When Doing Less Means Becoming More

As the spring left center stage and summer made her annual appearance, my excitement for summer 2025 grew. This summer I would be spending the long, hot days of summer in Spain with my responsibilities cut in half due to the summer break embedded in my part-time job schedule and flexibility of my freelance work. I would enjoy these days by spending time outdoors (when the heat isn’t unbearable) and leaning into some soul work I’ve been putting off. The first few weeks went according to plan. Then, out of nowhere, I felt this twinge of restlessness. 

My slow mornings suddenly felt inadequate and the subsequent hours infused with time for silence and rest eventually felt unproductive. I began to berate myself for being lazy and not “doing enough.” Especially since I haven’t felt drained these past few weeks when my head hit the pillow, I believed that I was doing something wrong.  That’s when I realized that old conditioning I thought I had overcome was coming back. Or, rather, I still had remnants of a belief system I didn’t realize was still there. This belief system is programmed and installed in many of our lives with its codes coming from the rule book of hustle culture. 

Hustle culture has programmed us to believe a lot of things. For one, it taught us that productivity should be held above all other things in our lives. What naturally follows this is the conditioning that our self-worth is intertwined with how much we can produce, and if we don’t produce enough, then we are not enough. Secondly, hustle culture has taught us that even when our actions aren’t producing quality, meaningful results, we should still exhaust ourselves to keep up appearances. It’s the “being busy for the sake of being busy” routine. Because at the end of the day, our lives, according to hustle culture, are valuable if and only if we are productive. 

Hustle culture promises more than it can actually deliver. It promises fulfillment. It promises a holy grail in an imaginary future where all this hustle will finally grant us the freedom from the stresses and inconveniences of life.

Hustle culture is a scam. This isn’t to say that effort and work toward aspirations and goals aren’t necessary for their fruition. It’s to say that hustle culture promises more than it can actually deliver. It promises fulfillment. It promises a holy grail in an imaginary future where all this hustle will finally grant us the freedom from the stresses and inconveniences of life. That’s essentially what all this hustle and rushing is for. It’s to reach a place in our lives where we’ve finally “made it” and we can finally be happy for the rest of our lives. But once you peel back the layers of this code book, you realize how silly it is. If life was meant to be simple and wrapped up in one nice big bow, then life wouldn’t need to exist. Life is meant to be experienced fully, not rushed through without a scratch. These scratches — the joys and the suffering, the highs and the lows, the triumphs and the losses, the effortlessness and the challenges — are what make life worth living. They are the intricacies that serve the beauty of our evolution. 

To decode the remaining influence hustle culture has in my life, I had to unabashedly agree and trust the fact that catering to other areas of my life is just as important as working toward my aspirations. This means that the season that I am in now where my wellness is the priority is an act of productivity. Because the time I take for self-care does produce results in my life. It produces peace, joy, compassion, patience, and love.  This point was made clear to me after having a conversation with Cieghlee Fennel whom I interviewed recently. Rather than buying into her lack of culture-defined productivity as a failure or waste of time, she saw it as an opportunity to pour into her self-care and make it a priority. “I can prioritize myself and prioritize my health, my wellness, which are super duper important,” Fennel said. “So really prioritizing being present and enjoying the experience, and not kind of getting bogged down on those, not smaller priorities, but maybe not priorities that served me and served the present as much” is an invaluable lesson Fennel learned and speaks to the necessity of deprogramming our minds from what culture has preached productivity should look and feel like. 

From outsiders looking in, my summer may be a waste of time that I could be using to hustle toward the goals I have written down in my journal. However, I know that the time I’m taking to water and nurture my well-being will be a better investment and will actually serve my goals whenever I’m ready to approach them from a place of patience rather than rush.

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