Hustle: Is it an overused, wrongly glorified, and unnecessary addition to everyday vocabulary?

In particular, I refer to the verb ‘to hustle’. If you search ‘hustle’ on Google, it gives you 292m hits; yet this is a word that I never use myself, not in writing, nor in speaking. Among younger people in the workplace, by contrast, this is almost a word in daily use; at our most recent graduation ceremony in July, our (female) student president urged those graduating to ‘keep on hustling’.

Its origins date to the 1600s when the Dutch word husselen, meaning ‘to shake, to toss’, came into common use – in 2023, I don’t think our student president was encouraging our graduates to keep shaking, rather, that they should maintain continuous movement, physical or otherwise.

Should we all be in continuous movement? The hustle generation, it turns out, are divided even between themselves about the merits of the word, and whether or not it might be over-used. For its detractors, ‘hustle’ defines a workplace environment which intensely focuses on productivity, ambition, and success, with little regard for rest, self-care, or any sense of work-life balance.

This has many negative connotations and has led to the concept of toxic hustle culture, where employers expect employees, for instance, to stay late or come to work early, and give them lofty to-do lists or demands, without enough time or resources to complete tasks.

This is, apparently, one of the contributing factors to, post-covid, what has been termed The Great Resignation and ‘quiet quitting’, yet more terminology which is more usually used by those much younger than me.

I do get the issue with being ‘always on’. The pandemic normalised the concept of Working From Home (WFH); while employers worried about employee productivity at home (would they step away from the computer to, for instance, binge watch a Netflix series, or indulge a new talent for sourdough baking, when they should be working?)

I personally found that the reverse was true (when the office was on the kitchen table, would there ever be space for the family to eat? Would I ever tear myself away for long enough to cook for them?).

In these post-Covid days I try and be more conscious of, for instance, when I send emails, and frequently use the ‘delay send’ function to give the impression that I write all my emails just before 0800, rather than the reality, which is more likely to be just before 2300.

I worry that as someone who does indeed work long hours, by sending late-night emails I imply that I expect others to as well. While I want my employees to take their responsibilities seriously, I don’t want them to think that I expect 24/7 activity.

Then there is the concept of the side hustle. This is the second job, something you are engaged in as well as your day job. My first significant side hustle was writing a newspaper column for a major UK national newspaper, which I started in 1999 and only gave up in 2016 when I became a full time academic.

Back in 1999 I was so nervous about my employer finding out about my side hustle that I asked the newspaper to give me a pseudonym, and so to many thousands of people I became known as ‘Mrs Moneypenny’.

What was the column about? Every weekend I described how I was surviving as a woman with a full-time job, a part time job, a mortgage, a husband and three children – looking back, it was a column about how to hustle.

If you encourage others to keep on hustling are you inadvertently glorifying overwork? Not necessarily. Hustle for many young people merely means getting it done regardless of how you feel. “It” can refer to goals relating to ambition, health and fitness, finance, business – whatever you want.

To its supporters, hustling is a combination of hard work, discipline and persistence. Ambitious and committed young people use the word to describe their focus and dedication to their life goals. Many of them (and I look after almost 5,000 university students, so I meet quite a few 20-somethings these days) tell me that they like to feel as though they are hustling their way through life.

Finally, is the word ‘hustle’ overused these days? The jury is out. Even ChatGPT, which I finally decided to consult, and which has been fed over 300 billion words during its development, could not decide.

”Some people”, it told me, ”might think it is used excessively, while others might find it fitting to describe hard work and determination. It is largely a matter of personal perspective”. Quite. My own personal perspective is that some words are best left to another generation. Including the verb ‘to hustle’.