There is an implicit promise hidden in the millions of words spilled on time management, productivity, and self-help: if we could just figure out the right strategy, we’d finally be able to live a more meaningful life.
Why Simply Hustling Harder Won’t Help You With the Big Problems in Life
In a generation that embraces the doctrine of hustling and hustling harder, when is enough, enough?
While others are fortunate of finding meaning in what they do, it’s becoming a tough question some of us ask ourselves, especially when we are working just because we have to.
Is hustling harder the image of what success looks like?
And in search of success, we look for answers from self-help books only to find ourselves down the rabbit hole.
From Why Simply Hustling Harder Won’t Help You With the Big Problems in Life, here are the sticky traps of self-help:
The first is convincing people that they’re invincible, and that all they need to do is harness that energy toward the goal. Another great lie is, “Everything you need is already inside of you.” It’s such bullshit. Most of what you need is going to be outside of you. It’s structural justice and a community that holds you, and coming to terms with your own limitations and frailties. But you can’t sell that. You can’t sell seven principles for power thinking if your seven chapters were, “One: Accept Your Limitations; Two: Locate yourself socially to figure out what supports are being denied to you.” [laughs] Wouldn’t now be a great time to imagine that we are not going to be masters of our destiny? That we’ll all likely need each other in the months ahead? Instead, we have an epidemic of loneliness and a tremendous amount of shame around not having mastered that side hustle, or conquered the capitalistic self.
And being a follower of Jesus and His gospel, I couldn’t agree more when the author and self-help historian Kate Bowler talked about how “productivity culture is a lot like a religion.”
From Why Simply Hustling Harder Won’t Help You With the Big Problems in Life,
I just don’t think that what we think of as secular is secular at all. We’re just renaming our religious beliefs as something else. In this case, we’re just saying, “My gospel tells me that I should be tireless, my gospel tells me that I should be self-mastering, my gospel tells me that my thoughts are the most important thing about me.” Our economy sped up, our economy bottomed out, and here we are, very confused about whether we’re failing or not. I wouldn’t describe it so much as a vacuum as a renaming. I always use “secular” in these really sarcastic quotes, but it’s really pretty deeply religious in its underpinning.
If you are in the quest for finding the meaning of rest, here’s a very helpful resource. You’ll learn that “God is the master of all time, and he holds all the time that we think actually belongs to us.”
jessa 