The pandemic has made everyone think about what really matters, and it isn’t ‘hustle culture’, working around the clock or pledging yourself to your employer like a serf
Everyone’s fixated on offices. Will we ever return? Will the extroverts return and the introverts stay at home? Will the high performers go back and the coasters stick to Zoom? Or will it be the other way round? Maybe anyone with a sense of purpose and direction can work from their bedroom, perched on an ironing board, and you only need IRL colleagues if you’re aimless and chaotic. But that conversation is actually standing in for (and masking) a more profound one about work itself. “Hustle culture” – working all the time, finding your fulfilment and identity there, pledging yourself to your employer like a serf, having a side-hustle to plug any gaps, configuring yourself as an instrument of productivity – has taken quite a hit over the past 18 months.
Some of us have been forced by catastrophe to think about what really matters. Some have realised that, for all that we loved our job, our job didn’t love us back. Some have worked so hard that we’ve forgotten what the point was, and emptied the tank of drive and ambition. And some have had such a prolonged period of inactivity that our muscles of activity for activity’s sake have simply atrophied.
Continue reading...from The Guardian https://ift.tt/3xTGVUu
