The 10x Hustle
A few days ago, I saw an important figure in the AI space posting on X about how they’re working 16 hours a day and “living the life”. The comments were full of supporters and people cheering on this, like it’s something to aspire to.
There’s always been hustle culture, but now combined with AI, it seems to be supercharged. People are becoming way more productive, yet they’re working more than ever. You can now code from your phone, work from the shower, work from the gym, work while having dinner, stay connected 24/7 and never let go.
I keep thinking about this… If you have a friend who’s addicted to drugs, but they’re managing. They hold a job, they pay rent, they seem fine. You’d still worry, you’d probably tell them to stop, right? Because you know how it ends, health problems, broken relationships, depression. The fact that it’s “working” right now doesn’t mean it’s ok.
But someone posts about working 16 hours a day, then someone replies they actually work 18, and then everyone is cheering, and nobody seems to realize it’s a bunch of workaholics. All addicts say they enjoy what they do, they don’t seem to see the downsides. That’s kind of the whole problem.
The tech industry has turned overwork into identity. Not just a habit… an identity. You’re not a person who works too much, you’re a “builder”, “You’re locked in”, “You’re following your passion”, or “you’re living the life.” And AI just gave that addiction a turbo boost. Now you can produce twice as much in the same time, which means you can work twice as much and feel twice as productive while burning out twice as fast.
Here’s what I don’t get. If you work 16 hours a day you can’t take care of your body. You can’t take care of your mind. You don’t have time for your friends, your family, your partner. You’re piling up zeroes in a bank account that you never have the time to enjoy. What’s the money for then? Seriously.
Nobody lies on their deathbed thinking “I should have been more productive” or “I wish I’d shipped more features”. Perhaps you don’t need to wait that long. Maybe one day, you find yourself alone at home, the kids have moved out, and you realize all the things you missed, your kid’s birthdays, visiting your parents more often, the friend you lost touch with. The life that happened while you were absent.
And look, maybe if you don’t have a partner or close friends, the 16-hour days don’t feel like a sacrifice. But maybe… that’s exactly the things you should be working on instead. Oh, but it’s not so easy, you can’t ask Claude Code to make you a friend, you can’t ask chatGPT for a partner. And dealing with people is hard, and it takes effort and time, and maybe that’s the whole reason the tech industry wants to replace everyone with agents and robots, so we don’t have to deal with any sort of uncomfortable conversations. No colleagues, no friends, no girlfriend, no relationships, no problems.
So you might be reading this and think, well Jorge is some anti-AI zealot right? But that’s not the case. I use AI every day. For coding, for personal stuff, for things I didn’t even think I’d use it for. I like AI. What I don’t like is what we’re doing with it. The narrative around how nobody needs to hire juniors anymore and replace them with more agents. That everyone is so focused on the short term gains that no one is thinking about how do we build the senior engineers of the future. This is not a new trend but now it’s getting exponentially worse. I don’t like seeing perfectly profitable companies firing people, because the market rewards “efficiency,” which is a polite way of saying fewer humans, more output, same revenue going to fewer pockets.
And here’s the irony. The market rewards your improved efficiency today. Tomorrow they forget. They’ll want more, always more. Once you’ve scraped the bottom of the barrel, fired everyone you could fire, automated everything you could automate… where do the next gains come from? It’s a one-way road with no destination, just more road.
But I don’t think the future is all bleak, it doesn’t have to be, there’s always been companies that value their employees, who believe their purpose is bigger than “maximizing shareholder’s value”. Of course every company needs to make money to survive, but does it have to be at the expense of their employees?
I consider myself very lucky, I found a client who values my work and is happy with my results. The gains from using AI allow me to work less hours while delivering more than ever. I work about 6 hours a day. I close my laptop at 3pm, go pick up my kids from school, and spend the afternoon with them. We have snacks, do homework together, play some music or video games, then get dinner ready. My wife has a more traditional work schedule and will come home around 6-7pm. I’m glad I can now help this way. I used to be stuck in the hustle too, and I worked 50-60 hours a week, and then my health started resenting and I was missing so much, but not anymore. I say no to the hustle.
Cheers!