everything is a side-hustle

In the back half of the 1990s when the dot com bubble was inflating, there was a sense among the watchers that the energy and limitlessness of the times represented a “New Economy” and a “New Way of Working”. Maybe it did. Maybe it didn’t. By 2008 that optimism was gone, and the prevailing ethos of the American knowledge workplace became more recognizable as an extension of the American factory floor from 50 or 60 years ago. It took a while for that ethos to spread into every nook and cranny, but the cultist and rentiers have won. Employment at a firm is The Good Place, a euphemistic dark reflection of those august days of optimism before the Financialization of Everything.

If you want meaning, you have to bring your own, and doing so has become a subversive act that undermines the true purpose of the firm, which is simply to grow without limits so that speculators may profit. This macabre ethos of control and harvesting can still be dressed up in various ways to create artificial differentiation between; this firm is better than that firm, but the whole picture is one where the classification of status is irrelevant because we’re all getting on the same plane to crash into the same ocean of greed. The only reason employment at a firm exists is because getting table scraps from billionaires is the most reliable way to put a roof over your head and have access to a doctor. You know it. They know it. And it is the chain around our neck and the gun to our head that keeps us in line.

Thus, no one cares. My energy, my optimism, my work ethic, and my good ideas are better spent on a side-hustle, and so are your’s. Once you make peace with this, being an employee becomes a side-hustle. Once you make peace with that, you realize you need to take responsibility for putting a roof over your head and having access to a doctor, and stop selling your mind and body to someone who just thinks of them as consumables. You are not an oil filter or printer toner. But that is what you are to the firm. A cost. A liability. A tool. Something to be optimized. Un-human.

So here we are in 2025, 127 million people in the workforce of the USA, locked into the Prisoner’s Dilemma. If we give The Man the full measure of what he wants from us, we get $2, The Man profits $8, and our peers get $0, but if we all give The Man the finger we each get $5 and The Man gets $0. Inefficiency is the cure to the Financialization of Everything.

Inefficiency starves the dragon sitting on it’s hoard. It forces rentiers to do real work. It builds the anti-fragile systems and communities that weather storms. Communities that practice mutual aid, and systems that keep profits local there they can be used for good instead of shipping them off to the dragon’s hoard. Communities that inhabit neighborhoods that are full of life, filled with humans who have each other’s backs when times are tough, not vacant and dead except when the un-human drones shuffle to and from their prison-factories to make gold for the dragon.

It doesn’t happen overnight. This mess we’re in started in 1960, got serious in 1972, got a huge boost in 1980, and again in 2001, and again in 2007, and now feels unstoppable. But nature repeatedly shows us that destruction is faster than creation, and this system of control of the many by the few is inherently fragile. We are the wildfire and the hurricane. You are the spark and the raindrop. And we just saw what it is like when we care more about the humans in our communities than the dragons on the mountain when we were in the lock-down in 2019. We grew our own food. We made our own meals. We shared. We crafted. We used technology to bring us together. We solved problems without worrying if the solutions were good for the dragon. We could have kept that going. We still can.

Everything is a side-hustle because our primary purpose can’t be feeding dragons. Not everyone is cut out for slaying dragons, but there is an entire economy of starving dragons to make them weak and kitting out those who will do the slaying that will let you be a human with a purpose and put a roof over your head and give you access to a doctor. Being part of something bigger than yourself feels so good because we are hard-wired to get joy from working with others through challenges and obstacles. Slaying dragons is the biggest challenge you can be a part of. Find your joy.

You are the spark and the raindrop. Be free.


Posted

in

by

Comments

Leave a Reply