Tag: Hustle Culture

Grindset, a relentless drive to work hard, constantly and excessively, once looked like the golden path to success. Then it did not. Then, in 2024 and 2025, some of it quietly came back. Understanding why matters more than picking a side in the debate.

Grindset Never Fully Left. It Cycled Back.

Around 2022 and 2023, hustle culture faced a real and visible backlash. “Quiet quitting,” “lazy girl jobs,” and “bare minimum Mondays” climbed social platforms as young workers pushed back against burnout being treated as a badge of honour. A 2022 Prudential survey found 70% of American workers had prioritised, or were considering prioritising, their personal life over their career, with 20% willing to take a pay cut for better balance.

That backlash was real, but it was not the end of the story. Through 2024 and 2025, return to office mandates spread across major employers, and “founder mode,” a term describing an intensely hands on, always available leadership style, gained real traction in start up and tech circles. Some commentators now describe this as hustle culture 2.0, arriving under new branding rather than actually disappearing. Economic pressure, layoffs, and anxiety about AI displacing roles are widely cited as the reasons people feel compelled to prove their value through visible overwork again, even while burnout rates remain high.

Defining Grindset

Grindset is not simply working hard. It is working constantly. It is a mindset fixated on achieving goals at all costs, marked by an inability to switch off or step back. Never enough, always more, regardless of the toll.

It shows up across culture in familiar ways: the tireless workaholic portrayed as the hero in film and television, “crunch” culture worn as a badge of honour in start ups, hashtags like #hustle and #grind across social platforms, and a long shelf of motivational literature arguing that rest is for the weak. Grant Cardone’s The 10X Rule, Gary Vaynerchuk’s Crush It!, and similar titles have sold millions of copies on some version of this promise. None of that makes the promise accurate.

What Current Data Actually Shows About the Cost

Deloitte’s 2025 Gen Z and Millennial Survey found fewer than 6 in 10 millennials rate their mental wellbeing as good or very good, and over a third report feeling stressed or anxious all or most of the time, with their job frequently cited as the major source. This is not a generational quirk. It is a direct signal about the environment grindset culture creates.

The pattern extends up the org chart. Gallup’s workplace research finds roughly a quarter of leaders report experiencing burnout often or always, and nearly two thirds say they experience it at least sometimes. A leader modelling grindset behaviour is frequently doing so from inside their own burnout, not from a position of sustainable strength, which is exactly how the pattern replicates down through a team.

The paradox holds up under scrutiny too. Extended overwork without sufficient recovery reliably degrades decision making, memory, and creativity, producing a cycle of diminishing returns where more hours worked does not translate into better output. Working constantly is not the same as working effectively, and the research gap between those two things has only become clearer as more recent data has come in.

Common Characteristics of Grindset

Workaholism, perfectionism, chronic stress, and an avoidance of leisure are the clearest hallmarks. A few others worth naming specifically: an inability to switch off, leading to constant checking of messages and normalised late night or weekend work. Depersonalisation, a cynical detachment from colleagues and clients under sustained stress. And, less discussed but real, reliance on substances to turn productivity on and stress off, a pattern that became particularly visible with off label stimulant use in some tech and finance circles.

Who Is Most at Risk

Ambitious professionals in competitive fields like finance, law, or tech, where long hours are normalised. Entrepreneurs and start up founders, who often feel every hour not spent working is a lost opportunity. High achievers and perfectionists, who fear that slowing down equals failure. People under genuine financial pressure, working multiple jobs out of necessity rather than ambition. Anyone in a culture, organisational or societal, that equates busyness with status. And, perhaps counterintuitively, people with a previous burnout history, who can fall back into old patterns without new coping strategies in place.

Balancing Grindset With Kindset

The alternative is not working less for its own sake. Call it Kindset: a deliberate shift toward self-compassion, care for others, and a genuinely multidimensional view of success. Kindset is not soft. It involves fiercely focusing on what actually matters, being purposeful, and practising real self-discipline about recovery, not just about output.