"Selling out" still has negative connotations, but "hustle" became a positive word that we use for a lot of behavior that previously would have been labeled "selling out."
Basically a bunch of upper-middle-class people adopted the concept of "hustle" from its poor urban context, where it acknowledged that the drive to do anything to scrape by was hard to reconcile with strict ethical standards. You don't question someone's ethics when they're trying to make sure their siblings have something to eat for dinner that night.
Upper-middle-class people recognized that feeling -- hey, that's the desperation I feel when I realize that if I don't take this adtech job, I might not be able to maintain the same lifestyle as my friends that I met in the dorm at my highly selective university. If I don't found a startup and get monstrously rich, other people will never think of me the way I think of myself, and that would suck.
How convenient that there's a word for when your desperate circumstances excuse you from the ethical standards that we apply to normal people! No matter how privileged you are, when you do ethically questionable things, just call them "hustle" and everyone will know that it isn't because of entitled self-indulgence, but because of your plucky determination to survive everything the world throws at you.
Solid comment. The word "hustle" conceals face-saving under the lip-service of survival. A careerist use it to cover up their wrongdoing. Like you said, they also believe in "hustle" because they're desperate; they've confused their face with their character. They believe "I needed to cheat and steal to get ahead because if I didn't, I won't be who I need to be, who I am." The belief in hustle masks and resolves an identity crisis, easily & selfishly.
When people can justify complex, bad behavior with simple, bad beliefs, bad behavior spreads like a fire. In the article, Bill Watterson calls out justifying as the first step for regulating bad beliefs:
> The world of a comic strip is much more fragile than most people realize. Once you’ve given up its integrity, that’s it. I want to make sure that never happens. Instead of asking what’s wrong with rampant commercialism, we ought to be asking, “What justifies it?”
It used to be that people lived life for the acts of life and a material things generally had a negative connotation. Now for a tremendous amount of people life is almost exclusively about material wealth and even many life experiences have a material quality because if you don't post pictures at certain landmarks did you really even go.
Basically a bunch of upper-middle-class people adopted the concept of "hustle" from its poor urban context, where it acknowledged that the drive to do anything to scrape by was hard to reconcile with strict ethical standards. You don't question someone's ethics when they're trying to make sure their siblings have something to eat for dinner that night.
Upper-middle-class people recognized that feeling -- hey, that's the desperation I feel when I realize that if I don't take this adtech job, I might not be able to maintain the same lifestyle as my friends that I met in the dorm at my highly selective university. If I don't found a startup and get monstrously rich, other people will never think of me the way I think of myself, and that would suck.
How convenient that there's a word for when your desperate circumstances excuse you from the ethical standards that we apply to normal people! No matter how privileged you are, when you do ethically questionable things, just call them "hustle" and everyone will know that it isn't because of entitled self-indulgence, but because of your plucky determination to survive everything the world throws at you.