Somewhere on your feed right now there is a man in a fitted black t-shirt standing in front of a whiteboard or a rented Lamborghini telling you that if you are not working while others sleep, you do not want it badly enough. He also definitely has a podcast. He has a course where he is selling how to be a high functioning human as well in his bio. He woke up at 4am to record this. And now he wants you to know that comfort is the enemy and that every hour you spend resting is an hour your competition is pulling ahead.
He is also, statistically, one of the rare few for whom this worked. The ten people who tried the same thing and burnt out are not making content about it. They are sleeping, or in therapy, or both.
This is survivorship bias dressed as gospel, and it is everywhere. Your Instagram for you page filled with the I am 17 years old and made 10k dollars this year kind of content.
The hustle narrative has a specific seduction that makes it irresistible. It takes something real — the fact that good work requires effort and inflates it into an identity, a morality, almost a religion. Rest becomes laziness. Boundaries become weakness. Wanting a normal life becomes something to be ashamed of. The sigma grindset content, the red pill productivity gospel, the 5am club aesthetics suddenly all of it is running the same code underneath: your worth is your output, and if your output is not maximal, you are failing.
The startup world today has made this worse by institutionalising it. There is a specific cruelty in the way early-stage companies talk about hustle — we are a family, we are building something, this is a mission — while paying people a fraction of what they ask from them in hours, energy, and emotional investment. Asking someone to work sixty or seventy hours a week is a legitimate business ask if you are paying them accordingly. Asking someone to work sixty or seventy hours a week at a salary that does not cover their rent and calling it passion is not hustle culture. It is wage theft with better branding.
The people who burn out from this rarely make headlines. They just quietly exit, carry the damage into the next thing, and wonder why they feel nothing when they should feel proud. Burnout is not a personal failure of resilience. It is the predictable output of a system designed to extract more than it returns.
What nobody in the hustle content space wants to say is that most people who make it do not make it because they ground harder than everyone else. They make it because of timing, access, luck, the right room at the right moment, a network that opened a door. The grind was present, yes. But so was circumstance. Collapsing the whole story into work ethic is convenient for people selling courses and uncomfortable for everyone else.
I want to make it clear here that it is not the purpose of this piece to make excuses for yourself for falling behind. But what this piece wants to drive home is that it is completely normal to want a normal life that is not great in a way that gets you global fame. It is okay to choose that you need slowness beyond just making that hustle your entire identity. One of my favourite creators on Instagram, Padmakshi Sharma who is studying Columbia University, speaks about this and puts it into perspective in a beautiful way:
"Late-stage capitalism frames ambition as some sort of virtue that we should all embody if we want to make it in life, and I hate that. Ambition is not a virtue, it's just a characteristic or a trait. Your ambition only describes the intensity of what you desire. It does not speak for the quality of what is being desired. It does not speak for the integrity of you as a person who's desiring it.... if it's not something that you want, it's completely okay to say that I want different things for my life. I don't want to constantly monitor my progress. I don't want to constantly compare myself with others. I just want to be, and that's completely fine."
Nick Tarmo puts it just as sharply:
"Ambition is not an accolade, it is a character trait.... for every ambitious person out there, there are 10 to 100 non-ambitious people that just want a normal, stable, and comfortable life.... for every successful ambitious person you see online, there are 10 unsuccessful ambitious people that you don't see online because they are recovering from a long-term burnout.... our consumption of highlight reel media makes us believe that it is much easier and more common to be hyper-successful than it actually is.... you are likely not any smarter than them, you guys just have a different set of priorities that were heavily shaped by the environment you've grown up or currently live in."
Roy Lee, who runs Cluely, calls this prestige whoring — and as offensive as the phrasing is, it describes something real and recognisable. The compulsion to chase credentials, institutions, and titles not because they align with what you actually want but because they signal the right things to the right people. In Asian societies, and India is no exception, this pressure does not come only from content creators or startup culture. It comes from the dinner table. It comes from relatives who ask about marks before they ask about anything else.
It comes from a culture that has spent decades romanticising a handful of success stories — the IIT graduate, the UPSC topper, the doctor who made it abroad — and quietly erased everyone who tried and found a different path. We do not just celebrate success here. We use it as a measuring stick for everyone else. The child who wanted to paint is shown the engineer. The student who loved literature is shown the civil servant. Social comparison is not incidental to how we raise children in this country. It is the primary pedagogy. And what it produces is a generation of people who are either chasing prestige they never chose or carrying shame about paths they did not take. Neither is a good way to live. Neither was ever really about the person at all.
We need to make it okay to be ordinary. To work reasonable hours and go home. To have evenings that do not involve self-improvement. To measure a life by something other than your output and your portfolio and your morning routine. Not every person needs to be building something. Some people need to be resting. Some people need to be present for the people around them. Some people need to do work that pays them fairly and then stop doing it when the day ends.
That is not giving up. That is what a life is supposed to look like.
The goal was never the grind. The grind was supposed to be in service of something — time, freedom, meaning, connection. If the grind has become the thing itself, something has gone wrong. And no amount of 4am content is going to fix it.