Missed Fucking Opportunities

And the Assholes That Perpetuate Them

So, here’s a fucking take.

I’m so fucking tired of this narrative it hurts me in my no-no places.

I ‘worked my butt off’ at the beginning. Rose to being a VP at a F500, bootstrapping a business, being an “influencer” (cough), publishing and touring a book…and watching it all come crashing down.

You know what it got me?

Toxic workplaces and bosses, rampant imposter syndrome, ignoring sexual harassment in the name of getting ‘noticed’ or promoted, shifty business partners who ruined me financially, ladder climbing, perpetual insecurity, manipulative relationships, and a total crisis of confidence in my work and professional identity that nearly killed me. Not to mention missing the first several years of my daughter’s childhood on the road, pressing palms at events with useless and shallow people, and pumping time and money into weekend work and side hustles to prove…something? I don’t know what.

And when all was said and done, and I was digging out of the rubble, somehow I felt like the failure.

This shit destroys people.

Fuck this narrative, and the people who perpetuate it. I lost probably 6-8 years of my life and career to recovering from this kind of garbage. And I’m not alone.

It’s always proffered by people—mostly men—who have benefited from this approach, probably at the expense of other people (partners, spouses, systems, children, colleagues, peers) and who have such strong blinders on that they attribute their own success to their unique “hustle” and blithely conclude that any mythical negative consequences or experience related to such an approach are only the domain of the lazy, the incompetent, or those who didn’t want it enough.

Hustle culture is a fucking disease. And with every bit of bandwidth we add to the digital landscape, we accelerate it, because someone is out there to tell us that if the web moves that fast, we aren’t moving fast enough.

Let me tell you something plainly.

No one lies on their death bed wishing they worked more.

The regrets of the dying aren’t laden with not building their platform or their wealth or their shareholder value. They don’t count retweets or subscribers or clicks. Their memories are painfully rife with missing time with kids and loved ones, missing moments and memories, losing their identity inside of a profession, regretting the things they didn’t do more than the things they did.

And here we are, mired in global illness and strife and retraction of rights and protections for anyone who isn’t a white cishet Christian dude and polarizing and terrifying extremism in our own US borders…and we care about fucking working more hours so we can what, get a Good Effort ribbon when we die of an aneurism on an insurance plan paid for by an employer that will post our open job req within the day?

Stop counting the things that don’t count. You can’t get back the ones that do.

I know. That’s fucking trite. Fine. I’m okay with that.

But I get so fucking angry when this toxic, hustle-at-all-costs shit hits my timeline, and I RAGE when it gets the likes and shares from even more sycophants who buy into this shit and then pass it along like mental venereal disease to the next generation of people who want some skeleton key to success. It’s a devastating grift and one where the survivors of it are classified as failures instead of prophets.

Stop putting these fucking walking ballsacks of narcissism and privilege on pedestals to perpetuate the fairy tale of “hustle first and profit later”. It doesn’t have a great track record of success. Or reality.

I want more for you. And you should want more for yourself.

Stay frosty out there, friends. You don’t live to work. You work to live. Stop the hustle culture narrative in its tracks, beginning with your own boundaries.

Someone is watching and learning from you. And it matters.

With love and angst,

Amber