Hey, fellow entrepreneurs – brace yourself for a potentially uncomfortable question. Have you ever stopped to consider if the whole concept of ‘hustle culture,’ where you grind 24/7 and sacrifice everything for success, is not far off from the deceptive promise of a pyramid scheme?

Think about it. Pyramid schemes thrive on the idea that if you just work hard enough and recruit sufficiently, you’ll reach the pinnacle of financial independence and luxury. Sounds familiar? The hustle culture narratives often parrot this same tune: Work around the clock, say goodbye to your social life, and you’ll be rewarded with entrepreneurial nirvana.

But here’s the controversial bit: Isn’t this promise equally misleading? We celebrate the few who make it, plastering their faces on Forbes and glorifying their bank accounts, but ignore the silent majority suffering from burnout, broken relationships, and spiraling mental health. The narrative dangerously implies that those who fail just ‘didn’t hustle hard enough.’

Are we simply perpetuating a toxic cycle that’s as risky and destructive as the schemes we publicly condemn?

Let’s have an honest conversation. Are we unfairly romanticizing overworking, or is this ‘extreme work ethic’ a necessary step on the ladder to success? Where do we draw the line, and how do we build sustainable, healthy entrepreneurial ventures without falling into this trap?

Ready for the heat

  • Epledryyk@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    there’s a lot to unpack here.

    on the whole the hustle grind thing is an unsustainably way to live both in business and for a life, and a philosophy targeted at a specific sort of person who is going to idolize and ferociously consume it.

    these people, by and large, are great targets because they’re not actually clever or positioned enough to win at doing it, so like a diet designed to keep you hungry and fat there’s a feedback loop of self-flagellation of wanting something, seeing no results, wanting it more, and so on.

    and who wins when you can rile a bunch of people up to consume it? the people making the paid courses, and the people make the ‘free’ ones (which get monetized through youtube ads etc.). this is great because now those people can point at their lambos in their garage and the whole loop “proves” itself to “work”.

    this by itself is not a pyramid shape - it’s really mostly producers and consumers in a typical arrangement. this could just as easily be artists and fans or parasocial streamer personalities or anything else.

    there’s a minor pyramidal component when you get into “I will teach you how to make courses so you can teach them to teach courses so we all get rich” and that grift starts to become sort of triangular because it explicitly wants to spread downward with recruitment over product and, like true pyramid schemes, you run out of new fools to rope in eventually down the line.

    but. I don’t know what the numbers look like, but that’s a very small corner of overall entrepreneurship. it probably just happens to come up the most because those very vocal people are making their money by being incredibly vocal. that’s their entire business model.

    meanwhile, mr. local garbage collection empire or mrs. insurance business that serves the entire city also makes more money than you could possibly imagine, also works 10 hours a week and doesn’t even know what youtube is. their source of revenue is providing a real product at scale and not recruiting 20-somes into ineffectively running in circles “working” 18 hours a day, keeping them juuuust tired enough to not realize that maybe spending $5k on an ebook package is a terrible deal.