The Side Hustle Bait and Switch
Exhausted, Broke and Still Hustling: The New Normal
It’s no coincidence that the “side hustle” economy has grown exponentially at the same time that corporate profits have hit 70-year highs while wage growth has hit a 40-year low. A cynic might call the confluence deliberate.
Over the past two decades, the cost of living has risen dramatically. Housing prices have become unaffordable for many working families. The path to financial stability feels almost impossible as folks struggle to afford basic necessities like food and shelter. Any step forward is met with two steps back.
And yet, corporate profits and executive pay continue to break records year after year — and wages remain frozen for average workers as rising inflation steadily erodes purchasing power.
In the face of this reality, the solution presented to the overworked and financially strapped is to take on “side hustles” — essentially second, third, and even fourth jobs on top of their regular full-time employment. This “side hustle economy” is not an organic grassroots movement. It’s not a new economy. It’s a calculated rebranding of overemployment sold as empowering self-actualisation by corporate interests unwilling to pay workers a decent wage.
When companies hit all-time high profits but working people have to drive Uber after their 9–5 to afford rent in a run-down apartment, something has gone seriously wrong.
Entrepreneurship and creative career paths outside the traditional corporate ladder are brilliant goals, and they’re worth pursuing. I’m a passionate advocate for the creator economy and startups. But the motivation makes all the difference. Innovation and progress emerge when people are driven by curiosity, ideas, creativity, and a chance to turn their passions into a profession.
Financial desperation forcing people into pseudo-entrepreneurship increases stress and financial risk and lowers the odds of success. People should start businesses because they have an exciting idea or product to bring to the world — not because they are desperate to pay rent and medical bills. A healthy system supports risk-taking and unique vocations from a foundation of basic financial security; it doesn’t push people to monetise every waking moment out of panic rather than inspiration.
We can talk all we want about lionised stories of tech billionaires like Jeff Bezos, who ostensibly blazed trails of entrepreneurial grit and determination. But let’s be real — what else could you reasonably call his parents’ $250,000 investment in Amazon ($440,000 in today’s money) other than a cushy safety net that most struggling side hustlers fantasising about “making it” could only dream of?
That’s no scrappy bootstrap origin story. It’s a level of financial backing that provides an unthinkable buffer compared to the economic pitfalls that stifle innovation for most Americans. For all the myths about lone geniuses forging empires out of garages, the reality is that true entrepreneurship thrives when people have access to capital without immediately putting their livelihoods on the line. Our system would birth many more pioneering businesses if the playing field were actually level. And realistically, the bare minimum I’m arguing for is better capital in exchange for the hard work people are already doing.
The crushing cost of living
Almost every metric that measures the cost of living has soared to absurd heights since the turn of the century. Median rents have exploded by over 25% across the country, vastly outpacing wage growth over the same period.
In many major cities, entire generations have found themselves permanently priced out of homeownership. Education costs have more than doubled since the 90s, trapping tens of millions of college graduates under the weight of decades worth of debt. Year after year, the stories pile up of record profits, stock buybacks, and executive bonuses at companies that refuse to raise pay for their workers.
Again and again, we find billion-dollar corporations like Walmart or Amazon pay their employees so meagerly that they have to rely on food stamps and government assistance while their shareholders and investors are raking in the biggest profits in history.
Wages and benefits have been utterly divorced from growth and productivity for far too long. What might have started as short-term profits motivated by greed eventually became entrenched policy as corporations, over decades, systematically fought back against every attempt to give the worker more for their labour, including deliberately and brazenly breaking laws meant to protect collective bargaining powers.
We have reached an extreme disconnect where workers have never been more productive, and companies have never made more profit, but year after year, we keep falling further and further behind financially.
Corporations are doing exactly what they’re designed to do.
I’m not blaming corporations as some nefarious arch enemy. In reality, they’re doing exactly what our economic system was explicitly designed to do — maximise value to shareholders as measured by short-term profits above all else.
When companies list on stock exchanges and source investment, the primary mechanisms driving those decisions are quarterly earnings reports and increasing share price. There is no column for “pay your workers thriving fair wages.” There is no checkbox to benefit the community. There are only financial mechanisms that reward profit by any means necessary.
If we want corporations to behave more responsibly, then the system of shareholder primacy motivating them has to change. This would require more accountable investment frameworks, strict regulations around stock buybacks, and compensation limits within organisations. Without systemic changes, blaming a corporation for cutting wages to boost profits makes as much sense as blaming a lion for chasing down a gazelle. It is quite literally their nature.
The side hustle myth: rebranding serfdom.
In the face of economic imbalance, what solution is offered to working people? In short — work more forever.
The “Side Hustle Economy” suggests that we need more hours in the day and more grind until we die at our desks. It is the insidious myth that to engage in capitalism properly, you should consistently work towards monetising every aspect of your life — your hobbies, passions, and free time. It’s a 21st-century rebranding of serfdom.
Underpaying workers was always a brilliant strategy for business owners to boost margins. But cultural acceptance and our celebration of endless work is a more recent development supporting that financial agenda.
We’re told that Side Hustles represent a new, empowering freedom to choose your own adventure. In reality, they are symptomatic of a system that has financially trapped huge swathes of the population. Being forced to drive for Doordash or Uber because your main job doesn’t pay a living wage is not an exciting story of following your dreams — it’s evidence of exploitation.
We don’t need Side Hustles. We need thriving wages from our primary jobs or a Universal Basic Income.
People should be financially secure enough from normal 8-hour work days that they have the capacity in their free time to develop skills, start businesses, invest in personal passions, follow artistic dreams for their own sake, and spend time with family and community — not just desperately try and monetise every waking moment to pay bills.
When we take a hard look at the way our system of economics functions, it becomes quite clear why corporations fight so viciously against any attempts to redirect more profits to workers or limit executive pay. Their strict allegiance is to share prices, not communities or employees. Attempts to change that reality clash directly with the fundamental values around which our current system was designed.
Powerful interests have too much at stake to give ground easily. Achieving a more equitable balance of compensation tied to growth and productivity will require collective action from everyday people — advocating locally, putting pressure on politicians nationally, and coordinating globally with allied movements.
The historical playbook for these struggles is long and storied. From the 80-hour work week of the 19th century to the fight for the 40-hour standard that became a global norm to the emergence of weekends as a right for rest and leisure — all were hard fought through solidarity. And the opposition was fierce every step of the way. Industry barons pushed back relentlessly, yet eventually, a thriving middle class did emerge.
As rampant corporate greed and the skyrocketing cost of living again push huge numbers of working families to side hustles and financial precarity, the time has come to resume that unfinished fight from last century. The work week should trend downward. The minimum wage must become a living wage, period. We need a renewed focus on workers’ rights and collective bargaining to redistribute the lopsided balance of power in employment.
Most of all, we have to debunk the cultural mythos suggesting that individual hustle and grind are the paths to prosperity in a system designed against economic mobility. As long as corporations can rely on the side hustle trap to boost their profits, they have minimal incentive to change.
The rigged game and its thinly veiled serfdom must end. It is time, as it has been before at pivotal moments in history, for us to rewrite the rules.
