Everything Feels Like Work
Hustle culture has melted my brain. I hardly remember the times when I was able to do something for fun, not for profit. Or, the allure of profit, I might say.
I recently taught myself Godot, since I've always wanted to dabble in game development. I came up with a cool idea fairly quickly, and, full of excitement, set off to work on it. After one particularly prolific bout of amateur game development, I suddenly thought: Hey, I could sell this! And, as quickly as the fun began, it ended. Working on that game was, from then on, well, work.
And so it is with almost all the things that I used to enjoy. Writing? Well, surely this can be turned into a newsletter that can be monetized, right? Or a nice little book to self-publish. Small idea for an app? Well, this has potential for a micro SaaS, has it not? Let me set up this payment provider real quick ("real quick" means three weeks and, by then, I have forgotten about the app, of course). Making a video? Well, how long would it take to gain a million followers on YouTube?
The most perverse side effect of this hustle culture is this: I can't take real vacations anymore. Whenever I take time for myself, I start some new, hustle-based side project that mentally drains me more than most work projects. Everything is performative. Long gone are the times when I could make a shitty video just for the fun of it and send it to the one person it was intended for. Long gone are the times when I could write a blog post for my handful of friends who were also big into writing blog posts for their handfuls of friends.
The dreadful rhetoric of those pesky Twitter hustle wankers penetrated my mind so deeply that "taking time for myself" has lost its allure and, thereby, its restorative quality.
I guess it will take some time to deprogram myself from this. I won't be trying to sell shit from now on. But maybe I can finally have fun again.