Education Views | Insightful Perspectives and Analysis - Edinbox

In recent years, "hustle culture" has become a prominent philosophy of productivity in the world of work and ambition. Hustle culture represents an almost romanticized view of work ethic, an obsession with busyness, and many (usually non-research) claims that self-worth can be equated to productivity. Whether in tech start-ups or creative industries, academia or corporate entities, hustle culture is rampant in our contemporary lives, demanding more: more work, more income, more success, more recognition.

However, this inspiring story brings with it an important question that does not receive enough attention: is hustle culture a motivating agent for innovation and personal development or is it a one-way ticket to burnout, excessive anxiety, and social inequality? 

The Origin And Evolution of Hustle Culture

The concept of "hustle" was originally associated with resourcefulness and street-smart business prospects. It meant doing what one had to do to navigate through harsh systemic disadvantages. Yet, in the first part of the 21st century, especially among millennials and Gen Z, "hustle" has since been redefined as a symbol of honour. 

Connecting the dots between hustle and social media critically altered the meaning of hustle into something so glamorized and romanticized that people started to believe the hustle was equivalent to success. Instagram influencers, tech entrepreneurs and self-help gurus began to suggest that waking up at 4 am, and accomplishing multiple side hustles for 80-hour weeks, was a sign of future riches. Thus the mythology of start-up culture in Silicon Valley, and the emergence of many gig economy businesses romanticized the theory of one being able to build any sort of empire merely with the help of sheer will and determination, or hustle, as the term started to signify. 

Literature like Tim Ferriss "The 4 Hour Workweek" and Gary Vaynerchuk "Crushing It!" created the idea that hustle equated to liberation. Hustle transformed into a lifestyle, and now a culturalized movement.

Social Media and the Aesthetic of Work

Social media is responsible for transforming hustle from a one-off to a lifestyle. The internet and social media platforms (like Instagram, YouTube, and LinkedIn) are saturated with tales of entrepreneurs, freelancers, influencers, and tech workers who are hustling and showcasing 18-hour days as virtues worth earning praise. The aesthetics of coffee-fueled mornings, laptops on beaches, and "grind now, shine later" attitudes are embraced and propagated by countless individuals, leading to an established way of working in the digital space.

These representations feed into *aspirational labor* — the notion that if someone works relentlessly enough, they too can be successful, financially wealthy, and admired. What is often hidden are the structural advantages, inheritance, or systems of support that make the white-knuckled, full-throttle work viable for some, yet devastating for other individuals.

The Gig Economy and Precarious Work

Hustle culture is tied to the gig economy, which has changed how work functions. Whether it is freelancers, delivery drivers, content creators, or digital nomads—gig workers lack many features of traditional employment such as protections. This model provides flexibility but blurs the lines between work and rest.

In India, platforms like Swiggy, Zomato, and Uber have spawned an entire class of gig workers hustling everyday with uncertain incomes. The gig worker's hustle is often the darkest form of hustle: not just a motivational chant, a lifestyle, or aesthetic; it can be one of pure survival.

Media and the Myth of the Hustler

Popular media and popular culture is a huge part of romanticizing hustle culture. Movies like The Pursuit of Happiness, The Wolf of Wall Street and series like Shark Tank are stories about people who hustle, who get killed by their industry, or who succeed in the face of adversity. Because of platforms like Instagram you can watch influencers' 18-hour days and on LinkedIn read about people's "no days off" stories.

However, these images are often curated narratives void of the very privilege, networks, and safety nets that make these success stories possible. The myth of the "self-made" hustler can be terribly misleading, and can make hustlers who are working just as hard feel inferior, because they simply do not have the same resources or access.

The Repercussions: Burnout and More

Hustle culture can be empowering but there are some costs; and we can see these costs more clearly with each passing day:

1) Mental and Physical Health Decline

When we spend every waking moment working, we are headed for burnout. Each year of overwork heightens your chances of suffering from stress-related symptoms such as anxiety and depression. We are also less likely to be physically healthy. Sleep is a vital restorative process for our mental health — sleep deprivation increases the risk of insomnia, hypertension, heart problems, and other ailments. In fact, in 2019 the World Health Organization (WHO) declared burnout to be an occupational phenomenon. 

2) Loss of Work-Life Balance

Hustle culture creates the circumstances that we are "always available," which disrupts our boundaries between work and personal matters. Disturbed boundaries create emotional exhaustion and can have critical consequences on our relationships with others.

3) Inequity and Exploitation

Hustle culture simultaneously drills down on structural inequities. Because not everyone can afford to hustle — caregivers, disabled individuals, and members of traditionally marginalized communities are generally more vulnerable in situations when hustle culture expects expenses, working people to position the cost of their labour from events in their personal life, and the increased vulnerabilities of individuals with marginalized social identities.

4) Diminished Creativity and Innovation

Overworking is counterintuitive to the process of innovation. Creativity is often the result of conditions accessing rest, reflection and un-itemized time, which is contraindicated by hustle culture. 

Cultural Variations in Hustle

• Western Employment Culture : 

In the U.S.A. and U.K. hustle culture is very much linked to entrepreneurship with the ‘American Dream’ believing that anyone can succeed if they work hard enough. Silicon Valley additionally glamorizes a culture of failing fast, working longer, and scaling faster. 

• Asian Employment Culture : 

In Japan, South Korea and China, overworking is entrenched in the work culture. “996” —working from 9am to 9pm, six days a week — has inspired protests, however this kind of work is still relatively common in tech industries.

• Indian Employment Culture:

Amongst the urban middle class and youth, hustle is both an option and a necessity. With a plethora of start-ups, content creators, and coding bootcamps giving opportunities, the desire to outperform peers and residents to upward mobility is immense. At the same time, rural workers and informal casual/day laborers are hustling just to survive.

Conclusion

The hustle culture signals a wider societal fixation with achievement, speed, and visibility. Yes, it can produce awe-inspiring acts of entrepreneurship and resilience, but it can also compress existence into a list of deliverables. The price is frequently paid through mental exhaustion, bodily collapse, and emotional stagnation.

As individuals, we have to ask ourselves: *Does the hustle serve us, or do we serve the hustle? As organizations and as a society, we must rethink how we measure success as well as construct systems that are considerate of performance and people.

In a world that is racing towards efficiency, the real revolution may be to *slow down, reconnect with purpose, and reclaim the right to rest. The future of work does not have to be strenuous - it can be **resilient, **humane*, and at the end of the day, it is more meaningful.

BY- ANANYA AWASTHI 

More and more college students are showing up to campus with something soft tucked into their luggage i.e.  a stuffed animal. Not for decoration, not for nostalgia and memories, but for comfort. For a generation raised amid constant global crises and personal pressures, little sources of comfort matters. Stuffed animals, for many Gen Z students, aren’t childish holdovers,they’re survival tools.

Colleges are overwhelming in today’s era. The freedom, the expectations, the loneliness that sneaks in between classes,it’s a lot, even for the most excited fresher. Being away from home doesn’t just mean missing family or familiar places; it means losing the quiet routines and objects that once made one feel okay. So when someone packs a teddy bear or a squishy dinosaur into their suitcase, they’re not regressing. They’re preparing. Comfort toys offer something the phone or planner can't, that is something nonverbal, steady, and calming.

Mental health challenges are nothing new on college campuses, but the conversation around them has changed. Gen Z is more open about anxiety, more familiar with the language of self-regulation, and more willing to seek out what helps,even if it looks a little unconventional. And honestly, there’s nothing irrational about clinging to a plush toy when the world feels unpredictable. It’s tactile, grounding, and deeply personal. You don’t have to explain yourself to a stuffed cow.

The association between soft textures and safety is backed by psychology. Sensory comfort matters, especially during moments of stress or panic. Weighted blankets, fidget cubes, cozy sweaters all part of the same impulse. Stuffed animals combine this sensory element with emotional resonance. They’re familiar. They’re usually associated with a version of you that felt safe, cared for, loved. Holding onto that isn't a weakness; it's a strategy.

This isn’t just an individual choice either. It’s cultural. Scroll through social media and you’ll see plushies sitting on dorm shelves, tucked into backpacks, or even riding shotgun in cars. There’s an aesthetic dimension here too, but that doesn’t make it any less serious. Gen Z doesn’t draw a hard line between function and form. They don’t think comfort has to be hidden to be valid. Making mental health tools visible cute, even is part of how they take ownership of them.

Older generations might see this as immaturity. That’s fine. But Gen Z isn’t asking for permission. They’re building new norms around care. The logic is simple: if something helps, use it. If something brings comfort during a panic attack or makes it easier to sleep, don’t overthink it. Don’t apologize for it.

A comfort toy doesn’t erase the pressure of deadlines or homesickness or figuring out who you are. But it can sit quietly next to you while you try. And sometimes that’s enough.

So yes, Gen Z is bringing stuffed animals to college. Not because they haven’t grown up, but because they’re learning how to grow up differently,softly, intentionally, and on their own terms.

By Aditi Sawarkar

Rest isn’t what it used to be. You can spend a whole day in bed, phone in hand, watching reels and still feel like you haven’t taken a single breath. You haven’t gone anywhere. You haven’t done anything. But somehow, you’re tired. Not just a little drained, wired, scattered and heavy all at once.

This isn’t laziness; it’s not even “too much screen time,” What’s happening is rooted deeper than that. For a lot of Gen Z, it’s become a constant occurrence. Scroll fatigue is that strange mental exhaustion that builds when your main form of unwinding is also a steady drip of stimulation.

We’ve confused stillness with rest. They’re not the same. You can lie still and be flooded with content ,fast cuts, loud opinions, beautiful people doing better than you, strangers fighting in the comments, algorithms guessing what will hook you next. And they’re not bad, exactly. Most of it is harmless on the surface. But the pace, the noise, the constant flicker,it adds up.

It’s like your brain is always half-on. Never quite present, never fully off-duty. And because so much of this scrolling happens during our “free time,” it wears a mask of leisure. You tell yourself you’re relaxing, but your nervous system isn’t buying it.

Here’s what makes it worse- scrolling feels passive. You’re not running errands. You’re just there. But behind the screen, everything is moving. Every second, a new idea, image, or microdose of drama. And your brain, trying to keep up, doesn’t get a break. It switches context a hundred times in an hour I.e from envy to amusement, from politics to a cat, from a horror show to fashion inspo. That constant flip, even when it feels mild, is taxing.

And the fatigue isn’t just mental. There’s a weird bodily tension too. The forward hunch,The subtle anxiety. The way your eyes blur after hours of motion that isn’t your own. Gen Z, more than any generation before, has grown up with this as the default. Phones aren’t a break from life now,they are the place where life seems to be  the most happening.

So when it’s time to rest, what’s the alternative? Silence feels boring. Reading takes effort. Meditation is hard. Even going for a walk without a podcast feels like wasted time.We are afraid of being with our own thoughts,And it’s not because Gen Z is incapable of slowing down. It’s because the systems we’ve built around ‘rest’ don’t allow for slowness. The pause button is missing. Everything wants to fill the gap.

The result? We end up chasing rest by overconsuming the very thing that’s making us tired. We scroll to relax and end up overstimulated. We wake up tired from sleep, because we spent the last hour before bed buried in blue light and extreme dopamine loops.

It’s easy to brush this off as a tech problem. But it’s also a cultural one. We’ve collapsed the boundary between work and rest, effort and ease, focus and distraction. And we haven’t taught ourselves how to rest in a world that doesn’t reward slowing down.

So no, you’re not broken for feeling tired all the time,even when you “haven’t done anything.” Your mind is doing more than you realize. Constant low-grade activity. Constant tiny hits of attention that are pulled in a hundred directions.

Rest, real rest, might look very boring now. But boredom is underrated. So is solitude. So is stepping away from the constant dopamine shots. Distancing ourselves from this is probably the best thing to do ,not because I'm saying it but because your body’s telling you it’s had enough. And maybe it’s time we listen.

By Aditi Sawarkar

In an effort to incorporate major local religious festivals, the district administrations in Thoothukudi and Tirunelveli districts of Tamil Nadu have declared local holidays on Monday, July 7, and Tuesday, July 8, respectively. The District Collectors of the two districts have issued notifications, which would allow government offices, schools, and colleges to celebrate the festival day.

The holidays have been announced with a view to keeping in mind big temple festivals which are religious and culture-oriented in the southern states. But the holiday announcement has several significant omissions. Public government examinations on July 8 will proceed as planned, with no respite for the students, teachers, and schools concerned. The authorities have declared formally that exams will continue uninterrupted regardless of the holiday scenario in the areas.

Also, as the holidays have not been notified under Negotiable Instruments Act, 1881, the banking sector will not be impacted. The banks will function as per normal, and regular bank transactions will go on according to normal. However, government treasuries and subordinate offices shall function with skeleton staff in order to ensure essential services, e.g., government securities processing.

In Tirunelveli, July 19, Saturday, is declared a workday in lieu of the holiday notified. The decision is taken to weigh administrative work and the requirements of public service against the two-day holiday.

These localized variations have come about from attempts by the district administrations to weigh the ease of entry of people into meaningful cultural activity against the need for continuity in required services and academic calendars.

While local administrations are expecting their thousands of citizens to take part in regional celebrations, the public have been requested to be vigilant regarding safety precautions and assist civic organizations in ensuring that the celebrations are a seamless process.

It's that time of year again — admission season. But in West Bengal, something is off. The government has only recently extended the deadline for college applications to July 15, and the excuse proffered — "student convenience" — just scratches the surface. The true tale appears far more disturbing: thousands of college seats remain empty, and the state's previously dependable higher education system seems to be slipping from its hold on young minds.

Let's be honest — the figures don't lie. Only 3.2 lakh students have logged onto the centralised admission portal, a portal that was inaugurated a year ago with great haste, assuring transparency, convenience, and speed. But for a state with more than 90 lakh students in Class 12 alone in the recent few years, the number is disappointing, if not alarming. And on top of that, the 18.24 lakh number of applications — that's hardly sufficient to bring hope, and only 2,800+ non-Bengali students have been interested. It's not a system glitch — it's a reflection of dwindling faith.

To add to the woes, the late opening of the admission portal this year — because of a lingering legal battle over OBC reservation — appears to have compelled students to seek alternative options. And "elsewhere" increasingly implies other states. Bengal's brightest minds are catching trains to Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, and Bhubaneswar — in pursuit not only of better education, but of better safety, faculty, and employment opportunities.

Within classrooms, instructors are seeing what numbers cannot indicate: disappearing students. Departments which had hundreds of applicants are getting a dribble now. Some have dwindled to a third of what they had last year.

Students now aren't just pursuing degrees. They're pragmatic — taking vocational courses, skill-based training, or direct employment. The traditional route of a degree, with its old curriculum and prolonged, unsure admissions, appears more like a bet than a surety.

What's tragic is the disconnect. Bengal has talent. It has institutes with rich heritages. But between policy slippage, safety issues, and a shifting youth psyche, the connect is weakening.

If this deadline extension is intended as a temporary solution, it will not suffice. What we require is radical self-reflection — not merely about how students apply, but why they are choosing not to.

Bengal's education system needs to reinvent itself — or else face being made redundant by the very youth that it once held its head high serving.

In addition to the four-year BA Honours History course of Maharaja's College in Kochi, senior Malayalam actor and college alum Mammootty has been officially included as part of a new course named History of Malayalam Cinema. The second-year students this year will learn about his three-decade-long career, proposed by the college board of studies.

Mammootty has appeared in more than 400 films in five decades of acting and received three National Film Awards. The fourth-highest civilian award, Padma Shri, was given to him in 1998. He received various state and Filmfare awards, honorary doctorates in 2010, and Kerala Prabha from the state government in 2022.

The elective will have students examine Mammootty's career move from second lead to the top star, deconstruct his acting of historical and literary characters, the importance of his award-winning performances, and his experiments in foreign languages. It is a rare case of an actor from today being examined in an academic history course. The new syllabus also names other prominent Maharaja's notable alumni like India's first scheduled-caste woman graduate and Constituent Assembly member Dakshayani Velayudhan and reformers and thinkers like Arnos Pathiri and Tapaswini Amma.

While Mammootty's coming may come as a surprise, the faculty feels his corpus of work, diversity of performances and cultural standing make him a subject for scholarly examination rather than effusive fanboying. "Academic discernment and not sentimental fanboying" is Zakharia Thangal, head, History Department.

Mammootty's upcoming films are debutant Jithin K Jose's Kalamkaval with Vinayakan and multistarrer Patriot with Mohanlal and Fahadh Faasil by Mahesh Narayanan.