Stephen Carter

Because I am a very important corporate professional person (he said with the most sarcasm possible, partnered with the biggest possible eye-roll,) I spend a not insignificant amount of time on LinkedIn.

Let me add a caveat: LinkedIn once served a very specific purpose. It was a place for professionals to connect with other professionals. To share job openings, articles, news, and all sorts of corporate pats on the back.

Like the early days of Facebook, without all the pokes.

But like seemingly every good thing that exists, rampant capitalism sunk its hooks in deep and ruined it.

Below are 3 actual sentences I read on LinkedIn this week:

“Everyone should have a side project that earns $150+ per day”

“My LinkedIn engagement is up 45% in the last 30 days. Here’s why.”

“If you’re not generating money in your sleep, you’re doing it wrong.”

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m all for working hard. I’m all for knowing what you’re good at and doing that thing really well, well enough to get paid a livable wage for that. If you’re really great at knitting and want to sell your knits, you go sell those knits and use all that knitting money to knit more knits.

Like I said, I’m not down on entrepreneurship. Far from it.

But what I’ve noticed on LinkedIn, and other social media platforms lately (which is part of the reason why I left them all,) is this glorification of hustle. And when I say “hustle,” I’m specifically talking about this 20th century notion of no days off, or I’ll sleep when I’m dead.

I think its leading to a generation of burnout. To a generation of people who can’t tell the difference between hard work and working themselves to death. To a generation of tired, stressed, anxious, overmedicated people for whom no amount of success will ever be enough.

Because when all you see in your social media feeds are people with generational wealth trying to “teach” people how to hustle harder, nothing short of that level of success will ever be satisfying.

I don’t want to be that curmudgeon that blames everything on culture, but humor me. We live in a culture that has decided to wholeheartedly embrace several ideologies, that when combined, are destroying us.

We Live in a Culture of Instant Gratification

Last year here in Portland, we had an ice storm that knocked our WIFI out for 4 days. Was in inconvenient? Sure. But you would have thought that my children had never existed before. They were befuddled.

“What do you mean we can’t watch Is it Cake?”

“How am I going to download Taylor Swift on my Apple Music account?”

Combine our dependence on the internet with things like the Drive Thru, curbside pickup, and Prime 2 day delivery, and it quickly becomes shockingly clear that we’ve prioritized instant gratification above pretty much everything else.

We Live in a Culture of Nonstop Comparison

Open your Instagram app right now. What do you see? If you’re like most people, it’s some curated version of someone’s life. They’re in Europe, or Disneyland, or their house is spotless, their abs are on point, or that swimsuit fits them JUST right.

The problem is only compounded if you’re a teenage girl. There have been multiple studies that adolescent girls that regularly use social media have higher rates of anxiety, depression, self-harm, and suicide attempts.

Because again, when all you see is how you’re SUPPOSED to be, you grow increasingly unaccepting of who you ARE. And the lie of “if you can just look like THEM, then you’ll be happy” is a hard one to ignore.

We Live in a Culture of Rampant Capitalism

Without sounding like a complete anarchist, it should be obvious to anybody paying attention that the only thing that drives our culture is money.

How to get more. How to spend more. How to pay less taxes. How to avoid paying taxes all together. How to make sure you never run out. How to make sure your kids never run out.

The list goes on and on and on.

And I'm not against money. I like having it. It provides a level of comfort and enjoyment that not having it doesn’t provide.

I buy records, and shoes, and artisan coffee. Those things certainly cost money.

But when people are dying because they can’t afford the healthcare or medicines they need, or are having to start GoFundMe accounts to pay for their chemotherapy, we’ve lost the plot.

When you combine our rampant, cannibalistic, take-no-prisoners capitalism with our need to compare ourselves to others, and our insistence on instant gratification, it creates a toxic mashup of all of the worst parts of humanity.

What if we resisted?

What if we said, “Enough is enough!”

But more than that, “HAVING enough is enough.” Maybe we don’t need to be making money hand over fist in our sleep? What if clocking out at the end of the work day was the norm, instead of using our mobile hotspot to answer emails at our kid’s soccer games?

While I know it’s cliche, I really do believe that nobody on their death bed wished they’d worked more. Or made more money. I’ve read the articles where people have interviewed people who are dying, and their biggest regrets are ALWAYS relational.

“I wish I had patched things up with my daughter.”

“I wish I was more present in my kids’ lives when they were little.”

“I wish I’d learned and accepted who I was earlier in life.”

So again, love your family, take care of your loved ones, and by all means, make a good living.

But let’s chew our legs out of the bear trap that is our no-holds-barred, dog-eat-dog, do anything to get ahead world that we live in.

Because this existence is all we get. Let’s make the best of it.

I’m no expert, but if there is an afterlife, I'm pretty sure there's no WIFI. 

And that’s probably a good thing. Most of us would figure out a way to check our emails there too.