stickers and use them to give Hustle Culture the middle finger.