The ritualistic roots of hustle culture: why you can’t stop hustling, enjoy your success or feel guilty when you do
- Apr 21
- 18 min read
Updated: May 1
If you are like many of my clients before they come to me, you struggle to believe that you can genuinely work less and live more, while continuing to have a successful career or business. Either they continue to hustle - despite having teams and / or systems (until they can no longer do that, and then find me) or they slow down and contend with what feels like an inevitable decline in income (justifying it as a fair price for getting their quality of life back). What I’ve discovered is that showing them evidence to the contrary isn't always enough. The entire paradigm and the roots of it must be uncovered.
My purpose in this essay is to argue that the spiritual and political roots of hustle run so deep that they make it extraordinarily difficult to disentangle ourselves from the narrative, even when we know better, even when all evidence points to the contrary. By bringing light to this, my intention is that entrepreneurs who seek better balance and greater success can begin to question their paradigm and give themselves the permission slip they need to do business on their own terms.
In this essay:
I. Why This Conversation is Necessary
First, a definition. When I refer to hustle in this essay, I mean hard work without alignment, effort that exceeds what is necessary to achieve the goal and is extracted by societal expectation rather than done in devotion to a greater mission. This is not to denigrate hard work. Hard work rooted in devotion and directed by alignment is one of the most sacred things a human being can do. Hustle is something else entirely: it is the anxious, compulsive, prove-it expenditure of energy toward an outcome you do not quite believe you deserve (or isn't even in alignment with your Destiny). It is sacrifice in its most corrupted form, the offering of the life you actually want in exchange for something you were told to want.
Ultimately, you have to define hustle for yourself, but the question worth sitting with is this: has your version of hustle made you sacrifice something that was never meant to be on the altar?
I have been sitting on this essay for a while.
The original opening was describing how I felt after watching Emma Grede interview Cardi B (sidenote, I’ve never listened to an album of hers but when I think of an authentic, fully expressed Queen, I definitely think of Cardi B). And now, as I prepare to publish it, the conversation around Emma Grede, hustle, and “girlbossing” is gathering momentum as she has just released a book on the subject of work. It feels more timely than ever to be discussing this.
Two women who have built extraordinary things from very little, talking about how they did it. The hours. The relentlessness. The intentionality. And within minutes I felt the silent indictment that whispered: you are not working hard enough. You are not sacrificing enough. You do not want this enough, otherwise you would be as successful as they are (which I acknowledge is very silly, it doesn’t matter that I am a successful person in my own right - at every level the temptation to compare endures).
So I know that voice well. I have spent years learning to recognise it, to understand where it comes from, to help other people unhook from it at the level of the spirit, not just the mind. And still the voice came.
I think this feeling of inadequacy is why Grede’s book and her comments have become controversial, particularly amongst women and black women in particular, tired of being told that they aren’t doing enough when in fact, they are doing all the things.
For others, it’s not inadequacy they feel, but inspiration. And that inspiration results from an unconscious assumption, that if they too work just as hard, they too can be successful.
Both the feelings of inadequacy and inspiration are predictable results, and moreover, energetic demands of The Hustle Egregore. We cannot be neutral, we aren’t allowed to be. And this is intentional.
I turned off the interview and sat with the question it raised. Why does the thought pattern run even in those who know better? Why is it so extraordinarily difficult to simply just stop it?
We have been sold a story. The story is this: success and freedom have a price, and the price is hustle. That sacrifice is the toll road to the life you want. That suffering is the proof of your seriousness, your seriousness is the proof of your worthiness, and your worthiness is the proof that you deserve what you are reaching for. Most of us believe this story somewhere in our bodies, even when our minds have moved on. It runs not as a conviction but as a programme, shaping our choices, fuelling our guilt, making rest feel like theft even when there is nobody to steal from.
The reason it is so hard to shake the story is not a personal failure of mindset or discipline. It is historical. It is theological. It is, in the most precise sense of the word, ancient.
This essay is my attempt to trace that story all the way back to its roots. Because until you see the full depth of what you are up against, you cannot understand why knowing is not enough. And you cannot begin to imagine what the alternative actually looks like.
II. The Mythological and Theological Antecedents of Work
To understand why hustle feels almost sacred, we have to go back further than you might imagine. Not to the Industrial Revolution or to capitalism. Not even to the church. We have to go back to the oldest question humanity has ever asked about itself:
What are we here for?
Some of the oldest written texts in human history, the Sumerian creation myths including the Enuma Elish and the Atrahasis Epic, contain a story that predates Genesis by thousands of years and is rarely taught alongside it. In these accounts, the earliest humans were not created for communion with the divine. They were not created to love, to create, to know themselves or know God. They were created because the lesser gods were exhausted from their labour and needed someone to do it for them. Humanity, in this telling, was engineered as a labour force. Our purpose was not spiritual becoming. It was productive output. It was work.
Read that again. The oldest story we have about why humans exist is that we were made to work so that those above us would not have to.
Whether one receives this as literal history, spiritual allegory, or ancient political myth, the implication is the same: the idea that humans exist primarily to labour is not a modern invention or a capitalist construction. It is among the oldest stories ever told about us. The slave-species story did not begin with slavery. It began with the first written story about what we are.
Then came the Biblical structure, which extended and sanctified it. Genesis gives us a God who works for six days and rests on the seventh, one day in seven. The divine model is a working model. Labour is not a consequence of the fall in this telling; it is the behaviour of God himself. And even the one day of rest, the Sabbath, which was meant to be a radical, generous gift of time, calcified under religious law into obligation rather than restoration, restriction rather than liberation. The day of rest became another set of rules. The six days of labour were simply assumed as the divine order of things.
Three centuries ago, the Protestant Reformation took these ancient foundations and built an explicit economic theology on top of them. The Protestant work ethic, articulated and disseminated by reformers like John Calvin and later analysed by Max Weber, made a direct equation between labour, virtue, and divine favour. Hard work was not merely practical, it was evidence of election, proof of godliness, a signal that you were among those whom God had chosen. Rest, by contrast, became morally suspect. Idleness was not just economically wasteful; it was spiritually dangerous. The devil makes work for idle hands was not a proverb but a warning.
This was the precise ideological framework that industrial capitalism required, and it arrived at precisely the moment capitalism needed it. The factories of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries did not have to invent a reason why workers should labour fourteen-hour shifts six days a week. The reason was already in place, sanctified by centuries of religious practice: work is godly, suffering is purifying, and your reward, if not in this life, then in the next, will reflect the faithfulness of your sacrifice. The spiritual language eventually fell away. The extraction did not.
The forty-hour week, which we now treat as a natural law of human productivity, was a negotiated concession, won hard, over decades, by labour movements fighting to reduce shifts that had previously run to seventy or eighty hours. It was a victory once. It has never been seriously revisited. And as the economy moved from factory floors to laptops, from physical to knowledge work, the hours remained while the rationale updated: now it was not just about earning a wage but about building a legacy, proving ambition, demonstrating the depth of your hunger. The clock stayed. The theology underneath it, stripped of its explicit religious language, stayed too.
By the time hustle culture arrived with its own secular gospel, grind, outwork everyone, sleep when you’re dead, your competition is working right now, the theological foundation was so deeply embedded that the new language felt like common sense. It was assumed, a given that serious people simply understood about how the world works.
That is how effective the foundation was that by the time it reached us, it had stopped looking like a story. It looked like the truth.
The oldest story ever written about why humans exist is that we were made to work so that those above us would not have to.
III. The Inculcation of Sacrifice as a System of Reward and Punishment
Alongside the theology of labour ran a second and equally powerful system: the theology of sacrifice. And where the labour narrative told people what they were for, the sacrifice narrative told them what obedience would cost them if they failed to comply and turned our natural birthrights (plentiful harvests, rain, fertility) into rewards for compliance.
The logic was elegantly simple. Give something up for the divine today, and you will be rewarded in the future. Withhold the offering, and you will be punished.
This transactional relationship between human sacrifice and divine response is not specific to one tradition. It runs across virtually every religious culture humanity has produced. And its persistence across such diverse contexts is interesting to me.
I’m not against the principle of sacrifice - as I will explain later but I find it interesting that even our indigenous spiritual systems reinforce the idea that our labour is not for us with the notion that the results of that labour (the best portion of it, no less) are not ours either.
They are food for the gods. For egregores.
The story of Cain and Abel, one of the earliest narratives in the Hebrew Bible, encodes this logic with startling directness. Both brothers bring offerings to God. Abel’s is accepted. Cain’s is rejected. And Abel’s better sacrifice is one of blood, life force. Cain, consumed by the shame and rage of divine rejection, kills his brother. The first murder in the Biblical account is a direct consequence of a sacrifice that was not good enough.
The message threaded through that story and through countless traditions that followed it is not subtle: the gods are watching what you give. The gods will judge whether it is sufficient. And if it is not, the punishment will come, from the divine directly, or from the consequences of your own corrupted inner state. Give correctly, give enough, give without reservation, or face what follows.
This pattern repeats across traditions with remarkable consistency. In Mesoamerican cosmology, the gods had bled to create the world; human blood was owed in return, or the cosmic order would collapse. In the ancient Near East, the god Moloch was said to demand the sacrifice of children, the most precious possible offering, in exchange for protection and favour. In the Greek and Roman sacrificial systems, the gods were owed regular offerings, and the failure to provide them correctly invited divine wrath: plague, drought, defeat in battle, the unravelling of fortune.
Across time, across culture, across geography: sacrifice is the price of survival, the currency of favour, the proof that you are serious about what you are asking for.
Christianity inherited this architecture and then performed its most significant mutation of it. The death of Jesus is framed as the ultimate sacrificial act, the final, definitive offering that settles the debt between humanity and God once and for all. The most precious thing, given so that the punishment owed to others might be absorbed. In its own theological logic, this is a story of liberation: the sacrifice has been made, the debt is paid, the transaction is complete.
But the cultural and psychological inheritance of that theology (even amongst those who do not subscribe to it) runs in a different direction. If even God’s son had to suffer and die for the prize, if the divine itself entered the transaction and paid the ultimate price, what gives any ordinary human being the right to expect anything less? Suffering becomes not just inevitable but redemptive. Sacrifice becomes not just required but ennobling. The willingness to give up the precious thing becomes the measure of how seriously you want what you are reaching for.
If even God’s son had to suffer and die for the prize, what gives any ordinary human being the right to expect anything less?
For any system of large-scale extraction to function, empire, slavery, colonialism, industrial capitalism, the people being extracted from must be managed not just physically but spiritually and psychologically. Coercion alone is expensive and unstable. Belief is far more efficient. And the existing sacrifice architecture was perfectly positioned to serve this function: people were already primed to understand that giving up precious things was how you demonstrated worthiness, secured divine favour, and earned your future reward.
All power had to do was redirect the sacrifice toward its own ends.
The colonial administrator preaching industry to the people he was extracting from was not living by the same gospel. The plantation owner citing scripture to justify the labour of enslaved people was not himself labouring. The industrial baron who built his fortune on twelve-hour factory shifts was not on the floor. The televangelist asking his congregation to tithe beyond their means was not himself giving from scarcity. The narrative was manufactured for consumption by those it was designed to extract from. It was always a story told downward. It was never practised upward.
The Protestant work ethic provided the moral framework. Colonialism provided the scale. And the prosperity gospel, which arrived in the twentieth century and persists today, represents the most explicit and most audacious version of the transaction yet. Give money you do not have, in faith, and God will multiply your return. The altar is the offering basket. The promised reward is material wealth, the very thing the system has structurally prevented the congregation from accumulating. The people most likely sitting in those congregations are the people from whom the most has already been taken.
And they are being asked to sacrifice again.
In both theological and sacrificial systems, the cause is the same. Fallen “gods” who have lost their ability to obtain abundance directly from the Source and so are left with no alternative but to extract it from others.
Many “dark” rituals function in this way - literally siphoning the life force of others to secure success or immortality. You’ve read the books and watched the movies and thus you already know the story.
IV. The Egregore of Hustle Culture
What we have been describing across these thousands of years, this vast, self-perpetuating system that mutates in form while remaining identical in function, has a name in metaphysical tradition.
It is an egregore.
An egregore is a collective thought-form: a field of consciousness generated by a large group of minds holding the same beliefs, fears, and patterns, which over time takes on its own autonomous energy and begins to sustain itself independently of any individual within it. It feeds on the attention and life force of those who participate in it, consciously or not. It actively resists dissolution, because dissolution means its own death.
The Hustle Egregore is one of the oldest and most powerful collective thought-forms in human history. Seeded in the Sumerian origin myth. Fed by the sacrifice-compliance system that ran through every major religious tradition. Supercharged by colonialism and the Protestant work ethic. Industrialised by capitalism. Digitised by hustle culture. It has been consuming human life force, time, attention, creative energy, rest, presence, joy, for thousands of years.
Every person who burns out and returns to overwork feeds it. Every successful person who attributes their success to sacrifice and teaches others to do the same feeds it. Every entrepreneur who left the corporate world and rebuilt its rhythms inside their own business feeds it. The egregore does not require your conscious belief. It only requires your behaviour. And it has had five thousand years to make your behaviour automatic.
The Hustle Egregore does not require your belief. It only requires your behaviour. And it has had five thousand years to make your behaviour automatic.
And here is what makes this particularly devastating: we already know it is not working. The hardest workers most of us have ever known are often the poorest people we know. The woman who arrives before dawn to clean the building where wealthier people will conduct their important work. The man running three jobs who cannot cover rent. The grandmother who never once stopped, not for illness, not for grief, not for her own dreams, and who died with nothing material to leave. Their sacrifice is beyond question.
And the promised return never came.
The correlation between hard work and wealth is not just weak. It is, across populations and centuries, frequently inverted. The most physically demanding, most relentless labour is almost always the least compensated. This is a feature of the system, not a bug. The system was not designed to reward sacrifice. It was designed to consume it.
We know this. And still, on a Tuesday morning when the work is not moving fast enough, something stirs.
A whisper: you are not doing enough. You need to sacrifice more.
V. How the Goalposts Kept Moving Despite An Age of Abundance
Every major technological leap of the last two centuries carried an implicit promise of more time. The washing machine, the printing press, the computer, the smartphone, artificial intelligence, each one arrived with the whisper that it would give us back the hours we had lost.
And the hours never came.
We have more technology than at any point in human history. More automation, more processing power, more tools for compressing what once took days into minutes. And most people are still working forty hours a week. Many are working considerably more.
Why?
Because while the productivity gains were made, they were never distributed to the people doing the work. They were extracted upward, consolidated in the balance sheets of shareholders, reinvested not into human freedom but into the capacity to demand more output from the same number of hours. Every time-saving invention became a mechanism for producing more, not for working less.
This is the egregore at scale. It does not matter what tool arrives. The egregore absorbs it and redirects it toward the same end: more output, more sacrifice, more offering of human life force on the altar of productivity.
Consider what we actually have. Enough agricultural efficiency to feed the world. Enough automation to dramatically reduce the hours required for most forms of production. Enough communications technology to coordinate work across time zones without anyone being tethered to a desk. We have, in material terms, enough abundance right now to be raising our children with presence, caring for our elderly with tenderness, tending our communities with joy. Not in some hypothetical future. Now.
The only thing standing between us and that life is the story we have agreed, collectively, to keep living inside. The egregore does not need scarcity to function. It only needs our belief that scarcity is real and that more sacrifice is always the answer.
The mistake we have made at every technological leap forward is not demanding more time freedom. We accepted the tools. We did not negotiate what they were for.
VI. The Prisoners Who Became The Prison Guards
The most compelling reinforcement of the egregore does not come from faceless institutions or nameless shareholders. It comes from the people we most admire.
Watch any interview with a person who has achieved significant success, in entertainment, in business, in sport, and you will hear it within minutes. The sacrifices they made. The sleep they gave up, the relationships that did not survive, the years poured entirely into the work. (And reader, I am not exempt, I have my own stories). And they will tell you this not with regret but with a particular pride that has become the grammar of success stories. The suffering and sacrifice is credentialising.
Which is how I ended up on my sofa feeling inadequate after watching an interview with two extraordinary women. They were telling the truth about their experience. And their experience, filtered through the egregore, became instruction. Became the implicit question hanging in the air: if they could do it, why can’t you?
This is not a criticism of Cardi B or Emma Grede. It is an observation about the limits of experience as instruction. When you have only ever known one way through, you will naturally believe it is the only way. And when you reach the other side, you will teach it, because it is true to you, because you survived it, because you cannot imagine arriving where you are via a different route.
But just because they do not know another way does not mean another way does not exist.
What if the most successful people, in aggregate, are not proof that the paradigm works but simply the most eloquent prisoners within it? They found a way to survive and even thrive inside a system designed to extract maximum output from human beings.
This is how the egregore reproduces itself across generations without needing institutions to carry it. It only needs survivors. It takes the people who made it through and turns them into its most persuasive advertisement. It says to those watching: see? It works. Keep going. Sacrifice more. And we, hungry for the roadmap, follow the only guides we can see not realising they are showing us a path through a prison they have simply learned to love.
The prisoner becomes the prison guard.
Just because they don’t know another way doesn’t mean another way doesn’t exist.
VII. An Alternative: True Spiritual Sacrifice and Wu Wei
The mind conditioned by the egregore will reach immediately for the obvious opposite: if hustle is wrong, then rest must be right. If sacrifice is wrong, then ease must be right. If working hard is the problem, then the soft life must be the solution.
It is not.
The opposite of hustle is not laziness. The soft life, as currently understood in culture, is still organised around the same axis, still defined by its relationship to productivity, still reactive. It is the slave-species story running in reverse.
The alternative requires us to go back to the original, ancient, universal spiritual idea of sacrifice. My true issue with sacrifice (as it is practiced today) and with hustle, is not that we have to give something up, but we give up the wrong thing and to the wrong energies / entities. We give up what we truly value, our destiny, our deepest longings and sacrifice it at the altar of validation and external approval.
Jesus, in conversation with Nicodemus, says something that has generated two thousand years of theological debate but whose core meaning is startlingly direct: “You must be born again.”
Not that you must work harder or you must sacrifice more, but something much simpler and more intense at the same time. The old self must die and a new self must emerge. The transformation is the point. The death being asked for is not literal, but the death of the old identity and the old story about who you are and what you deserve.
This is not the sacrifice of a slaughtered animal, or money you don’t have, or time with your children when they are still babies. This is the sacrifice of your old identity complete with its assumptions and limitations.
Every tradition that existed before patriarchy and the weaponisation of power, was pointing here. The sacrifice was always meant to be internal. The thing that goes on the altar was never the life you wanted. It was always the obstruction to that life, what was no longer serving you.
You will always have to choose and make trade offs. But be careful you aren’t sacrificing the very thing you are doing all of this for.
The true price of freedom is the old self.
When you make the right sacrifice, what emerges in its place is not ease in the passive sense, but what the Taoist tradition calls wu wei.
Wu wei is often translated as non-doing, or effortless action. Wu wei is the art of acting in complete accordance with the nature of things, including your own nature. It is what happens when a river finds its course. The river reaches the sea inevitably not through effort but through nature.
A tree does not worry that it is not doing enough. It does not push through seasons designed for rest because rest feels unproductive. It grows according to its nature, at the pace its nature requires, in deep relationship with its environment, and it bears fruit. A tree in full growing season is working at a cellular level with extraordinary precision and force. But it is not working from anxiety or trying to prove itself worthy of sunlight. It simply is what it is, doing what it does. And because it wastes nothing on performance, everything it produces is the fullest expression of what it was made to be.
This is the difference between hustle and devotion. Devotion has its own momentum. It moves consistently, persistently, sometimes with tremendous intensity. But its energy source is alignment.
Hustle asks: what must I sacrifice to deserve this? Devotion says: I cannot help but do this. It is what I am.
Cal Newport, in Slow Productivity, arrives at this same understanding through his own research. The scientists, artists, and thinkers who changed the world did not work in the frantic, always-on, output-maximising way that modern culture celebrates. They worked in long, focused, unhurried engagement with their subject. And then they stopped. They rested. They allowed. They were, in their own way, practising wu wei, working from nature.
Taoist philosophy, ancestral wisdom, Destiny-aligned practice, and modern productivity research are all pointing at the same truth: there is a natural pace at which human beings do their finest work. It is not the pace of someone trying to prove they are enough. It is the pace of someone who already knows they are. Unfortunately, this way of being needs a new PR manager.
Business Manifestation in the way that I teach it, to me, is an act of civilisational disobedience. It is the refusal of the slave-species story at its root. The insistence that you were not made merely to produce but to create, to receive, to flourish, to move through the world in deep collaboration with the intelligence that placed you here. A population who genuinely understood and practised this would be extraordinarily difficult to extract from.
Manifest Results™
P.S. If you are a business owner who would like support in releasing the hustle so that you can start enjoying your success (and create more) by developing new business and spiritual practices, you are welcome to apply for my 1:1 programme Manifest Results™. Find out more here.
Lola Seshat is a Spiritual Teacher and Spiritual Business Strategist (a former management consultant) who helps CEOs and Business Leaders scale their businesses through business metaphysics and spiritual practices. Read more about her here.
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