Hustle Culture and the Millennial Curse

Double, double, toil and trouble

(From Pexels, by Tnarg)

Every day we hustlin’

We don’t have hobbies; we have side hustles.

Do you enjoy writing? Start a Substack (that you secretly want to monetize but shh don’t tell anyone yet) or - heavens help you - try to get published. Enjoy visual art? Share it on Instagram and sell prints. Or maybe fitness and cooking are your things? Make reels, start a YouTube channel, and sell recipes/workout programs. No, you’re into music? TikTok your way to stardom and collect patr(e)ons that help you finance your demo.

Welcome to hell… err, I mean hustle culture¹.

While numbers vary somewhat among surveys, close to half of working-age Americans have a side hustle and the same is true for the UK workforce. That number is an average, though, and it’s significantly driven by Millennials and Gen Z’ers, of whom (again roughly) between 55 and 65% say they have a source of income beyond their main job. Here’s the painful part: the majority of those side hustlers state that they don’t do it for personal development or creative exploration. No, they do it to pay the bills.

In contrast, less than a quarter of Boomers (feel the need to) have a side hustle. Sure, part of that might be because of savings, pension, and so on. Still, something shifted when Millennials entered that scary land of the labor market. I think two things happened at around the same time, two things that, taken together, constitute something I’ve decided to call the Millennial Curse.

Timeline of generations. (Wikimedia Commons)

Part 1: village expansion

Millennials grew up alongside the internet. The commercialization and global expansion of the World Wide Web took place in the late 1990s, with the last restrictions on commercial data on the Internet being removed in 1995. Social media kicked off soon after in the early 2000s. Fellow Millennials, raise your hand if you remember dial-up modems. In those days, every time you tried to access the internet was a staticky roll of the dice, but by the time the first Gen Z’ers were born, the internet had become part and parcel of our daily lives.

In other words, Millennials were raised in a ‘local’ village yet they had to take their first adult steps in the ‘global’ village. Being the smartest young adult in your college class or the best athlete in your local gym was no longer good enough for early adult Millennials. No, we (yes, I’m a Millennial) had the whole world to compare ourselves to and we were inevitably left feeling lacking when we scrolled through endless feeds of (hyperrealistic) filtered realities we could never compete with as we tried - and still try - to build a life².

Thanks to our access to the global village, our availability bias can click on all of its virtual cylinders, and our instinct for comparison will always find someone who is orders of magnitude better at something we used to take pride in, but which has now become a source of shame and feelings of inadequacy.

This is not unique to Millennials, of course, but we were the first generation confronted with that pressure while they were trying to figure out their adult identity. We are the perennial immigrants in the global village. Not the already established identity of the Boomer, nor the digital nativity of the Gen Z’er…

Let’s make that worse. Millennials are also the first victims of the great decoupling.

Part 2: decoupled

Comparison is not only the thief of joy; it’s also a feedback loop of capitalism.

Besides the internet’s global expansion, another thing that started taking flight in the late 1990s is a phenomenon that economists call the great decoupling of productivity from wages. The gist is that the GDP produced per hour of work goes up while salaries even out. (I’ve written more about it here.) Or, since the first batch of Millennials entered the labor market around 2000, each worked hour is worth (comparatively) less and less³. This leads to the current paradoxical situation where living standards are better than ever, but fewer and fewer people can afford those standards — also known as the middle-class squeeze: increases in wages can’t keep up with inflation, except for the 1%.

When the Boomers ventured into adulthood, it was not uncommon to, after a few years of work, buy your own house with a mortgage that wasn’t going to strangle you with impossible interest rates. Today, Millennials are still (despite working from home being more prevalent than ever) less likely to be homeowners compared to Boomers and Gen X’ers when they were the same age.

Most Millennials were raised by Boomer parents. So, the life template most of them (I could say us) grew up with was: do good in school, so you can get a good job, which will allow you to buy a house, and then keep your head down, work hard, and you’ll have a few golden years left in retirement. While I disagree with several components of that sequence (big shock, I’m sure), it is, I think, the checklist most young Millennials were given when trying to figure out what to do with their lives, and from the Boomer perspective, it made sense.

It no longer does, or at least not to the same extent. An advanced degree no longer translates into employers clamoring for your attention, the gap between ‘good job’ and ‘buy house’ is larger than ever, and pensions are taking a beating worldwide so that for many people the future of golden years is beginning to look more like scrap metal. The great decoupling, including - for my US readers - crippling student debt, dangles above our heads like Damocles’ wrecking ball, with (hyper)capitalism as the knife cutting away at the thin thread that holds it up.

Of course, every generation has its challenges and its context and this is certainly not a case of Boomers versus Millennials. Yet, most Boomers were raised in a post-World War economic boom and they (very understandably) imparted their worldview of opportunity and stability to their Millennial kids. Meanwhile, Gen Z was/is being raised in a (decoupled) world transformed by the internet and they generally display more flexibility in things such as the importance of their job for their identity as well as trying new relationship forms (which intrigues me — another post, perhaps?).

Millennials are stuck between those two worlds: not the digital nativity and flexibility of the Zoomers and not the savings or prospective pensions of the Boomers. The unifying factor of my generation is the resulting cognitive dissonance that translates into a feeling of being lost and not knowing where to go. So, by the time the oldest Millennials dipped their toe into that poisonous pond called adulthood, the stage was set to have them work for (comparatively) less and feel ever more inadequate while doing so. Maybe a side hustle can make us feel worthy? Ah, the irony.

Well, fuck.

Bias alert! As I stare at that generation chart, I find myself falling in the middle of the Millennial birth dates, so I can’t help but see things in my Millennial way. What did I miss? Where did I go wrong? Let me know.

Bias alert 2! All of the above is written from a Western European and Anglophone perspective. I’d be very interested to hear from people outside of that bubble.

---

I’ve been reading:

• The environmental cost of AI: a short Nature piece on something that is often neglected in discussions about generative AI: its enormous environmental footprint.

• Lana Bastašić’s blazing response to yet another act of literary censorship.

  I do not know what literature means to you outside of networking and grants. To me it means, first and foremost, an unwavering love for human beings and the sanctity of human life.

• Two recent discoveries about giant beasts: how whales sing without drowning (spoiler: unique larynx), and a new species of giant anaconda.

---

1. And in its wake, countless podcasts and newsletters that will ‘teach’ you to be more productive and efficient — for but a small fee, of course.

2. This, I think, also partially extends to partner choice. Once upon a time, there were a handful of prospective partners in your local area; now we have an endless supply of profiles to swipe through. Hello, dating fatigue that makes us collectively want to flush our phones in the toilet.

3. I don’t want to turn this into an anti-capitalist rant (I’m not yet sure where I land in terms of preferred economic system, to be honest). But capitalism, especially the ‘advanced’ kind many of us live in, is a system that perpetuates and intensifies itself, often with detrimental effects on individual values and well-being. I’m not making that up, by the way. Study after study after study finds that the values promoted by what’s called ‘American Corporate Capitalism’ often run counter to (from the first linked study):

… pursuits such as caring about the broader world, having close relationships with others, and, for many people, feeling worthy and free.