Hustle Culture Burnout: What Hustle Culture Cost Me 

Hustle culture burnout is something I never thought would happen to me. I believed working longer hours, sacrificing rest, and constantly grinding would eventually lead to success. Instead, it slowly disconnected me from my creativity, relationships, and sense of self.

I Bought Into It Completely, and I’m Not Proud of That 

I remember the YouTube video like it was yesterday. Some guy, very confident, very well-lit, telling me that the ones who make it are the ones willing to sacrifice. They work late into the night. They work weekends. Holidays. While everyone else is out at dinner parties and clubs, the future successful person is at their desk, grinding, building, becoming. 

I watched that video and thought, “Okay. I can do that. I will do that.” 

What nobody in that video mentioned was that I was also slowly dismantling myself in the process. 

What It Actually Looked Like When I Was Living It 

There was this moment where I looked up from my desk — really looked up, looked around — and thought, “Why am I doing any of this?” I was surrounded by work and completely hollowed out by it. The thing I had worked so hard to build had become a cage I was sitting in voluntarily, telling myself it was discipline. 

I was exhausted in a way that sleep didn’t fix. Irritable about everything. Short with people I loved. And the memories I missed — the dinners, the spontaneous nights out, the moments people were living while I was answering emails at midnight — those don’t come back. I told myself I’d make it up later. Later never really arrived. 

The Moment It Stopped Working, and I Couldn’t Pretend Otherwise 

For nearly six months, I didn’t touch my camera. Not once. The thought of picking it up made my chest tighten with anxiety. Photography — the thing I had built my entire life around — had become something I needed to stay away from just to feel okay. That was the moment I couldn’t talk myself out of it anymore. 

I was tired all the time and joyless in a way that was impossible to explain to people who hadn’t felt it. I was terrified of missing an email, a text, an opportunity. There were no breaks. No real rest. Just the constant hum of not doing enough, even when I was doing everything. 

At some point, I had a thought that I still think about: if this is what success looks like, I don’t want it. I genuinely did not want it anymore. And that scared me enough to finally stop.

What It Cost Me Before I Finally Got Out 

My marriage took hits I’m still accounting for. My friends felt the distance even when I was physically present. My hobbies — the things that made me a full person outside of photography — quietly disappeared one by one because there was no room for them in the schedule I had built. 

I was living to work. That’s it. That was the whole thing. And somewhere in all of that relentless output, I completely lost track of what I actually wanted, what actually mattered, what I was supposedly doing all of this for in the first place. 

What I Replaced It With and Why That Part Is Still Messy 

Here’s what I know now: I still hustle. That part didn’t go away, and I wouldn’t want it to. But it’s a different kind of hustle — one that has edges, that has stopping points, that makes room for me to exist as a person and not just a business. 

Sometimes recovery looks like spending an entire day in my reading chair watching Netflix without a single productive thought. Sometimes it’s sitting at my favorite bookstore with a coffee and a book and absolutely no agenda. Neither of those things feels glamorous. Neither of them would make a compelling YouTube video. But they are the reason I can still pick up my camera and feel something when I do. 

The whole point of being a freelancer — the actual point — is to build a life you want to be living. But you have to go live it to know what that even means. You have to have the dinner, take the trip, and show up for the people. The work will be better for it. You will be better for it. And honestly, that’s the only productivity hack that has ever actually worked for me.