In the last couple of years, I have been recovering from the pernicious influence of hustle culture and its impact on my psyche. Most notably American influencers coming up on my social media feed telling me how to get rich. I’ve tried dropshipping, day trading, and print on demand managing to sell a few stickers every couple of months, generating 50 cents profit which admittedly, does make me chuckle every time. But no, I have yet to crack the code. Everyone online seems to be making bank through various means and I have failed miserably. Naturally, I blame myself. I never had enough of the hustling instinct growing up, I tell myself, or enough entrepreneurial spirit, and thus deemed myself a failure in the culture I grew up in. Looking back I can see I was dragged in, like many, into the alluring salesmanship of Americans online who live in a much more cutthroat society than mine, where you may have to hustle or literally die trying to pay your medical bills. This propensity to blame myself resurfaces from time to time but the ideological hold that these influencers had on me is beginning to wither.
Same shit, different guru
These people aren’t anything novel. Take the bestseller Rich Dad Poor Dad for example, written by Robert Kiyosaki in 2000, a story about a boy who admired his father’s entrepreneurial friend more than his academic father, who…
