Build A Life, Not Just A Resume
Corporate hustle culture is on the rise.
Or should I say hustle culture is on the rise? Not necessarily corporate hustle culture.
To be honest, it has given me hope in us.
Before you make any assumptions, no I am not one of those anti-capitalist guys who hate corporations as a whole. I do not.
I just like the fact that we have shifted this perception that hard work is getting up every day and going to the office. That is just stress work.
Working on yourself, on your skills and on your goals is also hard work.
We have had this notion ever since capitalism was established that any work that doesn’t bring in money is a waste of effort. Starting from working on your dreams and hobbies to mothers taking care of their children and the home, none of them receive the same amount of respect as getting up every day and showing up to a depressing place to sit at the same desk you sat yesterday and do the same menial shit you did yesterday.
To this day also, most people just say that being a mother is the hardest job on the planet. They don’t mean it. And it is evident.
The Local Situation of Gurugram
Did you know that Gurugram is the tech hub of the National Capital of India?
Big, vast offices of companies ranging from consultancy services like Cognizant, KPMG, EY and Deloitte to homegrown brands like Zomato, Ola, and Delhivery are situated in various business parks all across the Gurugram region. Not only big MNCs, but many startups and mid-size companies are also competing in the Gurugram market for both an audience and an office space.
The interesting part about all of this is that the tech hub of the National Capital still consists of many mid-size companies and startups, who to this day still do not offer maternity leave to women.
I am not kidding. This is the ground reality.
The same companies ask employees to give up their family time by staying late in the office every day and also sacrifice some weekends by coming to the office.
Yet, no one bats an eye.
Because for us, getting a job, which we earned by the way, is still considered a privilege.
So clearly it makes more sense to hustle for your dreams and visions day and night rather than working for someone else’s vision who thinks paying you a salary that is less than 1% of the total cost of the projects assigned to you, is rather an obligation they are doing on you.
We are like the corporate USA we see in movies, just 20 years behind.
I am sure there is a Jordan Belfort within these office spaces, we just don’t know it yet.
Media Doing the Opposite of What They Should
The only good thing to look forward to is that the new-er generation of the workforce coming right out of college is realising this. And instead of participating in the same, gruesome rat race, they are building something of their own.
Hustle culture is not just about getting a job or setting up a business. It is also about setting yourself up, for a cleaner and healthier life. A life that has work in it but also has a balance with it.
Media, be that the news industry or the entertainment industry, has pushed us to this life of perennial struggle for little to no rewards. I know, I could have just said the entertainment industry. We don’t have “news” channels now per se.
The Advice of Pre-Midlife Crisis
This rise of hustle culture has, of course, seen repulsion from people. Mostly the middle-aged audience. Not the old audience just the middle-aged ones, the ones you know will hit midlife crises in a couple of years.
No kidding, you share this philosophy of working on yourself and your goals with your grandparents or anyone’s grandparents who’ll lend an ear to you and they will be the most supportive and, dare I say, very brave in the things they share.
What to do, what not to do, who to listen to, who not to listen they will have every good piece of advice for you. And they’ll share it with great enthusiasm. That’s the best part. Someone is taking this much interest in your goals and bringing such a positive approach to your ideas. That’s what you need, right?
Now come to the middle-aged machines we see in corporates. You utter one thing about your passion and dreams, and all logic will be bombarded on you. Advice after advice on why not to follow your passion. Talks about what amount of money this corporate jargon brings them, when in fact they don’t follow any of the things they talk about in their lives.
I feel middle-aged men and women who are about to hit their crises of midlife look like such soulless machines that they don’t really seem human. It is after dedicating a decade or two to these corporate shenanigans when the crisis hits, they realise it was all bullshit.
Don’t Just Do It For The Money
Yes, the money was good. The money made a lot of things easier. So maybe we don’t call corporates bullshit.
But we cannot treat them like godsends too.
We, as kids, were always trained to be part of the workforce. In all our teenage years, we were taught discipline for this specific reason.
We were not designed to be machines but our curriculum and “discipline” pushes us to be more like machines and less like humans. Therefore, very naturally, corporates expect us to not care about our personal lives and dedicate everything to our work, their work.
Because if you do this in your initial 5–10 years, then your whole life will be set. This is the fake hope they promised us. Each and every one of us. Little do we realise that by the time this struggle is over, what is left of us is a machine. Not a human.
Stop being like machines. It’s time to be humans again.
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