Dismantling grind culture—it ain't easy

In which I search for the medium between grind and "bed rotting."

I just learned the name for the thing I did for the last three weeks

I hit a wall last week. I finally got hit with cabin fever after being mostly homebound for a few weeks recovering from a fall. Apparently, even happy homebodies can hit a threshold of fatigue where restlessness fights malaise. Coincidentally, the subject line from last week’s Culture Study by

Anne Helen Petersen

hit my inbox. It read, “Bed Rotting and Loud Quitting.”

Oh god, did I recently just loud quit my career? Have I also been bed rotting for the last three weeks?

Okay, so in my defense (and the unfortunate term really does make me feel like I have to rationalize it), I had limited mobility and everyone’s quick to tell you that is takes a lot longer to recover from injuries when you’re older (annoying). So this isn’t quite the form of self care that Gen Z is trending on TikTok. Nevertheless, I know what bed rotting is—I just didn’t know what it was called.

I’ve seen it first hand in my own Gen Z kids. I’m not denying that I’m guilty of it myself sometimes, but lying on your bed for hours on your phone? Holy hell if this doesn’t define an entire generation! And it’s not even necessarily about being unproductive; I do not think anyone in this house is lazy—quite the opposite. But I know what this vegetative-state-while-mindlessly-scrolling-to-oblivion looks like. I walk by my kids’ doors and barely see their heads visible under a cave of blankets except from the glow off their screens. I sometimes wonder if I should be concerned when they haven’t moved from that position in an hour. Are they ok? Are they depressed?

“Don’t you want to get out of bed? Do you have things to do?” I ask. They grumble that they’re resting. School is hard. Work is hard. Everyone is always tired.

I blame it on COVID and quarantine. It makes sense. My kids didn’t spend their lives in their rooms until COVID hit—nobody in our house did. Beds back then were still primarily reserved for sleeping, but when everything shut down, their entire world shrunk overnight to an area of about 38 x 75 inches when they did everything on their beds. Can we ever come back from this? Unfortunate name aside, I’m not sure bed rotting is going away, even as we move on with our post-Covid lives.

I know what some of you may be thinking because I thought it too. Isn’t this term insensitive towards people who have disabilities and chronic mental and physical illnesses who really are confined to their beds? Perhaps. And that’s probably why this term feels uncomfortable and gross. But I still believe we’re processing our collective and personal traumas of the last few years and this was our way of coping with the bleakness of the pandemic when we were in it.

Our phones were our lifelines to the outside world. It was a window to any vestiges of normal life we had and it often felt like we were even holding on to that by a fragile thread. I mean, for a time when nothing was open and we were stuck in our homes, that was all that we could do. So maybe we’re still recovering.

The rise of grind culture

I feel like we live in this perpetual state of extremes because on the other end is grind culture and it’s hard to dismantle. It’s too coded into society now because that’s what we’ve come to (falsely) recognize as a path to success. Mostly though, we tend to focus on the end goal and overlook the perils and negative consequences of overworking because success is the dangling carrot that’s supposed to drive us. But it doesn’t stop there. Hustle culture goads us to keep grinding and reach higher and bigger because we’re made to believe that gains can be infinite; success is never enough and there’s always something else to achieve.

I think my generation, Gen X, came of age during the nascent rise of hustle culture in the 90s, but it wasn’t until the 2000s that it got glorified through hashtags and memes. This mindset really proliferated with startups and tech. When you’re part of a startup, you breathe and live your startup. At least in my experience, work was rarely confined to the tidy hours of 9 to 5, especially if you’re a small team. Your users, after all, don’t stop using your product when you clock out of the office at the end of the day.

I look back and can laugh at how very true this is. Without fail at my last startup, the times our servers went down was always during the weekend and always when one of us was out of town. I’ve put out fires, jumped on Twitter to mitigate the deluge of messages that were sure to follow when something broke, and scrambled to answer emails, all while standing in line for a cheesesteak in Reading Terminal Market on a long weekend in Philly.

So even though I genuinely mourned and cried for a solid two weeks after we shut down when we pulled the plug on our servers and watched the product die, there was also this undeniable rush of relief that was palpable. The relentless pursuit of keeping our users happy, of keeping our investors happy, of mass adoption, of uptimes, of chasing KPIs and success was over. I could finally breathe.

Think about Marissa Meyer’s infamous and perhaps highly exaggerated claim that it was possible to work 130 hours a week if you were strategic about it. Or Musk claiming that “nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week.” And let’s talk for a minute about Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In movement which shifts the burden back into the hands of women to navigate the challenges of gender equality rather than striving for systemic change in the existing structures and norms of the workplace. It’s as if we admitted and surrendered to the fact that it was never going to get better for us, so might as well work harder and longer. This shouldn’t be the only way.

As much as workers started to push back on grind culture during and after the pandemic in a rare period where employees had the upper hand, it didn’t seem to last long. The pivotal moment might have been Elon Musk firing 80% of Twitter that would serve as a sort of blueprint for other CEOs looking to trim the fat of bloated teams gained during the pandemic years, but it continues with this push from companies to return to office after years of telling workers that not only was WFH was possible, it didn’t hurt productivity at all. The pendulum, once briefly in the hands of employees, has swung the other way.

Replacing one grind for another

Recently, I realized that I just replaced the corporate grind with one of my own making. I feel the weight of the midyear point, the pressure from self-imposed deadlines unmet and the internal push for more productivity to ensure that I’m not fettering away this gift of time. It’s hard to break free from it when it’s ingrained so deep and for so long. I think back to the ridiculousness of sitting with a computer on my lap just two hours after my accident when I was clearly rattled and in pain, just so I could get my last newsletter sent in time.

Why did I feel obligated to do that? The same reason I rarely took a sick day at work, I suppose. It is part personality though, and in many cases, also cultural upbringing. With college applications in full swing at our house once again, it feels especially impossible to escape. The term “grind” is used by kids, including my own, way too often when referring to SAT study and college essays. Grind culture starts early.

Looking for the medium between grind and rot

For the past few weeks, I was knocked off my routine. I didn’t feel like myself and everything felt fundamentally off. Not being able to stretch, do yoga, or walk any kind of distance really does a number on your mental well-being and it’s easy to take for granted being able to just spring out of bed every morning. By the third week I was so over it. And yet, it was also a reality check.

Walking through this lavender field on Governors Island in NYC was the perfect place to be after being cooped up for three weeks.

I didn’t write last week. I felt a bit guilty about it too. But it was a tiny step towards dismantling that relentless pursuit of busyness and listening to my body for once. There has to be a sane medium between that and bed rotting, right? I’m realizing that the journey of this year, is the year of untangling from it all, not just redefining what work means.

I finally succeeded late last year of changing my mindset from making all the money that I possibly can at the sacrifice of nearly everything, to making just what I need and being ok with “enough.” It was this change that sparked the groundwork for a different lifestyle this year. I’m realizing, however, that there’s more work to do. Swapping out one grind for another isn’t the answer. I’m searching for this other happier balance too.