Hustle Is Running Your Life—Here's How Alignment Can Give You Time Back

Working hard is an admirable quality that leads to praise, awards, a good paycheck, and usually a good life. This centers a lot of our lives, but as we shift our priorities as a cultural movement towards self-care, having boundaries at work, and taking time for ourselves, that work-hard notion has a different ring to it. Let’s compare the difference between hustle culture and alignment within our work and purpose and see which one serves our well-being the most. 

Hustle culture is a socially acceptable means for making a living that glorifies hard work at the cost of our well being. Alignment asks us to challenge that notion and look at rest as an act of resistance that ultimately takes that same amount of effort but with a different focus and more desirable outcome. 

What is hustle culture?

Hustle culture is a glorified way of looking at overtime hours, staying busy, and maximizing your time while striving for professional success. In the pursuit of following your dreams, where anything is possible, hustle culture can be really positive.

Its motto is that if you work hard enough, anything you dream is possible; you just have to be willing to sacrifice your time and, with that, other things you may prioritize. Hustle culture has received a bad rap for taking away time from mental health, physical health, self-care and family due to its demand on your time in return for a promise of success.

What is a side hustle?

This is like having a 9 to 5 to pay the bills, and the side hustle is your dream career, which you’re doing in your spare time until it becomes more substantial. You could also have a side hustle because the cost of living is higher than what you make from one income, so you need an additional job. 

Either way, this structure asks you to pour the majority of your time into work, productivity, and making money. This is all part of earning a living to survive. It’s also an acknowledgement of self-worth based on your professional achievements, which can lead to awards at school and professionally.

What is alignment?

When something is in alignment, it is working with flow and ease. It may take hard work and challenging experiences to align things, but once everything’s in place, they move effortlessly. Spiritually speaking, alignment consists of living your life based on your soul's purpose. It’s moving from your intuition and surrendering control to the universe when your mind is getting in the way of the bigger picture.

You know that feeling you get when you make a plan for yourself and put the effort and experience into making it perfect? And then everything goes wrong and not according to plan, but then you realize things turned out exactly as they were supposed to? That is living in alignment. 

Letting the natural flow of the universe take over and releasing control when necessary. In order to get into this state of trust and alignment, it takes work and active choice; it is a way of living just like hustle culture is. Here’s how:

The takeaway

Working hard is an admirable quality, but what if we took the time to reallocate what we work hard at and for? We work hard with our time for money to survive because our basic needs are getting met. What if we worked hard at our rest in a culture that doesn’t require us to take naps, schedule acupuncture, or say no to extra work? 

Setting the necessary boundaries to prioritize your mental and physical health could be seen as hard work in a culture that doesn’t promote it. When you take time to rest, you allow yourself to trust in your intuition and the divine timing of the universe, which is living in alignment.