American View: Why the “Side Hustle” Imperative Is an Unforgiveable Myth

Of course it was the same tired Algerean schlock. All of this “get out there and hustle” advice is the perfect way to manipulate gormless new workers into killing themselves through uncompensated (or undercompensated) labour for the financial benefit of their superiors. Work harder than everyone else! Sort all your professional development on your own time and dime! Make your own opportunities to get back into the workforce quickly for when we lay you off! We’ll never take care of you, the executives patronise, because you are a fungible, expendable resource that doesn’t deserve basic human dignity. That’s okay, they smile, because you’ll be fine so long as you demonstrate enough moxie, buddy! Go get’em!

I can’t stand it. Be right back. Switching from coffee to bourbon.

Where were we? Right. Seething at the self-serving wholly-apocryphal hypocrisy thar serves as the foundation of our modern social and economic culture. Got it.

I think this topic is fresh in my mind because I just wrapped production this morning on the audiobook edition of my first self-help professional development book: Why Are You Here? A Curmudgeon’s Guide to IT Interviewing. I started writing columns here on Business Reporter’s sister site in 2012 to give younger businesspeople a hand up. I wanted to teach young people the things I wished I’d known while I was smashing into obstacle after obstacle on my own career “journey.” I wasted a lot of time, money, effort, and sleep trying to pull off an Algerean career jump and learned too late that my mentors’ “advice” was hollow wish fulfilment fiction. I figured if I could help just one person improve their own professional life by learning from (and maybe being entertained by) my mistakes, it would all be worth it.

At first, it was all volunteer labour for … nothing, really. Then, two years after I published my first column, one of my readers used my advice from WAYH? to escape a dead-end burnout job and get a new gig that let her rebuild her life. The year afterwards, a good friend of mine did much the same: he took what I’d taught in WAYH? and scored himself a killer new gig that allowed him to move out of Texas and start a fabulous new life. I know of two more people who have done much the same since then. That’s four lives positively impacted. [2]

Business media defines “success” in terms of gross revenues, stock valuations, market share percentages, and other abstract metrics. Crap leaders measure their success solely in terms of those arbitrary, soulless metrics. Good leaders measure success in terms of lives improved, suffering reduced, and hope liberated … one life at a time. 

 

Were those four successes worth the thousands of hours I’ve invested in this uncompensated “side hustle” internet pundit thing? Yes. Yes, they totally were. This is why I choose to give up half of my weekend every bloody week wearing out my keyboard writing these snarky opinion pieces for all-a-y’all.

 

To be blunt, Horatio Alger was full of crap: there isn’t any “cosmic providence” that will reward people with a fast pass out of the gutter and advance a righteous nobody over the masses to a life of riches and respectability. All we have is each other.

 

You can muster all the moxie in the world, but that won’t help you claw your way out of the economic basement without someone to first unlock the metaphorical doors that keep you trapped there. This is what we’re supposed to do for one another, especially now that we can no longer trust our corporate masters to do it for us. We must reach back and give people the hand up they need.

 

So, to all those smarmy, condescending, slick-haired busy-boys is the bespoke suits and burnished BMWs urging gullible twentysomethings to “work hard and hustle!” I say, “get wrecked.” My “side hustle” doesn’t make you greedy liars any money. Instead, my time-sink side project helps some of the vulnerable people you lot prey on to bypass your bullpucky. It’s how I choose to spend what little “free” time I have outside of the office and I’m not about to stop.

 

Most of the working professionals I know don’t have the time, energy, or income to sustain a project like this one at all, let alone for over a decade. Truth be told, I don’t either … but I despise the way good, honest, workers get exploited and driven to despair by the American white-collar meat grinder. I have some small ability to mess with y’all’s methods for keeping the most vulnerable workers in perpetual, futile, servitude. I also have a heap of stupid stories and an inexhaustible reserve of spite, so watch your six boys!

 

I can hammer out tall ladders faster than you lot can raise the height of your proverbial socioeconomic walls … and, once they get inside, they’re going to do the same for the people coming up behind them.

See y’all here again next week. Count on it. 😈

 

 

[1] No snickering, please. We’re supposed to be grown-ups.

[2] That I know of.