Why constant striving and hustle culture is destroying you.

Striving and hustle culture are killing you. Here's what to do about it.

A few are still trying to sell it to you, but I think it’s on the downslide.

I still see it—I saw a post about it last week, in fact—about how you get nothing if you don’t work for it. True statement, sort of, but it's easily abused and leaves room for pride in accomplishment and little room for God’s undeserving grace. It slides easy into earning our way into value.

Maybe it’s a reaction to perceived cultural laziness. Maybe it’s a kind of virtue signaling, separating yourself as a worker bee instead of one of the lazy ones. Maybe it’s the only identity we have.

I'm talking about hustle culture, that obscene glorification of relentless nose-to-the-grindstone living, that foul celebration of long work hours and constant productivity and never-stop-thrashing that seems to suggest that God resting on the seventh day might have been in error.¹ It’s the bizarre over-correction to the couch potato who’s been unemployed and holding out for a management position for a decade. It holds dear the idea that if every day isn’t about self-improvement, you might as well disappear and free up oxygen for others.²

Hustle culture was packaged so prettily for years.

Wonderful stories of rags-to-riches, of bootstrapping founders and their amazing startups that could only have come about through non-stop effort. It trickled down through the writings and exhortations—often at MLM conferences where admonishment to sell is packaged as leadership classes—that your destiny and success are entirely in your hands alone, and if you fail, it’s because you didn’t work hard enough.³ Rachel Hollis comes to mind, as do many other self-help gurus.⁴

“Get out there and sell! Do things! Move things! Break things! Disrupt! Be in their faces! No excuses! Crush it! Kill it! Get off your ass! Get up earlier! Churn! Run! It doesn’t matter how you feel, do it anyway! Do more faster! It’s on you to make it happen! You snooze you lose! You think I got my success being lazy like you?” And then when you accomplish the thing— “Don’t you dare rest! You’re gonna do this every day for the rest of your life! You have to keep going! Climb the next mountain! You think you’re done? You’re done when you’re dead!”

God is not at all like this, by the way.

That is not the behavior of a God who leads me beside still waters and insists I rest in sweet green meadows, who asks me to be still and wait on him, even if it’s 20 years, so that I know he is God.

There was the time I worked at a startup, and a literal money-making machine sketch showed up in a meeting (as a joke, mostly). We’re out here 10Xing and maxxing everything except our waistline.⁵

The idea is simple: take a little bit of stuff and put it through the machine for maximum results.

Of course, you must keep that machine running nonstop. The goal is always to maximize. Everything is cumulative; there is no grace or mercy if you stumble.⁶ If you stop, you lose ground; all your effort was for nothing. The machine doesn’t allow stopping. We’re told that anyone who isn’t working the machine is going to hold us back and we should shed them from our lives.

The machine is what we know as striving.

Striving will burn you out.

Psychologist H. Freudenberger said that burnout was a “response to frustration. It's a response to a demand that an individual may make upon themself in terms of a requirement for perfectionism or drive.” (Emphasis mine.)

It’s the apps that hook us with gamification. “76 days in a row of tracking your food! If you miss one, it was all for nothing!” Of course, it wasn’t all for nothing. But you lose the literal game if you take a breather and put your phone down for a weekend. Our technology and our systems are counting on trapping us with striving. Our striving is the secret to their success.

So we must start by understanding what striving is.

Striving is a determined effort to accomplish something, usually over a longer period of time and often in the face of difficulties. It requires persistence and dedication. That’s not wrong, in and of itself. It’s how the horse pulls the cart, how we build muscle, how we learn from difficulty, and so on. It’s a basic principle that hard and difficult things help us in the long run.

The problem comes when the what and why of striving are wrong, such as when outside forces are driving us to strive.⁷

Take, for example, my FitBit app, scolding me because I’m at the “risk of undertraining” today due to some metric that doesn’t take into account painfully aching feet or a hip that’s not working right. Or maybe you have a “coach,” who confuses accountability with whipping a broken horse needing rest. Perhaps it’s the Instagram and TikTok influencers—selective in showing you only their success—who hold up their great bodies and finances and natural lifestyles and obtuse and fussy wellness programs and successes, all to trickily “encourage” you while making you aware of your lack, just enough to sell something to you.

“Strive! Strive! Hit your goals! We are tracking your metrics, and you aren't meeting them! I thought you wanted this! Why are you stumbling?”

The stick holding the carrot can be used to beat you, and I don’t like it.

I mean, I’ve yelled at my FitBit.

“Why don’t you shut up!” I tell it when it buzzes to let me know I didn’t get in enough steps in the past hour, or when I stumble across another video telling me if I’m not improving, I’m wasting away. “Did Tolkien get in 10K steps?! Did he only eat paleo? Did he obsess over food ingredients? No?! Maybe he just created an alternate world that changed generations! So take a seat!”

If I’m constantly moving or hustling, I cannot engage in the deep thought required to create. Great ideas do come when I’m out walking, though FitBit will buzz to let me know I need to up the cardio because it sees the walk as exercise, while I see it as background pattern. Sometimes, I need to be still to write, paint, or play the piano.

Striving creates myopia. Our entire lives become so focused on one goal that we shave off the other things that are equally important. Our lives are only about our physical body, follower count, or bank account.

Striving also creates a weird kind of idolatry. I wrote about this in my journal, as I’ve been trying to figure this out over the past few months:

I come back to striving again and again—striving and a loss of wonder, which are somehow connected. Striving happens when we don’t want to wait. It happens when we think God forgot or is doing it wrong. Maybe he needs a little help because we think God helps those who help themselves.

It’s true we can’t be lazy and idle. But an entire life drenched in this striving ethic has left me unable to properly separate what God says and what “good” people say that “good” people do. The intertwining of productivity, efficiency, and business culture into the church and its teachings has made it so convoluted.

Striving seems to turn the world into an algorithm or mathematical equation.

I noted in my journal that in recent years, I’ve struggled to understand the difference between wisdom, knowledge, and information in terms of what God says. I never quite wrapped my head around the answer, and I’ve come to believe that my lack of conquering the solution was part of the answer.

There are things I can’t fully understand. Maybe it’s the wrong time, maybe God doesn’t want me to know—whatever the reason, I have to accept it and stop striving to know. It’s holding me in one place.

How odd that striving, the facsimile of action and motion, can hold you still.

There’s a difference between striving in our strength and striving in God’s strength, mind you.

When God runs the striving machine and our striving is done rightly, it is very different. He takes our limits and turns them into something amazing. Brokenness, weakness, and imperfection go into the machine, and the beautiful works flow out naturally.

When we run the machine, it’s an entirely different matter.

When we strive in our own strength, it ends in brutality for someone, either through frustration, damaged relationships, or going around something God has put in front of our path. We try to control people and situations. We become competitive and compare ourselves with others as the only way to know if our striving is doing anything. We have increasing anxiety. We run ourselves into the ground. We feel like we’re living Ecclesiastes on a loop.

We put our best work, effort, and energy into that striving machine and get upset when what comes out is a broken person. It’s the complete opposite of what God does or wants, though when we’re broken, we’re uniquely ready to be used by God. He wins, either way. It’s just less painful, and we waste less of our lives, if we let him run the machine.

Striving in our own power for our own desire or supposed good thing is always a mistake, even (especially) when we get good results. Even (especially) when we achieve success. Even (especially) when the money rolls in. Even (especially) when we package it up as a system and sell our striving methods to others.⁸

This sounds confusing to an American Christian, since the motivational self-help culture has thoroughly polluted the church and Christian publishing systems. Striving and maximizing are what Christians do, right? It’s for the Kingdom! God needs our help and our money, or the work won’t get done! If we train people to strive the right way, we can get them to make good choices and live moral, self-controlled, productive lives, and practically not need Jesus, all the way to hell. He can stay seated at the right hand of the Father, and we’ll take it from here! We’re Rosie the Riveter, confident that we can do it. Idle hands are the devil’s plaything!⁹

Wait a minute, though. This isn’t about idleness or not working.

It would be easy to think that working and striving are the same, which they are not. We should do good work in all that we do (Colossians 3:23). We should never be lazy (see: most of Proverbs). We are to work for our food and do all our work for the glory of God.

But striving is something else.

To an outsider, someone striving looks like a hard worker, someone who hustles and doesn’t give up, never taking no for an answer. They always get back up to try again. It might mirror our preferred success stories, and we don’t see it for what it is. We only see the high points, not the low. We don’t see the carnage along the way.

There isn’t much differentiation between a healthy work ethic and striving because we’ve systematized things in our culture, and systems do not take into account the individual (even though God does). To sell books and programs, a system is necessary. It’s not possible to account for a unique individual for whom hustle culture is destructive. The same admonition doesn’t land in each person in the same way. What spurs one person out of sloth and into excellence might enslave another.

Striving comes from the heart, meaning it can do great damage if it’s wrong. Striving has an end game, with reasoning behind it. It’s attached to a goal. And that goal comes with questions we don’t always ask before starting our striving.

“Why do I want this?”

“How should I get it?”

And most importantly: “God, is this what you want me to do? Help me follow the path you have instead of the one I imagine.”

I recently read a blog post on Substack written by a young man absolutely kicking against the goads of his faith. He wrote paragraphs about how all his efforts had come to nothing, describing everything from pounding his fists on the wall to crying on the floor because his faith wasn’t happening or existing as he thought it ought to. He’d put so much work and energy into being a Christian, and still, something was off. He was just about done, ready to embrace doubt above all else.

My only thought? You’re striving too much, son. You’re putting all your work into the machine and are angry that you’re coming out broken. I know, because that was/is me.

I’ll tell you what striving in my own power, according to the culture’s rules for the typical life-goals—relationships, work, wealth, opportunity, renown—has gotten me: nothing.

I’ve followed programs, spent money, bought ads, networked, cold-called, followed-up, read books, tried and tried again and again and again, stayed up late and got up early, worked overtime, begged and pleaded, tried the trends, introduced myself, applied, upgraded, invested, put in extra effort, tracked the data, did some A/B testing, tried a new idea, sent press releases, attended events, connected—nothing. The things working for everyone around me are not working for me. In a striving culture, the failure is mine.

But. Every job, client, and work opportunity I did get—I kid you not—I can see how God opened the door. None of the techniques in that list did it; God did.

This doesn’t sell well, mind you, as I cannot systematize a “Five Step Plan To Wealth And Career Success” and include “let God have his way” as part of it.

Striving is a full spectrum. We strive for control, strive to achieve, strive to justify, strive to understand, strive to win, strive to identify, strive to relate, strive to have our way, strive to be relevant, strive to belong, strive to feel alive, strive to consume, strive to matter—we’re just striving all the livelong day. We’re taking everything we can and shoving it in the machine and hoping for the best.

So here it is, then, a simple, terrifying, and uncomfortable concept: cease striving.

I tried to be practical about dealing with the striving issue, and I wrote three things down in my journal.

First, I have to separate the goodness of the goal from my understanding of why or how to get there. Why and how should always be directed by God, not the latest trend or bestseller. Even a good goal (losing weight) might have bad reasons for it (so I can flaunt my body). A good goal (losing weight) might become a better goal if God directs it (being healthy enough to accomplish the things he has for me even if not skinny). There’s a level of acceptance of the path God has for me that our culture sees as giving up, or overcorrects in pushback by embracing a hedonism of sorts. We can’t let our goals, nor the methods we use to obtain them, be directed by culture, trends, or anything but God. This is not easy.

Second, I have to know myself and be honest about how I respond to things. As a perfectionist, gamification is dangerous for me. Data can be dangerous. Mistakes and setbacks carry oversized discouragement. I easily slip into all-or-nothing. If fewer calories are how you lose weight, why not just stop eating? My mind views life through “what’s fair,” and my initial reaction is despondency when good, hard work doesn’t provide the expected return. I’m terrified of being considered lazy because my family is full of hard workers. These are facets of my personality I have to know and be honest about. I have to be self-aware. We are all different. Admonishment to strive might land very differently for someone else.

Third, I have to be willing to live in “I don’t know” and “it’s out of my control.” People will want to advise, discuss, scold, and admonish based on their own understanding of success and purpose. Entire belief systems, platforms, and brand empires are built on striving, and they will never run out of “yeah buts” to anything that threatens their ideology.

The non-believing world functions on equations that lack God and the supernatural, understanding and balancing those equations through logical cause and effect actions because they mostly work. Biblical and spiritual exponents do not apply, because we are the masters of our fate and the captains of our souls.

But what happens when the equation doesn’t balance and there’s a failure?

The people who strived and failed didn’t quite strive correctly or long enough, such folks will tell you, unaware that Jesus holds it all together, not them (Colossians 1:15-17).

When bad things happen despite all our striving and best efforts, such folks must assign superfluous meaning to it because everything has to have meaning in any equation humans can understand. Everything has to have an understandable value in order to make the equation work. Everything happens for a reason, we insist, unwilling to accept that even if so, we may never know the reason. We can’t accept that we don’t know, only acknowledging God by blaming him that such a thing could happen at all; how dare he give us a taste for how little control we have in life? How dare he break our equation and our system to success? How dare he not honor our striving?

So, ceasing striving.

That’s the arrival point and also the start of the journey.

This will require trusting God that what seems like a disastrous failure of a life isn’t. He will have to help me process fears of being lazy. I will have to be very careful about the inputs I allow that lead to striving and comparative living. I will have to actively control my thoughts when they immediately assign failure to things that aren’t progressing like I think they should. I will have to stop competing for position, and rest in the truth that God has enough for everyone for everything all the time. I will need help in seeing that waiting on God and resting in his time is okay, even if it looks like giving up to a striving world.

I will have to be OK if the machine roars by me, the whole world operating at warp speed according to measurable and tangible values.

This is no easy thing.

We—not God—have foolishly packaged the accomplishment of goals as one way we measure the value and worth of a human being.

1. Of course, the overcorrection to hustle culture sometimes comes hidden in the label “work-life balance,” which is an interesting concept depending on whether you view work and life as separate or an intermingled calling, what position you are in leadership, and whether you’re using that as an excuse to work as little as possible while still getting paid with benefits. There is also the discussion of the hierarchy of loves, God’s model, and how we view work and rest beyond selfishness. That’s all for a blog post for another day.

2. One reason I liked FLOTUS Melania Trump’s “Be Best” campaign is that it wasn’t “be better.” Be Best is completion. Be Better is a constant state of comparison in which you never reach an end; you’re always hustling.

3. Downline lack of hustle looks a lot like upline bank account sadness, you see.

4. Hollis was the poster child for hustle culture. While her life has unraveled, faltered, and flailed (like normal people’s lives) even as it’s packaged as still on course, she is still out there selling the idea that she can help you with your life if you follow her program and buy her books. Hustling is a big part of her advice, which may have played better in 2016.

5. I saw a video about looksmaxxing, which is a really stupid way to say “trying to make yourself look as physically attractive as possible.” It’s possible I may be interested in napmaxxing, but that’s it.

6. Grace is when you get what you don’t deserve, and mercy is when you don’t get what you deserve. God shows us grace by giving us good things when we deserve punishment and mercy by not punishing us when we deserve it.

7. I never read nor had interest in The Purpose Driven Life because I don’t want to be driven. Cattle are driven. Horses and buggies are driven. Slaves are driven. I want to be led by a good God, not driven by purpose. Being driven strips me of free will and a chance for rest. Being led allows me to love and the freedom to present excellence as an offering.

8. Non-believers see their successes in terms of their goodness and ability, and believe they have the secret that can be replicated for anyone. They don’t consider God’s hand in their life and do not give Him credit. Few things are as deceptively dangerous as rolling the dice and winning big the first time you’re in Vegas. Now you think you understand how the machine works and don’t realize you’re inside the machine.

9. We may have generationally overcorrected, and significant numbers are now eating bonbons and playing video games all day, living off of government checks and mom. But again, laziness—the refusal to work—and trying to stop striving are not the same thing.