Let’s imagine a very real scenario, one that I experience often. I’m on TikTok, doomscrolling instead of sleeping. My ‘For You’ page is packed with self-improvement advice: 'that girl’ time-stamped routines, productivity hacks, male podcasters telling me that I can make it too if I work as hard as they do.  There is an endless stream of content by influencers who claim that they wake up at 4 or 5am for pilates, hit 12,000 steps a day, and somehow get more work done before noon than most people do in a 9-5 shift.

Scrolling through these videos becomes its own strange and torturous ritual, part inspiration, part self-punishment. I feel disappointed in myself in that moment, yet oddly energised, convinced that tomorrow will be different. Tomorrow, I’ll wake up at sunrise and become the most productive version of myself. However, constantly trying to be more and to live up to the unrealistic expectations of today’s hustle culture is tiring.

Even the culture of the ‘LinkedIn grind’ has become concerning because it normalises constant self-promotion, overwork, and performative success. Users are encouraged to present uninterrupted career progression, relentless motivation, and productivity as moral virtues, leaving little room for vulnerability, rest, or failure. The extent to which hyper-productivity is pushed online solely creates the illusion that you are just never working hard enough. When did growth become performance?

Statistics indicate that in 2025, 34% of adults reported ‘always’ or ‘often’ experiencing high stress, while 91% experienced high stress at some point. Despite this prevalence, stress management appears to be sidelined within contemporary self-improvement culture. Instead, social media promotes a narrow conception of “improvement” that prioritises productivity and measurable outcomes, often at the expense of mental wellbeing.

We are at the point of glamourising and aestheticizing the ‘slow life' because it seems like a luxury to be able to slow down. For instance, we are fed ‘Sunday morning reset’ videos, which depict people spending the day deep cleaning their homes and offering an alternative to the hustle culture. In a world where everyone feels like they are meant to be pushing themselves to the extreme to compete with others, rest has become a reward. On one hand, we can see rest and the ‘slow life’ demonised by this hyper-productivity culture, but at the same time it is depicted as a luxury because it is something that you can only afford down the line, after you’ve hustled your way to the top. Only once you have completed a certain amount of work have you earned a slow morning.

But it is not just a slow morning that has become a luxury. It is also having hobbies that aren’t monetized and allowing yourself to do things just for fun. Social media propels both ends of the spectrum, turning them into extreme trends. These competing lifestyles have also become capitalised, with TikTok shop promoting both products for you to incorporate into your wellness morning routine and e-books to help you maximise your productivity.

There is so much focus on maximising everything you do to make money and produce better results that it is easy to forget that you can do things just for your own enjoyment; not everything has to be productive. Many people conflate productivity culture with meaningful development – it has become less common for people to have hobbies purely for the love or the fun of it, instead choosing hobbies based on the purpose they serve. This results in exhaustion rather than genuine growth. You are not focussing on improving your own life, but on trying to achieve an unrealistic expectation we have been fed through a screen. Do we all need to be waking at 5am to achieve our goals, or have we just been following trends that suit the lives of others?

Moreover, many of the people who sell e-book guides to recreating their success had an advantage over others to begin with, with privileged backgrounds and important connections to give them a head start. But the starting point is not equal for everybody, and that is what is most often ignored in hustle culture. Gary Stevenson speaks about how you cannot just ‘hustle culture’ your way out of systemic barriers. How hard you have to work depends massively on who you are and the resources you have. For example, it is easier for a white man to get access to startup funding than a minority individual. The long-hour workloads that are so often pushed and aestheticized on social media systemically exclude women, particularly working mothers. But when you go online the message is that if you just imitate ‘that girl’, if you just work harder, if you just invest whatever you have, then you too will be successful.  As much as there are people that will feel extremely motivated by this, it is important to remember that this as an extreme and not something that is equally accessible or desirable to everyone.

So, are we becoming better, or just more tired? Lately, rest and relaxation have felt like something everyone has put on pause until they have worked hard enough to earn it. Meaningful and sustainable development depends on boundaries rather than relentless forward motion, challenging the notion of hustle culture that growth only comes from working harder, faster, and without pause. Sometimes the most radical form of self-improvement is refusing to treat yourself like a project. I think we need to normalise a balance between work and rest and break down the illusion that if everyone puts in the same amount of hard work then it will produce the same results. There are wider systematic factors that need to be tackled before a podcaster can tell you that you just need to buy his e-book to experience success.