Hustle Culture: Where It Came From and What It Costs

Hustle culture is the belief that success goes to whoever works the most, so long days, side projects and visible busyness become proof of ambition and even of personal worth. Parts of the idea are centuries old, its modern form owes much to marketing and social media, and it has hardly been studied on its own terms: a PubMed search in October 2026 found four records using the phrase, none of them a study that measured hustle culture and tracked its effect on health.¹

Its costs therefore have to be read from neighbouring research on long weeks and compulsive work, so this page keeps the cultural story and the health evidence apart. Both bear on how work and the rest of life fit together.

What is hustle culture?

Hustle culture is an informal label for shared messages about work: that nonstop effort is a virtue, that rest is a weakness to be overcome, and that every spare hour should be earning or improving something. No research paper fixes one definition, so the wording below is our summary of how the phrase is used.

These messages travel through ordinary channels: a post of a 4:30 a.m. alarm with a coffee and a to-do list, a manager who praises the person who answered email on holiday, a friend who calls a weekend spent on a second income “building freedom.” None is harmful alone, and plenty of people choose a hard stretch for a launch, an exam or a new business. The culture is the assumption that the stretch should never end, and that wanting it to end says something bad about you.

Because the label covers so many things, start with your own week. Take the three longest days of the last fortnight and write one word next to each: “boss” if someone else set the hours, “bills” if you needed the money, “belief” if you kept going because stopping felt lazy. Each answer points to a different fix.

Where did hustle culture come from?

Hustle culture draws on two older threads: the moral weight that Protestant teaching gave to everyday work, as the sociologist Max Weber described it in essays of 1904 and 1905, and an American vocabulary of “hustle” that the management researchers Nicolai Jepsen and Lauren Eaton trace from the late nineteenth century to the present.

Weber’s book, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, argued that Protestant, especially Calvinist, ideas encouraged people to treat ordinary work as a calling, to live frugally and to reinvest what they earned, and that this helped capitalism spread in northern Europe. He quoted Benjamin Franklin’s advice, “Remember, that time is money,” to illustrate the attitude. Near the end he wrote that the religious reasons had faded while the duty to work remained, an obligation he pictured as an iron cage.²

The thesis is famous and disputed. Historians such as Fernand Braudel and Hugh Trevor-Roper argued that capitalism developed in Catholic communities before the Reformation, and Laurence Iannaccone wrote that its most noteworthy feature is its absence of empirical support.³ Weber is more useful as a history of attitudes than of economic growth. On his account the duty to work outlived the faith behind it, which may help explain why an idle Sunday can feel like something to excuse, even for people who have never been religious.

The word itself has a separate history. In a 2025 paper in Management & Organizational History, Jepsen and Eaton of Copenhagen Business School follow “hustle” through American usage and argue that it has been used by turns to legitimize, stigmatize and celebrate different kinds of work. They name three ways it has been promoted: as an escape for workers from poor conditions, as a way to remove the stigma from nontraditional work, and as a way to sanctify alternative work arrangements within entrepreneurial ideology.⁴ Only the paper’s abstract could be read for this article.

When an app, a founder or an influencer praises your hustle, ask which of those three versions is on offer: a way out of a bad job, a respectable name for insecure work, or a sales pitch.

How tech founders, gig apps and social media sold the grind

The modern version took shape in the 2010s, when gig platforms, tech founders and social media turned long hours into a brand, often voiced by people or companies that gained when others worked more.

In 2017 the freelance marketplace Fiverr ran an advertising campaign called “In Doers We Trust,” with posters in New York subway cars. The writer Jia Tolentino, in The New Yorker, described it as the gig economy dressing up overwork as an aesthetic, and set it beside a Lyft blog post that cheered a driver who kept taking passengers while in labor; Lyft did not give its drivers paid maternity leave or health insurance.⁵

Sleep deprivation is your drug of choice. You might be a doer.

A year later Elon Musk, then running Tesla and SpaceX, posted that nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week. Asked how many hours it took, he said about 80 was sustainable, with peaks above 100, and that the pain grew sharply beyond 80.⁶ In China the same idea had a timetable: the “996” schedule, 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. six days a week, spread through Chinese tech companies. Workers protested against it online in 2019, the businessman Jack Ma called it a huge blessing, and the Supreme People’s Court called it illegal in 2021.⁷

Social media then turned the message into memes about the “sigma male” and his “grindset,” which are often used ironically, mocking hustle culture by presenting absurd routines as discipline.⁸ The journalist Derek Thompson coined a related word, workism, in The Atlantic in 2019, for devotion to work so strong that it becomes a person’s purpose in life.⁹

1. Late 1800s on: the word hustle in American usage, by turns praised and looked down on
2. 1904 and 1905: Max Weber’s essays tie the Protestant idea of work as a calling to the spirit of capitalism
3. 2017: Fiverr’s “In Doers We Trust” ads in New York subway cars celebrate sleep deprivation
4. 2018: Elon Musk posts that nobody changed the world on 40 hours a week
5. 2019: Chinese tech workers protest the 996 schedule online; the Supreme People’s Court calls it illegal in 2021
6. Late 2010s to 2020s: “grindset” memes, often mocking the idea, spread on social media

When a post or a boss tells you that real ambition means skipping sleep, check who gains from your extra hours. It may be the platform taking a cut, the founder recruiting or the account selling a course.

Side hustles and flat pay: the economics underneath

For many people the hustle is about money more than identity. The International Labour Organization’s Global Wage Report 2024-25 found that in high-income countries output per worker grew about 29 percent between 1999 and 2024, while pay grew about 15 percent, so pay rose at roughly half the pace of what workers produced.¹⁰

That gap makes extra income attractive. Wikipedia’s overview of side jobs links their spread in the United States to wage stagnation and to pay that has not kept up with living costs, and notes that a side job lengthens working hours.¹¹ A side hustleside hustle: Paid work done alongside a main job or other main activity, such as freelancing, gig work or selling goods online. Income from it is usually taxable, and the rules depend on where you live.Full entry in the glossary can be a sensible choice; how side hustles work and who takes them has its own guide.

Two people can both work 60 hours a week for different reasons. A nurse takes extra shifts to cover rent, while a consultant posts about her early starts because she believes rest is for the unambitious. For the nurse, the levers are pay, rota rules and household costs, and a lecture about rest helps little. For the consultant, the lever is the belief itself, and that belief is what hustle culture supplies. If your own week came out as “bills,” treat the hours as a money problem first.

Does working longer hours make you more productive?

Total output rises with hours only up to a point. The best-known evidence comes from the economist John Pencavel of Stanford University, who in 2014 reanalysed weekly records of British munitions workers from the First World War and found that each extra hour added less once weeks became long.

The study

Limited evidence

Pencavel (2014): output and hours in a First World War munitions factory

In weekly records from a large factory in the English Midlands in 1916, output rose in step with hours up to about 49 hours a week and more slowly after that. Output peaked at about 63 hours, and 70-hour weeks produced little more than 56-hour weeks. Holding weekly hours constant, weeks without a Sunday rest day went with output about a tenth lower.¹²

The workers were mostly women doing physical work in wartime, and the data are a century old, so they say nothing precise about office work today. What carries over is the shape of the curve: past some point each extra hour buys less, and a day of rest can matter as much as the weekly total.

A modern study points the same way. Marion Collewet and Jan Sauermann followed 332 call-centre agents in the Netherlands from 2008 to 2010, whose hours were set by central scheduling, and found that agents handled calls more slowly as their hours rose. The authors call the loss mild and read it as a sign that fatigue matters even in mostly part-time jobs.¹³

Myth

Twice the hours means twice the output.

Fact

Historical factory data and a modern call-centre study both found each extra hour adding less; in the factory data, weeks without a rest day also produced less.

A report drafted at 11 p.m. after a ten-hour day comes from a more tired person than the one who started the day. Before adding hours, check how long your working stretches run and whether you get one full day a week away from work.

Why is hustle culture toxic? The health evidence is borrowed

Any case that hustle culture harms health rests on research into its ingredients, mainly long hours and compulsive work. The handful of PubMed records using the phrase include a news item, focus-group studies and a survey, and none follows people over time.¹

Long hours carry the clearest evidence. Systematic reviews by the World Health Organization and the International Labour Organization reported sufficient evidence that 55-hour-plus weeks are linked to higher stroke and heart-disease risk, and the two agencies used those reviews to estimate the worldwide toll.¹⁴ How large that toll is, and why some researchers dispute it, is set out in the long-hours estimate and the dispute around it. At the extreme, Japan has a name and an official count for death from overwork, karoshi.

Compulsive work is the second ingredient. A 2016 meta-analysismeta-analysis: A study that combines the results of earlier studies on the same question into one overall estimate. Pooling makes the estimate more precise, but it cannot repair the studies it pools: a meta-analysis of surveys is still survey evidence.Full entry in the glossary led by Malissa Clark linked workaholism to burnout, job stress, work-life conflict and poorer physical and mental health (we read its abstract).¹⁵

How the culture connects to those ingredients is our reading, and it is untested: hustle culture makes long weeks look normal and makes rest feel like failure, which pushes people toward both.

Is hustle culture the same as workaholism?

No. Hustle culture is a set of messages a society or workplace sends, while workaholism is a pattern in one person: working excessively and feeling compelled to keep going, with guilt or unease when work stops. The research on that pattern, and how it is measured, is explained in how workaholism differs from working hard.

Telling the two apart changes what helps. A delivery rider can work long weeks inside a hustle-heavy app economy and still switch off easily on a day off; the pressure is outside him. A designer can work modest hours yet feel restless and guilty whenever she stops; the pressure is inside her. Changing jobs may help the first, while the second may carry the drive into any job.

Signs hustle culture is costing you

The signs below are our own list, drawn from the research on long hours and workaholism cited above; none is a diagnosis.

• Rest days bring guilt or restlessness more often than relief.
• You sleep less on most nights than you did a year ago, and catch up only on holidays.
• You judge a week by hours logged and messages answered rather than by results.
• A health check, a dentist visit or exercise keeps getting postponed for work.
• Friends or family mention your hours often, or have stopped inviting you to things.
• Attempts to set a finishing time last a few days and then slip.

Some problems need help sooner than others. The three levels below are this article’s own grouping; the symptoms in each come from the bodies cited.

• Now: chest pain or discomfort, or sudden stroke signs such as a drooping face, an arm that drifts down or slurred speech, mean calling your local emergency number at once (in the US that is 911, and the CDC lists these signs).¹⁶¹⁷ Anyone thinking about suicide or self-harm should also call the local emergency number first. Find A Helpline, which the International Association for Suicide Prevention links to, lists verified free and confidential services in over 150 countries.¹⁸
• Within days or weeks: in the WHO’s account, a depressive episode means feeling low or empty, or losing interest in things you used to enjoy, for most of the day, nearly every day, for two weeks or longer, with other symptoms that can include broken sleep, tiredness or guilt.¹⁹ That pattern, or worry that keeps returning, is worth a visit to a doctor; the timing is ours.
• At your next appointment: if long weeks have turned into your usual pattern, bring it up with your doctor during a check-up, or with occupational health or an employee assistance program where your employer offers one.

The bottom line

Hustle culture has barely been studied directly, so its known costs are the costs of long hours and compulsive work, with the firmest health warning attached to regular weeks of 55 hours or more. Go back to the boss, bills or belief labels you gave your longest days, change the part you control first, and protect one full day off and your sleep before anything else.