Hustle culture is ruining narcissists (science said so)
I could talk about dumb money forever and, it turns out, so could science.
Have you ever had a boss who insisted on taking all the power and attention they could? They yell over others; schedule mandatory fun; brag about screwing associates, partners, even love interests.
Actually it’s more likely you’ve seen this person in training, before they get their mitts on power. This is because online media is pumping up young people with a couple of messages:
1) Get rich immediately,
2) Have a personality disorder.
Narcissism is blowing up in our culture. Most of us can’t tear our eyes away from this chlorine bomb of personality traits. We listen to podcasts and watch documentaries about narcissists, we share terrible stories about our lives with them, for some reason we gorge ourselves on stories about power-tripping serial killers. And a decent chunk of society is on the other end — they are told to be narcissists, to inflate their self-image and use others’ heads as tender little stepping stones to greatness.
And how do these back-patting, win-at-all-costs entrepreneurs look? Young, covered in tattoos, already rich, entirely on social media. In fact, you’ve probably never caught them in a candid moment — or gotten a straight answer about how much they make.
That’s because according to new science, their hustle doesn’t work.
A study by Leung et al in the most recent Journal of Business Venturing Insights shows that people with narcissistic traits tend to be entrepreneurial, but narcissism actually hurts their work life. The study took not people who specifically had Narcissistic Personality Disorder (a condition with nine symptoms including a compulsive need for admiration and a preoccupation with fantasies about their own perfection), but regular people with some narcissistic traits. This means control freaks, huge braggarts and the power-hungry. The most positive correlation was in the early stages of entrepreneurship. That means they’re getting into hustle culture … then stopping.
Who else only shows you the shallow beginnings of starting a million-dollar business? Social media. Hustle culture.
Hustle culture is not about making money, but giving money to people who promise you money. Hustles include MLMs, books telling you that you can be rich, and (according to its evangelist Elon Musk) Dogecoin. Hustlers (workers) don’t benefit from hustle culture, hustlers (people ripping others off) do.
The biggest hustle has always been novelty. Why is there talk of a new cryptocurrency, a new job market, a new way to get ahead? Why do fad diets always change? Answer: they don’t go away, you just hear about the new ones more often because humans seek novelty.
Novelty both increases desperate people’s chances of survival and gets eyeballs on you. Where there’s incentive to ride a neverending wave of new things, there will be people manipulating the message to direct your eyes from the new thing to them. You can spot these people because they’re always on something new and great, always one step from changing the world — but every time you see them, they’re one step away for different reasons, through different methods. Sometimes they’re people, sometimes they’re companies or governments. All are lying, often to themselves, and if you watch for the endless stream of novelty in hustle culture you will see logical contradictions.
Dumb money in this case can be the narcissist who is always in the early stage, or it can be the people they bring with them. A sucker can have a grifter (a grift being a petty scam) guide them to part with their money, but there’s no guarantee the grifter will succeed. Even if they’re coerced or unable to make a level decision, there’s a point where the sucker chooses to give up their money. And grifts are just one way of guiding the sucker to that decision. Someone who compulsively needs novelty will typically do this by hopping on a bandwagon and inviting others to join. And bandwagons are memes. Therefore someone sucked in by a bandwagon might just have gotten caught up in the meme and its disinformation. They might not been conned at all. That goes double for narcissists.
