[heavyset_go]

I once met someone who lived and breathed "hustle culture". They even had a giant poster about "the hustle" framed in their living room. They were all about business, (allegedly) making money, and "legacy building". They had endless stories about their luxurious lifestyle and vacations, since work hard and play harder was their motto, after all.

I later found out that it was all a ruse. They didn't own any businesses and weren't employed. They didn't even own/lease the apartment, they had convinced an elderly couple at a church they were sleeping in the basement of to put them up in the apartment for free.

To me, that person was the living, breathing personification of hustle culture as I know it.

[wpietri]

This is my impression of the phrase too. I think there's a difference between being a go-getter or an entrepreneur (which can be fine things) and self-conscious "hustle culture", where people perform "hustle" and base their identities not in results but in the appearance of hard-charging success.

I think we have an epidemic of that right now both in the broader culture (e.g., MLMs, crypto hustling) and in tech, where some icons of success (Jobs, Zuckerberg) have led to countless dubious imitators (Theranos, WeWork).