The Profound Emptiness At The Core of Hustle Culture
Don’t listen to Andrew Tate: you don’t “escape the matrix” by enslaving yourself to money.
Every now and again one of my social media feeds will be interrupted by a video from Andrew Tate, kindly informing me of how I should be sacrificing every last moment of my life to the pursuit of money and success.
Only then could I ever hope to be free from my earthly troubles.
While I can usually scroll post the vapid theatrics of success porn — which all too often resemble of gaudy imitation of what someone with no money imagines rich people are getting up to — a recent tweet from Kevin O’Leary really got under my skin.
It feels legitimately stupid to have to spell this out, but this increasingly pervasive narrative of “hustle until you’re free” — peddled relentlessly by the Tates and O’Learys of this world — strike me as one of the most obvious contradictions in today’s social media hellscape.
Without mincing words, O’Leary says that we should all forsake our principles, our families and any sense of self-respect for the unabated pursuit of money and material wealth.
While this message isn’t usually spelled out as brazenly, or as distastefully as Kevin puts it above, slightly less-revolting versions of it are littered endlessly across the vast expanse of social media.
Everywhere at all times, people are sharing their tips, hacks and secret routines for optimising output, all while reinforcing this idea that it isn’t merely desirable to be working yourself to the bone, it’s imperative to your worth as a modern human being.
Bear with me while I take this on a wild philosophical tangent, but I promise you I’ll loop it back to the discussion of hustle bros.
Nietzsche’s diagnosis of hustle culture
The meteoric rise of today’s appallingly shallow hustle culture reminds me of a famous declaration made by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche in his 1882 work The Gay Science:
“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.”
Many readers have a tendency to take this somewhat literally or simply aren’t aware of the rest of the quote.
Nietzsche’s full statement bears more in the way of context and helps us understand the dilemma that he was trying to introduce us to. Here’s the rest of the quote:
“How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?”
To me, the most interesting part of this claim is where he asks us, “what festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent?”
Now before we go any further, some context.
Nietzsche isn’t saying that we’ve literally killed God.
Instead, he’s saying that we’ve cast down religious beliefs in favour of a more rational and materialistic (not consumerism, but the idea that there’s no ‘spiritual’ or ‘unseen’ element to to reality) worldview. And in the process, we’ve murdered an integral and irreplaceable part of our own psyche.
It’s also worth noting that Nietzsche was a ruthless critic of Christianity, so he’s really not saying that we should all be hurrying back to Church. He’s actually describing something far more profound.
By killing “God” through our adoption of worldview that favours only the physical and discards the ‘immaterial’ realities like social norms and ethics, we have pulled up and thrown away the anchor of morality and ethics in our broader society, leaving the ever-growing ‘non-believing’ segment of our species adrift in a sea of hyper-rational, fundamentally material constructs.
At present, there is still no plan as to how to replace the ethical guidelines once reinforced by the religious organisations from the past.
Nietzsche was right. We need something to worship. We need something to give ourselves over to and we need something that is beyond ourselves to place our faith in.
The rise of Andrew Tate, Kevin O’Leary and the thousands of other similar pseudo-entrepreneurs spewing their banal creeds of materialistic babble signifies to me the most recent iteration of a truly soulless and deeply corruptible replacement of God in the broader culture.
But God has been dead for a while, and many collective paradigms have already reared their ugly heads in his place. In the first half of the 20th century we witnessed the rise of state-bound ideologies like the Nazi regime in Germany and the Communist dictatorships of China and Soviet Russia.
It goes without saying, but ideology without an ethical underpinning opens itself up to the perpetration of the most horrific and barbaric crimes in imaginable, something our species bore witness to for most of last century.
Now that varying degrees of individual human rights have been established in most parts across the globe, and blatant iron-fisted tyranny is largely frowned upon, we’ve summoned a new, more personalised God from the ether of our psyche.
And even though we admittedly still hand ourselves over to the increasingly polarised political ideologies of our day — whether it be rabid pseudo-libertarianism for the Right wingers or “justice” for the oppressed at all costs on the Left, we all bow our heads and silently pray at the alter of money.
There is no “matrix”.
This brings me to the next point of my long-winded rant
In his pseudo-profound ramblings, Tate (who currently resides in a Romanian jail cell while awaiting sentencing for sex trafficking) always returns to this idea of “escaping the matrix”.
According to Tate, the “government” and the “elite” are desperately trying to control you and the only way out of this predicament is to make absurd sums of money so you can gratify your impulses whichever way you choose.
Once again, the contradiction should be obvious. You don’t escape the matrix by making yourself a slave to money, all the while sacrificing the things that matter to you along the way.
Secondly, and more importantly, there is no fucking matrix.
If you’re alive in 2023, in any democratic nation in the world, congratulations! You’re officially one of the freest humans ever to have walked the face of the earth.
The only “real” Matrix that actually exists is the incredible sci-fi series produced the Wachowski siblings.
What do we mean by “free”?
Another thing that needs mentioning is the profound irony of also ironic because they act as though they’re doing all of this “work” so that they themselves can be free. But the freedom they speak of and parade so brazenly on their social media profiles, is probably the furthest thing from freedom I could possibly begin to imagine.
When we discuss the concept of “free” it’s usually juxtaposed against the concept of captivity or servitude. So the sort of freedom that Tate and O’Leary espouse, is just a very specific type, and it’s one that I’d argue isn’t even legitimate in any real sense.
Tate and O’Leary aren’t free.
They’re enslaved to money.
Were they not so deep in the belly of the consumerist beast, they may still have the capability to feel regret, pain and anguish at all of the other ways they’ve failed at being a well-rounded, dignified human being.
Ironically, there’s no escaping “servitude”, and in fact the way out of servitude is by serving something beyond yourself that you find meaningful.
Without going down an entirely new rabbit hole, this is something that Victor Frankel — a survivor of the concentration camps in Nazi Germany — talks about at length. By serving others and by following deep-seated moral principles that are upstanding and just, we free ourselves of existential despair, and are able to endure monumental amounts of ‘surface level’ pain while doing so.
At the end of the day, life is fundamentally about being a ‘good’ person. And I don’t mean good as in ‘nice’. There are plenty of ‘nice’ people that are actually just insufferable pricks using their ‘niceness’ to appear more moral to others.
I mean ‘good’ as in someone that stands up for themselves and acts in way that serves others without being a miserable, vindictive wretch while doing so.
Now, for those of you wondering what a good person looks like or how to become one, Aristotle is easily the best authority on this.
He says that to become a Good person, “you should act like one”. Even though this sounds hilariously simple, it’s annoyingly true. We all know a good person (or people) in our lives, and to Aristotle, emulating the qualities of these people in our own individual ways is the first and most important step on the path to fulfilment.
Even though it’s a tough read I cannot recommend a text more highly than the Nicomachean Ethics. The pursuit of the ‘Good’ is all that matters, and sacrificing your deepest & most fundamental principles so that you can spend money as impulsively as you please is an appalling substitute for “freedom”.
Before I wrap this up, I want to make a few final points, so there’s no confusion around my intentions for writing this now very wordy blog post.
There’s nothing wrong with working really, really hard.
I personally do a bunch of shit that would definitely fall under the banner of “hustle culture” at first glance. There’s also nothing wrong with pursuing material success, everyone deserves some level of this, and no one should live in perpetual fear because of their finances.
We’re also status-seeking creatures, and we fundamentally desire the feeling of being valued in the eyes of others. Money and wealth are very good ways to achieve this outcome, but it’s also just one single aspect of a much larger equation that involves long-term relationships, steadfast principles and daily temperance.
I personally quite like the idea of being somewhat wealthy and I’ve dedicated a good portion of my life to making money. However, if push comes to shove and I’m asked to sacrifice my relationship, my family or my deepest core values for any amount of dollar bills, there’s no fucking way I’m making that deal.
It’s time to cast aside the false idols of hustle culture. Your relationships, your leisure time, and your experience of the world as it presents itself to you matters more than any sum of money you could possibly earn.
To sum up, I’d like to say: fuck Andrew Tate, fuck Kevin O’Leary and fuck everyone who tells you to diminish your self worth and sacrifice your principles so that you could one day maybe buy a Ferrari.
The new generation needs to be told again and again that true fulfilment doesn’t come from earning another dollar, it comes from doing something meaningful and Good for the world.
And if you earn some dollars along the way for doing that then more power to you.
But don’t blast your soul into the abyss because some guy on podcast told you to.