Where Did Hustle Culture Come From?

where did hustle culture come from?
TLDR; Hustle culture didn’t appear out of nowhere. It was built — through industrialization, Protestant theology, and decades of manipulative marketing. Chapter 2 of Business Like We’re Human traces that history so we can finally stop carrying it as if it were our own.

Most of us who run values-led businesses have had the uncomfortable experience of realizing that some of our deepest beliefs about work — that more is better, that rest needs to be earned, that our worth is tied to our output — didn’t actually come from us. They were handed down. Absorbed. Inherited from a culture that was optimized for industrial output, not human flourishing. In Business Like We’re Human, Chapter 2 asks a question I think is genuinely liberating: where did hustle culture come from? Because once you understand the answer, you can stop taking it personally.

It Started Before Your Alarm Clock — Literally

Here’s something that stopped me cold when I first read it: before the Industrial Revolution, humans slept in two distinct chunks. The average family went to bed around 8pm, woke naturally around midnight, used that quiet middle-of-the-night window for prayer, conversation, or just being together, then returned to sleep until morning. Total: seven to nine hours, in rhythm with darkness and light. We lived this way for thousands of years. Then industrialization arrived — and we compressed all of that into a single block, because efficiency demanded it. I came across this in Charley Morley’s book Wake Up to Sleep during one of my own bouts of insomnia. It struck me that if even our sleep was reorganized around productivity, the conditioning goes far deeper than we usually acknowledge.

How the Industrial Revolution Built the Hustle Myth

The race for efficiency wasn’t an accident — it was constructed, piece by piece, over two centuries. Public schooling removed children from the home so parents could work longer. The steam engine pulled families off farms and into factories. Mass-produced candles made night shifts possible for the first time. Henry Ford’s assembly line turned human labor into a mechanized process. Before labor unions emerged to push back, workers had no protection whatsoever — and what they were actually fighting for, when unions finally did arrive, was to reclaim the work-life balance they’d had before industrialization stripped it away. We tend to think of work-life balance as a contemporary ambition. It is, in fact, a very old one.

And it wasn’t just machinery that rewired us — it was theology. The Protestant Reformation of the 16th century, led by Martin Luther and John Calvin, introduced a new myth: that hard work was a moral virtue and a sign of God’s favour. Salvation, in this framework, couldn’t be bought with good deeds — it was demonstrated through disciplined labour and the accumulation of wealth. Yuval Noah Harari writes about how humanity is shaped by the myths it collectively agrees to believe. This was one of the most consequential myths of the modern era. We absorbed it so completely that most of us don’t even recognize it as a myth. We just call it a work ethic.

Then Marketing Made It Worse

By the time the Creative Revolution of the 1960s arrived, people were getting wealthier — but instead of working less, they started buying more. Marketers discovered psychological tactics and began using them systematically to drive consumption. The Age of Materialism was born: unimaginable wealth, apparent unlimited growth, and a cultural equation between purchasing and fulfilment that hasn’t loosened its grip since. I wrote about what this eventually did to online entrepreneurship in Marketing Like We’re Human — how small business owners, without really meaning to, began using the same guilt, fear, and false urgency that the big internet marketing gurus modelled. We used the templates. We followed the “persuasion hacks.” We talked at our clients instead of with them. And in doing so, we gave up something essential: the human connection that was the whole point.

I include myself in this. I spent years trying to fit my business into frameworks that felt subtly wrong, without being able to name why. It took a long time to trace that wrongness back to its source — to see that the discomfort wasn’t a personal failing but a rational response to a system that was never designed for people like us in the first place.

How This History Lives in Your Body

My maiden name is Keimer — a German word rooted in woodworking — and my grandmother on that side ran the most popular restaurant in her village for her entire adult life, while raising three children and managing real estate after losing her husband early. She was extraordinary. She was also, in the way of her generation, defined entirely by her work. I grew up at a dinner table where workers’ rights were a constant topic of conversation, in a working-class family where hard work was not just valued but moralized. By the time I started first grade, I was already being rewarded — publicly, in front of the class — for effort and achievement. The carrot was installed early. I suspect yours was too.

This is what Celeste Headlee explored in her book Do Nothing — that understanding the history of work isn’t just an intellectual exercise; it’s the beginning of seeing how that history lives in our actual lives. Can you trace the moments where your work ethic was formed? The messages you absorbed at school, in your family, from the corporate world before you left it? Can you see that many of those messages have roots not in your own values, but in an industrial paradigm that is centuries old — and that was designed to serve systems, not humans?

Not only did we accept the myth that we needed to work in order to be good, faithful humans — we started to measure our success by how hard we worked and how much wealth we were able to accumulate. That myth had its roots in the 16th century. And most of us are still living by it.

Frequently Asked Questions About Where Hustle Culture Came From

Where did hustle culture come from originally?

Hustle culture has roots in the Industrial Revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries, when efficiency and productivity became the organizing principles of work. It was reinforced by Protestant theology — particularly Calvinist ideas linking hard work with moral virtue — and later amplified by consumerism and manipulative marketing tactics in the 20th century. It wasn’t inevitable. It was constructed.

Is hustle culture harmful to small business owners?

Yes — and in subtle ways that are easy to miss. Hustle culture ties your sense of worth to your output, makes rest feel like failure, and pushes you toward tactics that feel misaligned with your values. For values-led entrepreneurs especially, it creates a chronic low-level discomfort that’s easy to mistake for a personal problem rather than a systemic one.

What is the Protestant work ethic and how does it affect modern business?

The Protestant work ethic emerged from the Reformation teachings of Martin Luther and John Calvin, who linked hard work and wealth accumulation with moral virtue and divine favour. Over centuries, this became secularized into a cultural belief that your worth is determined by how hard you work. It’s still running quietly in the background of most modern business culture — including in entrepreneurship.

How can I unlearn hustle culture as an entrepreneur?

It starts with naming it — tracing where your beliefs about work actually came from, rather than assuming they’re simply true. From there, it’s a gradual process of building a business around your actual values and life, not around inherited myths about productivity. The inner work comes first; the structural changes follow.

What does “doing business like we’re human” mean in practice?

It means designing your work around your humanity rather than organizing your life around your work. It means releasing the myth that more is always better, and building instead from sufficiency, genuine connection, and values alignment. It’s a different starting point — and it changes everything that follows.

Continue Your Humane Business Journey

This article is an extract from Business Like We’re Human.

Read the Book
Explore 1-on-1 Coaching

Read the Rest of the Series

The 7Ps of Humane Marketing

One-Page Marketing Plan by Sarah Santacroce, Conscious Business & Marketing Coach

Get the Fill In the Blank
One-Page Marketing Plan

  • A powerful map you can use over and over again to plan your marketing campaigns
  • A new version of the 7 Ps of marketing that takes marketing from arduous to joyful!
  • A 7-day email series to fill out your working canvas for the often-forgotten (but incredibly important) pre-work that most marketers avoid
Get your copy

Your contact information is safe, and will not be used in ways
other than stated on this page. 

Sarah Santacroce logo black and white

Humane Marketing is founded and led by Conscious Business Coach Sarah Santacroce.

Linkedin Twitter Youtube

©2026 Sarah Santacroce

Key Humane Business Definitions

The 7Ps of Humane Marketing

Get the Fill In the Blank One-Page Marketing Plan

One-Page Marketing Plan by Sarah Santacroce, Conscious Business & Marketing Coach

Your contact information is safe, and will not be used in ways
other than stated on this page.