Today I woke up at 4:20 (nice) in the morning.
This isn’t so surprising, as I went to bed at 9.
I dont have any bottled ice water, so my face remains undunked and banana-peel free.
I just have some coffee and an hour of peace and quiet.
We live in a cult of productivity.
It’s a culture where working harder than your peers is the primary method of success.
There’s something very future-dystopian about that: Telling the working class that working harder is the only way to succeed.
Some of the reason I wake up so early is that I’m on the west coast, working on east coast time.
As a remote dev, it’s a smoother work experience to offset my core hours to skew a bit earlier.
And I found if I wake a little earlier than that, I have about a solid hour of high quality project time. No distractions, no work, no family, just me and whatever hobby-project I have on the go.
There’s a difference between having a hobby and having a hustle.
They can be the exact same thing, the difference between the two being the goal, the outcome.
There’s only one desired outcome in a hustle: Money.
A successful hustle puts cash in your pocket.
The outcome of a hobby is much harder to define. It scratches an itch, it teaches new skills, it builds art with no price.
People can absolutely tell the difference between your hobby and your hustle.
People resonate with art much more than they do with products.
They can smell the desperation at the heart of your hustle.
Now maybe your product is so good they’ll engage regardless.
But they’ll know your goal.
There’s many problems with the working class telling itself that the only path to success is to work harder.
But in my mind, the biggest one is that we live in a flat society.
Elon is working just as hard as a factory worker. Maybe even working longer, since business workers have not seen the benefits of collective action.
We’re all working class, and I see little evidence that anyone has ever got enough cash in their pocket.
To rebel against this system is to make art.
Output with no price.
Internal validation over monetary rewards.
That’s the reason I go to bed at 9pm, and wake up around 5.
It buys me an hour or so to work on my hobbies.
I try to build something that resonates with me, and I share it so that it might resonate with you.