Fighting hustle culture: When rest feels like failure

Almost eight years ago, I was forced into retirement by disability.

There was no grand plan. No careful transition. One day I was a business owner, writer, and professional problem-solver. The next, I was flat on my back in bed, focused solely on trying—and often failing—to manage pain.

At first, I couldn't work at all.

As someone who considered sixty hours a slow week, I panicked. Work wasn't just how I paid my bills. It was how I measured my value. It was how I understood myself. If someone asked who I was, I had an answer ready: I was a writer. I was an entrepreneur. I was productive.

When disability took that away, I discovered something unsettling.

The hardest part of becoming disabled wasn't losing my ability to work. It was discovering how much of my worth I'd attached to productivity.

I don't think I'm unusual.

Many of us have absorbed the idea that productivity is more than a useful skill. We've turned it into a moral virtue. We admire productive people. We celebrate busy people. We praise hustle, ambition, and optimization. We treat rest as a reward that must be earned rather than a basic human need.

The result is a culture that quietly teaches people to ignore their limits until their bodies force them to stop.

The cult of productivity

I'm not sure exactly when productivity became a moral virtue, but I struggle to remember a time when it wasn't.

From childhood, many of us are taught to value ourselves through achievement. Good grades become good colleges. Good colleges become good jobs. Good jobs become promotions, side projects, networking opportunities, and endless self-improvement.

The modern workplace often reinforces the same message. Being busy isn't just accepted; it's admired. People describe themselves as "swamped" or "crazy busy" almost as a badge of honor. We celebrate people who answer emails at midnight and work through vacations. We congratulate people for pushing through exhaustion.

Entire industries have emerged around helping us squeeze more productivity out of every hour. There are productivity systems, productivity coaches, productivity books, productivity apps, and productivity apps designed to help us manage our productivity apps.

The language surrounding productivity often sounds strangely moral.

People talk about "wasting time," "being lazy," or "falling behind." We admire people who "grind" and "hustle." The underlying assumption is that every minute should be monetized, optimized, leveraged, improved, or somehow transformed into measurable output.

Let me be clear: Productivity is not the problem. The problem is when productivity becomes a measure of human worth.

When work becomes identity

I spent roughly twenty-five years living inside that mindset.

I built businesses. I wrote books. I chased goals. I worked nights, weekends, and holidays. Every accomplishment felt important until I reached it. Then it immediately became normal and I started looking toward the next milestone.

What I eventually realized is that productivity culture contains a hidden trap.

The reward for productivity is the expectation of more productivity. You finish one project and receive another. You hit one goal and create a bigger one. You increase efficiency and expectations rise to match. There is no finish line. Nobody appears with a certificate declaring that you have finally done enough and may now rest without guilt.

The horizon keeps moving. According to FlexJobs, 1 in 4 employees took no vacation time in 2024. One-quarter of employees are so caught up in being productive that they don’t use the vacation time they’ve earned and have the right to spend.

Many people spend years believing that relief is just around the corner. As soon as they finish this project, get this promotion, launch this business, pay off this debt, or achieve this milestone, they'll finally slow down. Then they arrive and discover that slowing down feels impossible.

Without realizing it, they've built an identity around motion itself. If productivity becomes who you are, rest starts to feel like failure.

What it does to bodies

This might be merely unfortunate if it affected only our schedules. Instead, it affects our health.

Burnout has become so common that many people treat it as an unavoidable part of adulthood. The World Health Organization now recognizes burnout as an occupational phenomenon, resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.

Researchers have linked chronic stress to a wide range of physical and mental health problems, including cardiovascular disease, sleep disruption, anxiety, depression, and weakened immune function. Chronic stress doesn't stay in our minds. It eventually shows up in our bodies.

Long working hours present their own risks. A joint study by WHO and ILO estimated that working long hours contributes to hundreds of thousands of deaths annually through increased risks of stroke and heart disease.

Not every illness is caused by productivity culture. Not every disability comes from overwork. But productivity culture can make many conditions worse.

People delay doctor's appointments because they don't have time. They work through illnesses because they don't want to appear weak. They answer emails from hospital beds. They skip vacations. They sacrifice sleep.

The logic sounds responsible in the moment. Keep going. Push through. Deal with it later. Unfortunately, bodies eventually collect those debts.

Rest isn't optional. It's part of being human. Yet our culture often treats it as suspicious. When people feel guilty for meeting basic physical needs, something has gone wrong.

Disabled people notice the lie

Disability has a way of exposing cultural assumptions that many people never notice.

Disabled people are often forced to confront a question that able-bodied people can sometimes avoid: If I can't produce, do I still have value?

For years, my answer was more complicated than I wanted it to be. Intellectually, I believed every person had value. Emotionally, I struggled to apply that belief to myself.

When your identity is built around output, losing that output can feel like losing yourself. But disability reveals a truth that productivity culture tries very hard to ignore. Human worth cannot depend on productivity because productivity is temporary.

Every body changes.

Every body ages.

Every body becomes less efficient eventually.

Even if disability never enters your life through illness or injury, aging alone guarantees that your output will decline someday.

Productivity is a terrible foundation for human value because it is temporary by definition. Every athlete slows down. Every worker retires. Every body ages. Every life eventually contains illness, grief, caregiving, injury, or decline.

Productivity culture asks us to build our identities on something guaranteed to disappear. The disability perspective exposes the flaw in the entire system.

If a person loses their value when they lose their productivity, then every human being is eventually destined to become less valuable. Most of us would reject that conclusion immediately. Yet many of us continue to live as though it were true.

AI and the future we keep refusing

The arrival of artificial intelligence presents an interesting test.

For generations, new technologies have promised to make life easier. Washing machines reduced household labor. Computers automated calculations and recordkeeping. Email sped up communication. Automation transformed manufacturing.

Each innovation promised greater efficiency. Yet many people don't feel like they have more time. Instead, expectations merely expanded.

Tasks that once took days are now expected in hours. Messages that once took weeks to deliver now demand immediate responses. The capacity to produce more became an obligation to produce more.

Now AI arrives with similar promises. It can draft documents, summarize information, generate images, analyze data, and automate routine tasks.

The optimistic vision is obvious: Perhaps people could work less and experience less stress. Technology could absorb the drudgery and allow more room for creativity, relationships, leisure, and rest.

But history suggests another, more sinister possibility. What if we use AI the same way we've used every previous labor-saving technology? What if efficiency doesn't reduce the demands on workers, but increases them?

Ten emails become twenty. Twenty become fifty. One report becomes three.

Technology itself is not the problem. The question is whether we will use technological progress to improve human lives, or simply raise productivity targets yet again.

What worries me about AI isn’t the technology itself. It is the possibility that we will use it to deepen habits that are already making us miserable.

We could use AI to shorten workdays, reduce burnout, and create more room for family, creativity, friendship, and rest. Or we could use it the way we’ve used every other productivity breakthrough: as justification for expecting more from already exhausted people.

The right question

Creating things is one of the great joys of being human. I still write. I still create. I still care about producing good work.

The difference is that I no longer believe productivity is a measure of my worth. Productivity is a tool—not a virtue, not a personality, and definitely not a measure of human value.

A society that cannot distinguish between a productive person and a valuable person will eventually make everyone sick.

The question isn't whether we can produce more.

The question is whether we can remember that human beings were never meant to be production systems in the first place.