Hustle for Wellness: How Could Anyone Live Like This?
The series of impossible tasks that no human being could keep up with
Make sure you wake before dawn. But only after your requisite 8 hours minimum of deep sleep, of course.
Do your yoga routine before making your morning smoothie bowl with rolled oats, chia seeds and blueberries. It’s best to start your day off with good nutrition; it’ll fuel those ten thousand steps you need to do.
Drink lots of water with Himalayan sea salts and lemon juice on your way to the first of your jobs — you’ve got a lot of hard work ahead of you before you go to your side hustle. Everybody needs a side hustle. Oh, but don’t forget about work-life balance!
Your lunch had best be a well-balanced chopped salad or jar noodles.
Your supper better be high protein and low carb. You have to worry about that perfect beach body, after all.
This is the lifestyle we’re sold by influencers, by wellness blogs and advice. This is the supposed ‘ideal’ way to live.
It’s also fucking exhausting. Who has the money, the time, the energy?
Only the people who are already rich enough to not have to work in the first place. The people to whom a job is a status symbol and not a means of survival.
Granted, not all of it is bad advice. Good nutrition and sleep are important. Managing stress is important. Good exercise is important.
But in the world we live in, how many of us can manage to pack all of that in one day?
Realistically, how can any of us live up to the picture painted by Influencers online? The perfectly clean and decorated homes and family gatherings we see in advertisements, the supposed ‘correct’ way to live.
If you’ve got a kid or a spouse, forget about it. Nothing ever stays perfectly clean and put together when you’re sharing your home with someone else — especially children.
If you’ve got a chronic illness, forget about it. After work, you’re probably so tired that all you can manage is a microwave dinner or take out. Ask me how I know.
Matter of fact, if you want any down time to fucking relax and not constantly be thinking about the next bullet point on your to-do list, forget about it. That’s no way to manage stress.
Real life doesn’t look like Instagram. It doesn’t look like a magazine article about beauty tips and skinny meals.
So much of our society is built upon impossibility. It’s built on fiction, on fantasy, and somehow all of it comes with a gigantic price tag and a demand that you consume.
The perfect product for every situation. A podcast for guided meditation that includes 30 seconds of advertisement every ten minutes, or a sponsored product ad in the middle.
It’s all designed to sell you something.
It’s designed to keep you chasing the next new addition to your routine. A routine that’s so packed full of things that you have no time to just exist as a person.
Our society, our entire economic structure is built on consumption.
Everything is about trying to sell you something and squeeze you for every cent in your account. Because under capitalism, the only thing that matters is the corporate profit margin — not whether you can actually afford to live a good life.
Never mind what a good life actually looks like.
And so long as money matters more than people, you will always be judged by how well you follow the script.
Solidarity wins.