It’s Okay to Want a Small Life
Can we please just live instead of building the life?
I have always had ambivalent feelings about the so-called hustle culture. I never liked the word, to begin with, and I felt always conflicted about it seeping into our everyday lives — as something to go for.
I spent almost two decades of my life working in advertising, for huge international ad agencies where the corporate culture was everything but healthy, the competition was ruthless, and the notion of hustling was the groundstone of it all. Even worse, by the nature of the territory, advertising professionals were hustling to fill the pockets of already filthy rich shareholders and investors — giving their all, sweat and tears, mental and physical health, life sacrificed for something that has never been something worth the sacrifice.
Of course, it didn’t seem that way to me. At the time, young and single and ambitious, it was also fun. It was catering to my competitive nature. It was also great company. If you were lucky, you got to work with amazingly talented people. It was also the promise to become one of the elite VIPs, living the high-life in five-star hotels with infinity pools and trips with penguins in South Africa during the cold continental winter to shoot some commercial that needed a sunlit field in the middle of December. It was…
