Success is an obsession and our country is probably the most obsessed about it. Most Americans obsess about work, their jobs, job titles and how fast their promotion rocket is climbing. For some, working a full-time job still isn’t enough, and they further prove their ambition in the gig economy. From turning their own homes into B&B’s, transforming personal cars into taxis, delivering food for local restaurants, walking dogs or any number of on-demand jobs contracted via phone app, Americans keep themselves looking for every opportunity to generate income, including the so-called “hustle economy.”
I read somewhere once about our country’s work fixation and wish I could remember where I read it. Essentially, the writer said that work in the US is seen differently than it is in many other places, especially countries in Europe. For those countries, work is a means to make sure that you don’t starve, stay in a safe, bedbug and vermin-free place, take a trip now and then and sock away some savings. In our country, work isn’t just something you do, it’s essential to who you are, often synonymous. In that piece, it mentioned that, generally speaking, if you ask an American what they do, they’ll reply with their job. If you ask a European what they do, they may say paint, hike, or provide some other hobby or interest.
I have heard and seen examples of this myself. One man I knew of retired, became antsy almost immediately and told anyone he could that he regretted his decision. He didn’t know how to spend his time without a job. After about a year of drawing his retirement pension, as he avoided the deadlines, staff meetings and holiday parties most of us dread, they invited him back. Another position opened up that he was qualified to fill and he already knew their systems and company culture. To my amazement, he jumped at the chance and worked quite a few more years.
I understand that work is necessary and unless you are independently wealthy, you’ll probably have to punch a clock to eat. I don’t understand how job tasks, a soulless building, office politics, the straitjacket of corporate culture and strings of endless meetings featuring semi-stale doughnuts, can hold such a powerfully seductive appeal. Semi-annual dental cleanings are necessary too. I don’t pine for the dentist’s chair over the next six months until my appointment.
Going back to that article, it mentioned European respondents being more likely to reply with hobbies, or items of interest, to questions about what they do. They generally seem to think of what they do as things they’re passionate about doing. That seems healthier to me.
According to OECD, full time workers in our nation put in 38.8 hours a week on average, and have done so over the last four full years of data. Some other nations work more or less than we do, but almost all of them provide more paid time off (PTO). According to this list, many nations have guaranteed paid public holidays and guaranteed minimum paid time off. Some nations with GDP and per capita wealth numbers lower than ours have 30-40 guaranteed days of paid time off. Consider the American worker; in the world’s highest GDP producing nation, she shows up near the bottom of the same list, with no paid guarantees for any time off taken. As Forbes Advisor wrote:
The average American worker gets 11 days of paid vacation per year
In the private sector, the average number of paid vacation days after five years of service increases to 15 days. After 10 years of service, it rises again to 17 days. For employees with 20 years of service or more, the average number of paid vacation days is 20. Keep in mind that these are strictly averages as there is no guaranteed PTO in the U.S.
Americans not guaranteed paid time off, while having some of the lowest amounts of PTO offered, yet some people won’t even bother to take the PTO they do have. Those that take it often keep working through their vacations. Those who aren’t on vacation but should be off the clock, cannot or will not shut down. Many people continue to constantly check their cellphones to see if they got an email, or a message over Slack. It’s pathetic. Digitally shackled professionals, either out for dinner or drinks, are obsessively whipping out their phones to see the status of some work project that no one will care about, or remember, within two months.
Contrast that to France, a nation with 25-37 PTO days and another 11 paid national holidays, guaranteed with pay. Even their lunch breaks are leisurely to the point of legend. While workers in the US grind at their stones an average of 38.8 hours a week, with many working more, the French have a 35-hour full time week. Any work beyond the 35-hour threshold is paid as overtime. In 2016, there was a government proposal to raise the hours a company could ask their workers to toil. Protests exploded in streets all over France in response.
Back home, under the rockets’ red glare, full time workers paid a salary that isn’t exempted from overtime, must work over 40 hours before becoming eligible for overtime. Although 38.8 hours is the average, many people are working more hours than that and many of those are salary exempt; so, they’ve agreed to a salary with no eligibility for overtime for working over 40 hours a week.
If you agree to a salary exempt position of $50K/year, for example, and can perform all of your job tasks in 40 hours, good. If you can do it in less, you’re ahead of the game. Great! The truth is that most exempt positions appear specifically structured, so anyone filling it will likely be working more than 40 hours. More often than not, that 40-hour target becomes a fantasy from skeletal staffing levels prescribed by management. What could have taken 40 hours with appropriate staffing levels, is probably impossible to accomplish in less than 50 or 60 hours. If you average 60 hours/week, you’re simply providing a full-time employee and an additional part time employee for the low cost of one employee. Even though these jobs aren’t officially part of the hustle economy, the employees are definitely hustling while working them.
Giving away another part-time employee’s worth of labor sounds like a bad deal to me. Not everyone seems miffed at this scenario. On the contrary, I’ve been involved in conversations, or overheard them, where people proudly boast about how long they’re anchored to their desks. There is such pride in being driven like a mule, that it’s similar to someone telling you they completed a marathon. Like a marathon, it’s grueling, punishing, tough on your joints and doesn’t leave much time for interests outside of it, including family or friends. Also like a marathon, finishing it often has very little value, other than the ability to tell others you’ve done it. (Kind of related side note: I saw a car this weekend with one of those black and white circular stickers on its trunk. It read, “0.0, I don’t run.” I absolutely need that sticker)
Additionally, not every job’s tasks are worthy of requiring someone’s massive time investment. Many jobs have tasks that companies want done, and they believe are crucial. Just because the company believes those tasks are internally necessary, doesn’t mean that those efforts are universally valuable. Beyond their office walls, those assignments have little to no value for the rest of humanity. Most tasks in corporate environments provide the same impact and societal good of Peter filing his TPS reports. They’re usually not in the same league as Project Ultra breaking code coming from the Nazi’s Enigma machine.
A company making you work night and day on tasks that are of dubious value, without the possibility of overtime, is abusive. To specifically structure the job, then keep adding to its responsibilities, to get almost two full time employees work from a person paid a base salary without overtime, is exploitative. If you keep doing it and there isn’t anything gained other than basic pay, and average to no career growth, eventually you’ll ask, why bother?
Even with long hours, demanding requirements, and occasional job dissatisfaction, many of us hop on another treadmill after the day job is over. Gig jobs. For many of us, there isn’t much choice and it helps make ends meet to boost pay that otherwise won’t keep pace with inflation and family needs. Others of us believe that these pursuits will help build a savings to become financially independent. Regardless of motive, people are out there going from their main thing to meet up with their thing on the side later. The outcome for each participant will vary, with every person finding more or less reward for their effort. Regardless of the take, every person doing this has to be dog-tired at the end of the day. All hustled out.
The holy grail of hustles is the “passion that became a dream job.” These stories are all over the place. They’re pushed on Shark Tank. There are accounts in podcasts. There are literally thousands of online articles, pieces and testimonials about them. The premise is a springboard from an old adage: find a job you love and you’ll never work a day in your life. To roughly paraphrase Michael Bolton from the movie Office Space, who would unclog toilets, pick up garbage, or shovel manure if people all did jobs they dreamed of? Yet, people all over are trying to turn something they love doing into a product, find a niche, build a market, watch it take off and monetize it into bullion.
You’re probably thinking to yourself, “Well isn’t that what you’re doing with this Substack? Don’t you eventually hope to reach a point where you turn on the paid function and watch it make money?” Uhm, yeah. True. Guilty. It just seems a shame to me that our every waking moment, every thought, some of our dreams and many of our nightmares are about finding more ways to make cash. People used to do their jobs and then spent their spare time pursuing hobbies; art, an instrument, a sport, traveling to spots of interest. Lately, it isn’t that we quit having hobbies, it just seems that somewhere lurking in the recesses of our mind is a little goblin with green, dollar-signed eyes thinking of ways to transform it into business ventures.
I read a book a while ago, How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell. In it, she mentions a lot about our slavish devotion to productivity and monetization. We used to try things out that weren’t our jobs because we found them interesting. The pure pleasure of doing that thing was the purpose. Getting better at it with practice was its own fulfillment. Broadening what we knew, expanding the universe of our experiences, becoming more interesting and widely interested people was the thing that held the most value. It seems that many of us now only value something if we can post it online, go viral for likes, subscribes and potential sponsorship.
We hustle at career jobs, keep hustling at other gigs and continue hustling our interests into something we can sell. Some people do it just to get rich. Others of us because wages have been stagnant for two generations and we don’t have a choice. At what point is our finite time not valued in how many dollars we can exchange it for? My mother has a saying; money is not all. Is she right? When I look around, even at myself, we all appear to move through life as though it’s the only thing.
The saying goes, don’t hate the player, hate the game. I think there is something to this. The game breeds the conditions we see and the reactions we have within it. It has no spectators; everyone is playing and it’s turned us all into hustlers.
I had a very sweet but very sexist boss who told me I wasn't eligible for a promotion to "manager" because of my "family commitments." (I was a single mother of two--the other candidate was male with a stay at home wife). At first I inwardly thought "going to sue the pants off you" but he went off to get coffee and I suddenly thought--that promotion will involve hours of reports and spreadsheets and such instead of what I was actually doing (working directly with defaulted contractors) and I LIKED what I did. By the time he got back, I found my self relieved, with a sensation that my eternally striving (and now late) father had evaporated off my back. The pay differential wasn't all that great, and I did get a raise in any event.
I eventually did get the title manager--I didn't really want it, since "attorney" worked better on letters for what I did. But by that time we were working out of our homes (way pre-Covid) and there wasn't much "management" work to do.
Because the job involved folks who had defaulted--contractors, auto dealers, fiduciaries, etc) the workload went WAY up during the 2008 recession and no, no overtime. But I turned 65 in 2009 and said I would retire to get Medicare, which was better insurance than my company offered. They asked me to stay on as "consultant" until a retirement trip I had planned, at an hourly fee, doing exactly the same work I had been. And boy did I make a lot more money each month, even after the business taxes and such connected with being my own "company."