Hello darling,

I wanted to start this newsletter issue with an epigraph about hustle culture, and my Google searches led me to a website called “sidehustlenation” (no backlink because they don’t deserve it), and an article titled “Hustle Quotes: 52 Famous Quotes About Hustling.” Inventive. Groundbreaking! 

My hope had been that I could find a clear quote that epitomized what has come to be seen as hustle culture since I aim to spend the majority of this newsletter talking about the nuance between side projects that invigorate you creatively and intellectually, and side hustles that drain you of your energy as you pursue unattainable promises. 

Instead, what I found was a list of bro-coded wall art sayings– the kind of “Live. Laugh. Love.”-quality drivel that would only appeal to someone whose frontal lobes havent finished forming and unironically refers to himself as an alpha male. Quotes as motivational and insightful as “Everyday I’m Hustlin’” and “Eat. Sleep. Hustle. Repeat.” 

(It should come as no surprise, dear reader, that for each of these quotes, there just so happened to be a link to a t-shirt on Amazon bearing the quote across the chest. Very subtle, very valuable affiliate marketing!)

Rather than start with one of these wow-factor quotes from Side Hustle Nation, I’ll open things off with a quote of my own: “wow, there’s a lot of bullshit online.” 

I’ve been thinking about hustle culture quite a lot recently, as I sometimes have a hard time intuiting the distinction between a side project and a side hustle in my own life. I invest time, energy, and money into this very newsletter, and I hope to one day make money from writing it. Does that make me a hustle culture bro? Lord, I hope not. But it’s an insecurity worth exploring, so I decided to spend some time researching. 

I’ll start with a fun fact: Did you know that Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 12th Edition, includes an entry for “side hustle?” It’s defined as, 

While bound, physical dictionaries may be less common these days, I want to draw your attention to the example usage and citation. The source– a paper called the Kitsap Sun– used the expression “side hustle” to refer to secondary work for the sake of income supplementation in 1950. 

Having a side gig is not new, though the current understanding of it is fairly recent in the grand scale of human history. If you think about it, the existence of a side hustle necessitates the co-existence of a primary means of employment. Up until the Industrial Revolution, it was less common for people to have a single, specific job that defined their career.

Prior to that, work was dictated by daylight, seasons, and family needs. Someone who farmed might also be a soldier as required, might also darn socks, might also can food, might also shear sheep, might also milk cows, might also be a priest. And on and on and on. Earlier still, the hunter and the gatherer didn’t have distinct roles in ensuring the survival of their communities or family units. I like to imagine conversations with caveman HR… Me no start fire. Me on payroll for hunt only. Need overtime if carve arrowhead. 

To oversimplify and summarize several millennia of human history, people do what they need to survive and care for their immediate circle within the context and norms of their society. 

And, again, for much of human history, that’s not been a particularly contentious way of being. Survival of the species and all, you know? But in our post-Industrial world, there’s something odd about side hustles that we have to be willing to consider. 

First and foremost, we’re in a time of significant wealth disparity. The rich are getting (way) richer, and the poor are getting poorer. The gap between the haves and have-nots is widening, and as the cost of living rockets upward while wages stay flat, more and more people have to turn to alternative or secondary sources of income to make ends meet. In the United States, there’s not a single state where someone working full-time at the federal minimum wage rate of $7.25 an hour could support a family under the current cost of living. For many people, having multiple jobs doesn’t feel like having a side hustle for extra income. It’s survival. 

But there’s another camp that’s very curious to me. For some, having a side hustle is all about maximizing wealth simply because you can. Especially on platforms like Twitter, Reddit, and the blogosphere (like the darling little site I mentioned in the opening section), there is a very active, thriving community, primarily of young men, who preach the gospel of hustle any time they get a chance. It’s as if they are fixated on finding ways to make more money, no matter the cost, ethics, or feasibility. Most annoyingly, they also tend to have a superiority complex and look down on people who aren’t using every second of their time and available resources to make more money. 

It’s often quite trite, but there’s still a strange allure to it. Consistent across their messaging is the notion that one can take care of themselves and take control of their situation through a willingness to work hard alone. It often appeals to young men who are fearful about their career prospects or who have been teetering on the edge of just making ends meet for a while. But it also has a wide appeal to men in the tech and business spaces, who typically have to deal with less scarcity, yet also carry a belief that they are inherently deserving of greater wealth as a byproduct of their character and efforts. 

The echochamber of these conversations often repeats lines about the ease of passive income, buying vending machines, renting out parking spaces, and sacrificing sleep, health, and relationships in service of a greater calling: making money. 

I have a lot I could say about online hustle culture and its MLM-like quality, but that likely warrants an entire issue of its own. I’ll sum up those thoughts and feelings by reminding you that if something sounds too good to be true, it is; if someone is selling you on a product or course that promises an easy way to make money, run. 

Instead, what I want to tease out is the distinction between a side hustle and a side project, and whether or not that distinction really matters. 

Perhaps because it’s merely a matter of semantics, there’s not much reputable writing on the nuance of a side project vs a side hustle. However, among solo-writers such as myself, there seems to be a relative consensus that:

In my conscious mind, I see endeavors like Non-Slop Fun as squarely in the side-project camp. I write a newsletter because I enjoy writing, and because the structure and consistency it requires force me to carve out time and space to focus on my writing. I am also fully aware that I have double-digit subscribers, not the 4- or 5-figure numbers required to meaningfully generate revenue. Side project. 

And yet, what I have found is that when I procrastinate on this newsletter, I feel guilty about not working. When I look at my subscriber count, I start to question whether or not I’m growing fast enough or if I need to work harder, buy ads, and start knocking on doors to bring that number up. Those are not symptoms of a healthy side project; they’re stereotypes of hustle culture. 

I find myself wrestling with the same trappings in my fiction writing. Even as the first words start to trickle onto the page, I find thoughts nagging at the back of my mind about how marketable something is, whether it would be easy to pitch, whether it would be a candidate for transmedia adaptation, and on and on and on. 

Weirdly, I think that’s where having side projects for my side projects has been helpful. Liz Gilbert has a great metaphor in Big Magic where she talks about fear, and how it’s okay to have fear come along for the ride so long as you aren’t letting it sit in the driver’s seat. That’s how I’ve been trying to box up and constrain hustle culture. Like, yes, the desire to monetize and figure out how to tackle growth can come along for the ride, but it’s relegated to the work I put into building a workout-tracking app, not in the driver’s seat of my creative pursuits. Creativity gets to stay fun– infuriating at times, sure, but mostly fun. 

-Blake

Dense Discovery is one of my favorite newsletters to read, and I imagine that if you like my writing, you’ll like it as well. Here’s one of my favorite recent issues, titled “The casino in your pocket,” about one of my favorite topics: screens and our addiction to them. 

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In March, for the first time, renewables provided more electricity in the United States than gas did! Read more about this milestone on Canary Media. 

Let yourself loosen up and shake off the dust by doing some freewriting. Set a timer for 15 minutes, and just start writing. Don’t edit. Don’t question yourself. Whatever comes in your head should come out of your pen on the other end. If you need inspiration to get started, respond to this quote by Willa Cather from the novel The Song of the Lark. 

“The world is little, people are little, human life is little. There is only one big thing — desire.”