Sunday Essays #4: Are You or a Loved One at Risk for OD'ing on Hustle Culture?
read this before redlining.
There is an influencer I follow on IG who posts stories and advice about sales and business.
He’s a pretty accomplished guy, with a track record to prove it.
However, he posted a reel the other day that stopped me in my tracks, and not for a great reason.
I’ll keep him anonymous (and fwiw, I still really respect the guy and this isn’t hate), but the post was along the lines of this:
“I have a 7 minute drive to do right now. Instead of wasting my time, I’m listening to actionable content on a podcast so I can use this time to learn a new SKILL instead of mindlessly listening to MUSIC”
Oh brother.
Let’s get into this.
A Brief Defense of Hustle Culture
Modern online “hustle content”, as with most things, started out pretty well.
That follows trendlines across all sorts of mediums, it’s almost standard.
It’s not uncommon that a band’s eponymous first EP hit harder with fans than their label-curated later work, or your favorite team’s star QB was more endearing when he was a gritty early career gunslinger, and less so when he started hawking pistachio nuts and car insurance while marrying an A-list actress.
The jump from attainable and tangible to cartoonish and sensational might make the social media metrics go up, but you lose the everyman in the process.
This isn’t to say hustle content doesn’t have its place.
I’ve written many a time about my admiration for Alex Hormozi.
He can break down metrics and frameworks that seem so abstract into simple plug-and-play math formulas.
It’s a top .001% human ability.
We’re blessed to live at a time with free digital libraries full of content and advice from men and women who have walked the walk.
However, it’s the second and third order effects we need to be careful of.
Constant Arousal ≠ Discipline
There’s a stark difference between discipline and living in a constant state of arousal.
Discipline is calm, deliberate.
Constant arousal, on the other hand, may look the same on the outside, but it’s frantic on the inside.
The human equivalent of having 30 Chrome tabs open at the same time.
The impending feeling of digital gurus lording over you while you slam down yet another dinner in front of YouTube.
It’s more common than you think, and wholly unsustainable.
“says the guy with an Oura Ring basically living in monk mode lol”
What do you think made me want to write about this topic in the first place?!
Let’s break it down quickly and anecdotally, so we’re on the same page.
When I was at the peak of my commercial real estate run on Long Island, I absolutely redlined myself.
No, I wasn’t a slave to the talking heads on my fyp, but I was indulging in such toxic practices like:
-being proud my phone was never on Do Not Disturb
-Saturday mornings no longer being mine
-taking meetings that could’ve been phone conversations “for the face time”
-hopping on calls from the balconies of Long Beach house parties
-answering attorney emails from the bathroom of a New Orleans strip club (true story)
What was the grand result?
Sure, there were some marquee moments. (Feel free to Google ‘em)
At what cost?
The New York Real Estate Journal reaching out for an interview is obviously cool, but said coolness really takes a hit when you have to do the interview from bed because you re-aggravated your chronic spine issues in the process of doing the very things they wanted to talk to you about in the first place.
When I see such content as the “no music” reel, I see it as a gateway drug that’s going to lead people down this very same path.
I don’t want that for you, my friends!
You don’t have to take it from me, and that’s fine.
That’s why I spend a lot of time talking to…
People Way Smarter Than Me
“Your network is your net worth” is a bit overblown (makes for good cortisol content, though), but having friends way smarter than you is worth its weight in gold.
I’ve got guys who are crushing it in PE, consulting, tech, you name it.
Some have even been interviewed on here.
Around late-2024, I started to notice a trend amongst all of them.
While they were running up their respective scoreboards and our personal relationships grew stronger, they had become less accessible.
“XYZ has Notifications Silenced”
No, I don’t wanna alert anyway.
(but I was initially stunned)
Conversations became scheduled, face-to-face meetups went from “yeah we should do that” to a must-do.
Chat topics changed drastically.
Less KPIs, tools, and metrics.
More talk about recovery. Health. Faith. Spirituality. Longevity.
The men and women at the forefront were leading the trend against the Big Hustle Culture Machine.
We’d be foolish not to take notes.
They’re just tools.
No, not my friends.
The very things we have at our disposal- content, fitness trackers, productivity apps.
They’re aids in our pursuits, not religious doctrine.
Your Notion calendar is supposed to help you stay organized, not inject you with 500cc’s of cortisol because you skipped over your Friday afternoon KPIs review.
YouTube business guys are awesome and super accomplished, but they’re guides you choose, not prophets.
I'll leave this with an anecdote:
I love my Oura Ring.
It helps me see my recovery, my sleep, even when I might be starting to get sick.
But did I have to “check my stats” the Sunday morning after running around St. Pete til 3AM?
Of course not.
Obviously the sleep score was brutal.
I knew I had a HR spike at 1AM when a group of guys let me rip a couple of manuals on their skateboard when we were in-between bars (growing up on Rodney Mullen 411VM vids never does leave you..)
Use the tools you’re given, don’t let the tools use you.
In Closing
According to my subscriber map (yeah we get one lol), the majority of you are snowed in right now.
Just long enough for that little voice to start poking at you.
“When this clears up, I gotta do this, I’ll be behind on that..”
(I thought we spoke about this!)
Maybe there’s some optimizooor bro on IG who has a very different opinion on how to spend your time snowed in.
That’s great.
What’s greater is taking care of the human engine underneath so it doesn’t run hot, catch fire, and burn down calamitously.
Usually we end with a song here, but I’ll attach an appropos playlist a lot of my friends enjoyed.
Listen to it, vibe out, whatever it may be.
Occupying a brain space that’s totally yours and aligned with your inner state is a fun place to be, and if you can achieve that?
Well…
…..you might’ve just learned a new skill 🫣
Stay warm, stay safe.
🫶🏻
-John Abbate
1.25.2026