The Problem with Side Hustles

BY REBECCA BAYUK

Rebecca Bayuk is an editor, writer and classic movies fan who is partial to poetry, animals, and kitchen discos (she continues to extend an open invitation to her two cats, despite their distinct lack of enthusiasm). She is originally from Brontë country in Yorkshire, England, but now lives with her husband just outside Washington DC. You can find her over at rebeccabayuk.com, or pootling around Instagram: @rebeccabayuk.

Whether it's a shirt in Target urging you to “rise and grind” in glittery calligraphy, or an Instagram post prescribing “LESS SLEEP, MORE HUSTLE,” the message that we should all be “grinding” 24/7 is everywhere. 

Hustle culture has been around a while. It revolves around the idea that the sole predictor of success (only ever measured in dollar signs) is your own effort. "THIS IS WHY YOU ARE POOR" screams the headline of one article. "Are YOU prepared to work holidays, anniversaries, birthdays, not take a vacation for YEARS? No? Then don't call yourself a hustler!"

Hustle culture's newest, most hyperactive spawn? The side hustle.

Side hustle suggestions range from the reasonable (dog walking in your lunch hour!) to the grossly oversimplified (qualify as a personal trainer and book clients before work!) to the downright depressing (consider selling your hair!).

Simply put, side hustling seems to constitute the following: doing what until fairly recently was simply called moonlighting, and/or monetizing a hobby. 

The side-hustle isn't a choice when you work multiple jobs to make rent—the reality for millions. But hustle culture can also cause the financially secure to feel guilty over a hobby's perceived failure to produce.

The Problem with Product

Several years ago, I taught a middle-school art class. One term, we created animal sculptures from recycled materials: cardboard tubes, aluminum foil, bits and pieces of string, bottle caps. 

Once we'd chosen our animals, we had to research them—consider them from all angles, mentally turn them this way and that; figure out how tendons connected to bones, and fur or feathers to flesh. 

Anatomy studied, we worked out how to build. Materials were selected, tested, rejected: alternatives sourced from home or forgotten corners of the classroom. We adjusted plans, abandoned them entirely. There was a great deal of returning to the drawing board, literally and figuratively. It mattered not: we were utterly absorbed, the work meditative, the room calm amid the snicking of scissors and shredding of paper.

I'd love to tell you we finished the sculptures, and that an exhibition was held at which everyone clapped and told us we were wonderful, but in reality, the term ended with the sculptures mostly unfinished—a result of timetable disruption (exams will do that). Most (including mine, a wolf) were recognizable but far from the polished products initially envisaged. 

I felt rather glum. I expected the children would be disappointed they'd not finished; I was disappointed I'd not finished. I expected to find the sculptures abandoned. Instead, my students merrily carried them off to waiting parents, explaining how they'd used shreds of old netting for scales or kitchen towel inners for legs. As the children disappeared into summer, the animals bobbed alongside them, half-finished, wholly loved.

Still, I complained to my friend, the Art teacher-proper. I was glad the children were happy, I said, but it was a shame the darn things weren't done.

"But it's the process," she reminded me. "That's where the learning is, the joy."

Herein lies the problem with side hustling. 

First, even if we ignore the fact that side hustling is merely the latest rebranding of a tale as old as serfdom—that society encourages working multiple jobs and monetizing downtime to “live the dream” when, really, it's to keep our heads (barely) above water and our public discourse free of any pesky conversations about why so many people live paycheck to paycheck in the richest country in the world—even if we ignore all that, there are other problems with side hustling.

Yoking our hobbies to profit conflates our sense of worth with productivity. It leaves no room for learning, experimentation, or mistakes. No room for joy.

The culture of side hustling tells us that if we're not good enough at a hobby to open our own Etsy store, then there's little point bothering to do it at all. Time, after all, is money, and what's enjoyment if it doesn't yield profit? Similarly, if you are talented, it can feel like you're letting the side down if you don't launch a business to capitalize on your skill with artisan cupcakes or dressmaking or turning old maps into art. After all: You're so talented. You should sell these!

I think of my wolf in all his haphazard glory. I think of how I fashioned his frame from tubing and how, if I made him again, I'd try chicken wire. I think of how I perfected the papier-mache glue-to-water ratio through trial and error. I think about how I learned to break down the wolf's form into its simplest components—loose ovals for body, head, and haunches, and how this helped me visualize him, how it brought him alive in my mind. I think too of how our group labored for hours on end, enthralled; of how we slipped through those hours easily, like seals through water.

I've thought about making another wolf. I've plenty of cardboard; I've a little time. I've not started yet, though, for the same reason I've been circling an idea for an essay collection for nearly three years; the same reason your knitting needles or paintbrushes or camera might lie neglected in your home, too. 

We've internalized the message that doing something for our own enjoyment is not enough, not without the external validation of money, of praise.

What if we created a society that didn't necessitate sacrificing free time to keep the roofs over our heads? What if we celebrated creativity for creativity's sake, and prioritized enjoyment, expression, and personal fulfillment over profit?

I'm going back to those essays. They might not, ultimately, ever be read by anyone. They might not, ultimately, make me any money nor garner me any praise. 

But maybe I write them because I want to, and that's the only justification I need to give. 

And: while I'm at it—I'm going to make a wolf, and his head will be thrown back, and he will be howling up at the moon.