Why young people are pretending to love work

Have you ever, at the start of your workweek - in the morning coffee shop line, during the crowded subway commute or as you begin your bottomless inbox slog - paused, looked to the heavens and whispered: #ThankGodIt'sMonday.

Apparently, not doing that makes some of us traitors to our generation. At WeWork locations in New York, throw pillows implore busy tenants to "Do what you love." Neon signs demand they "Hustle harder," and murals spread the gospel of TGIM. Even the cucumbers in WeWork's water coolers have an agenda. "Don't stop when you're tired," someone recently carved into the floating vegetables' flesh. "Stop when you are done." Kool-Aid drinking metaphors are rarely this literal.

Welcome to hustle culture. It is obsessed with striving, relentlessly positive, devoid of humour and, once you notice it, impossible to escape. "Rise and Grind" is both the theme of a Nike ad campaign and the title of a book by a "Shark Tank" shark. New media upstarts like the Hustle, which produces a popular business newsletter and conference series, and One37pm, a content company created by the patron saint of hustling, Gary Vaynerchuk, glorify ambition not as a means to an end but as a lifestyle.

"The current state of entrepreneurship is bigger than career," the One37pm "About Us" page states. "It's ambition, grit and hustle. It's a live performance that lights up your creativity ... a sweat session that sends your endorphins coursing ... a visionary who expands your way of thinking." From this point of view, not only does one never stop hustling - one never exits a kind of work rapture, in which the purpose of exercising or attending a concert is to get inspiration that leads back to the desk.

Ryan Harwood, the chief executive of One37pm's parent company, said that the site's content is aimed at a younger generation of people who are seeking permission to follow their dreams. "They want to know how to own their moment, at any given moment," he said.

"Owning one's moment" is a clever way to rebrand "surviving the rat race." In the new work culture, enduring or even merely liking one's job is not enough. Workers should love what they do and then promote that love on social media, thus fusing their identities to that of their employers. Why else would LinkedIn build its own version of Snapchat Stories?

This is toil glamour, and it is going mainstream. Most visibly, WeWork, which investors recently valued at $47 billion, is on its way to becoming the Starbucks of office culture. It has exported its brand of performative workaholism to 27 countries, with 400,000 tenants, including workers from 30% of the Global Fortune 500.

Workplace indifference just doesn't have a socially acceptable hashtag.

It's not difficult to view hustle culture as a swindle. Persuading a generation of workers to beaver away is convenient for those at the top.

"The vast majority of people beating the drums of hustle-mania are not the people doing the actual work," said David Heinemeier Hansson, the co-founder of Basecamp, a software company. "They're the managers, financiers and owners."

The reality of 2019 is that begging a billionaire for employment via Twitter is not considered embarrassing but a plausible way to get ahead. On some level, you have to respect the hustlers who see a dismal system and understand that success in it requires shameless buy-in. If we're doomed to toil away until we die, we may as well pretend to like it. Even on Mondays.