Is hustle culture destroying the next generation? by Danica Sperath

We spend our days in boxes. In cubicles, classrooms, desks, offices and bedrooms. Stuck into routines that make life feel meaningless. Often feeling trapped by superficial social and academic obligations, like you’ve been strapped onto a treadmill at birth and forced to run down a path you've never wanted. Many students seem to break under the immense academic pressures to be perfect.. being graded on ability to memorise rather than ability to understand. Are we forgetting the reason we go to school? To learn. Everyday, we’re surrounded by never ending ‘unspoken rules’, expectations, and jealousy that makes us afraid to live, and regardless of the amount of times tables we’ve learnt, we still don’t know how to escape them!

Hustle culture believes more work equals more success. And while this can be true, improving productivity and motivation, what benefits can you get from draining yourself that you can’t get elsewhere?

It’s no shocker that this hustle mindset is huge in high school. Universities have ever-lower acceptance rates, and now that the minimum to even have a chance is perfection.. acceptance into university sounds like a fever dream. In an age of constant online comparison, numbers of mental health issues in teens continue rising higher too. In 2024, over half of all New Zealanders ages 15-24 experience anxiety or depression, and numbers of young people with moderate to high distress have nearly doubled since 2016. What are we to do when we need help? As much as we all love doomscrolling, taking advice from influencers and fake medical professionals won’t help us whatsoever. Even though a quarter of rangatahi experience high mental health needs, the percentage who cannot access support when they need it has risen by 77%. What are we doing?! We can see teens in Aotearoa are struggling, getting crushed by the pressure of perfection. Academic pressure is just one of the things crushing us. But can we see any end in sight?

Let me ask: How many hours do you spend on your phone each day?
I spend maybe three hours (okay maybe a bit more), but online comparison still sometimes makes me feel like a total failure.
I see videos about “14 hour study days”, StudywithKate’s “study marathons,” and "GCSE results day” tiktoks and you probably do too. So what if I decide I'll spend every waking moment studying, neglecting myself and shutting everyone out, because more work equals more success…right? But what do we do when we don’t have any motivation left? Are teenagers able to stay strong under this pressure?

Well… no. I wouldn’t say so.

In a study from the United States, over 90% of 9-12th Grade students reported that they get an inadequate number of hours of sleep on most school nights. Some students reported coping strategies such as taking sleeping pills, smoking cigarettes and drinking alcohol to help them sleep. If hustle culture is depriving teenagers of sleep, and leading them to habits that destroy their body physically and mentally, do you think that this is the school system best developing the leaders of tomorrow or demoralising them today?

We know that global rates of diagnosed mental illness and psychological distress have surged in recent years - anxiety and depression lead the crisis. When humans start to break, we’re told it's a personal problem. But we aren't glowsticks. ‘Breaking’ us doesn’t make us work harder! What if anxiety, burn out, depression and dissociation are just our minds sending alarm bells, reacting exactly how they should to a life that's completely unnatural, controlled, and oppressive? Why is it that we are always told to manage these symptoms rather than question the system causing them?

Humans are social creatures. But hustle culture is destroying our sense of community. If we don't have that, what do we have? We prioritize getting better grades than our peers than getting to know them as people, and are so terrified of someone beating us, that we can't help anyone out if there isn’t something in it for us! If just being alive takes a village, why are we burning our bridges to give ourselves motivation to run faster?

I believe that hustle culture has alienated us, destroyed our sense of community, and is adding to a long term mental health crisis, but all we are getting are ways to reduce these effects, instead of ways to stop the root problem.

In Krishnamurti's words, “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” But we’ve known this ‘sick society’ since we learnt our ABC’s. Do we love the hustle and bustle of life because it’s good for us, or because we don’t know how to escape the box?

Danica Sperath
Year 12 ENWN