The Rise of the Hustle Economy

Back in January of this year I published a bit from my upcoming 4th book in The New
Age of Enlightenment. As I get closer to publication the current events of 2020 have
made me consider a new dynamic in regard to how, in an unprecedented way, the new
power of cancel culture has given rise to what I’ve called the Hustle Economy.

How many YouTube content producers rely on their channel as a ’side hustle’
revenue to pay their bills today? How many self-published authors have quit
their day jobs to write for their new employer, Amazon, today (Amazon owns
86% of the publishing market today)? How many former cubicle workers
decided it was more lucrative to start an internet business than continue
slaving away at a corporate gig that only made their bosses rich? Today, we’ll
readily shift to the digital world to sustain us financially – in the end we don’t
have much choice – but it’s the old order thinking that pervades this new
“reality” and causes problems.
I write this at a time when several prominent names in the Manosphere (and other
spheres) with large subscriber bases are having their channels erased by
YouTube/Google. In some cases this erasure is a complete deletion from mainstream
social media (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and even WordPress). I’m not a
fortuneteller, but I did predict this happening as far back as my State of the
Manosphere address in 2018 and as recently as a defunct convention I spoke at back in
May of 2019. I said a storm was coming. I saw then that a mainstream Village would
need convenient foils, easy targets, to defeat in the 2020 election cycle; and the “Red
Pill” – as subjectively defined by every online ideologue-grifter – would make the
perfect, easy-to-hate, villains to bring down to prove a point. Purging long-overdue
“hate accounts” would seem like a necessary and needed step to prove ideological
virtue to the ‘woke’ masses.

Well, that storm is upon us now, and the people who convinced themselves they
were entrepreneurs, and a much more profitable side hustle was their true calling in
life, are looking around with a bit of nervous hesitancy now. Even the guys with the
temerity to start an online business in the wake of the Corona Virus eliminating their
jobs are now realizing they may not be as anti-fragile as they thought. Cancel
Culture isn’t just about getting ideological enemies fired from their day jobs. It’s about
total personal assassination, and stealing that person’s bread in the form of denying
them any future ability to exist online, much less generate revenue, is the real
objective. Right now, the Cancelled are just faceless randoms online losing jobs and
tenured university staff who got too comfortable in the belief that they could never be
fired. But in the coming months the Cancelled are going to look like an army of
dispossessed with nothing to lose by hunting down the ones responsible
for canceling them.

An Economy of Hustlers

The Hustle Economy came about because the barriers to entry into that economy have
never been lower. For roughly 7-8 years anyone with a laptop, webcam and a basic
understanding of social media and WordPress could join the hustle revolution of online
“influencers“. Who wouldn’t want to make more money than the shitty 9-5 corporate
cubicle job they spent 4 years in college to get into? Is it any wonder that for a decade
the various ‘spheres have been dissuading young men from attending college, to get
worthless degrees, in order to get into one of these jobs? Why bother with the “leftist
indoctrination” we call education when you can make six figures in a couple of years
online if you learn how to leverage SEO, engagement, grow an email list and
pitch offers and merch? Hell, you can pretend to be a dog online and make more
money than that job you thought assuming all that student debt for would be so
rewarding.
The Hustle Economy was a natural progression from the Gig Economy. A lot of
companies understood the sense in ‘retaining’ at-home employees, or project/contract
workers. No benefits, next to no overhead, productivity was up to the freelancer
completing the tasks on time (instead of monitoring hourlies’ productivity in a cube
farm) and all for about the same, if not less, compensation. Don’t like your gig? Fine,
just fire your “employer” and go back to your service advertising site to pick up a new
one. For being a hired gun or contractual employee working from home most smart
pros saw the freedom of the Hustle Economy almost immediately. Cut the middleman
out and have the “jobs” come to you in the form of a potentially worldwide clientele.

Around 2014 the online Coaching/Guru hustle really began to develop into a template
that anyone with a bit of social media savvy could follow. ‘Smart’ men and women
quit their dead-end cubicle jobs or rearranged their Gig Economy jobs, for the more
lucrative positivity hustle dollars that only required the small investment of a laptop,
webcam and a willingness to parrot the scripts of Tony Robbins, Zig Ziglar, Napoleon
Hill or Norman Vincent Peale. To be fair, this new Hustle Economy isn’t unique to
the Manosphere; the Lost Boys Generation – this generation of directionless young
men – niche market is just one among many lucrative markets today. Health & Fitness,
“Entrepreneurs”, dating/relationship/marriage, personal empowerment, motivational
positivity, the Law of Attraction, these are just a sampling of what I’ve called
the Success Porn industry in the past. And new order technology makes all the old
order grifts seem novel to a generation that’s never experienced them before.
This Hustle Economy online template is cross-cultural and largely globalized now.
Religion, psychology, motivation, business, philosophy, fitness, medicine/health,
dating/relationship, marriage, child-rearing, or even just catering to the red meat needs
of others’ desire for affirmation in their own despondency; all of these and more are
now the spheres of the Hustle Economy.

Old Order Mastery vs. New Order Hustle

In 2015 I had a guy approach me at the Man in Demand conference who wanted to

thank me for my work and The Rational Male. He said he’d come to reading it at the
suggestion of his (male) therapist while he was recovering from a nasty divorce. This
was the first time I had ever been told that a legitimate clinical psychologist had been
using my book as a part of their therapy practice. The significance of this was profound
for me then, but I don’t think I fully appreciated it until I had more men relate a similar
beginning to reading my work in 2017 up to today. Here were real psychologists with
doctorate degrees using The Rational Male as a reference in their practices. It was at
this time I began to pay more attention to doctors and scholars and legitimate business
pros who were aligning themselves with the various influencers of the new order
spheres.
Psychologists are the best example of this because of the diversity of fields they can
involve themselves in. Take a guy like Gad Saad, easily one of my favorite
evolutionary psychology researchers. He’s a bonafide doctor and evo-psych scientist
who’s found a new celebrity in various Hustle Economy sub-spheres on Twitter and
elsewhere. His YouTube channel is pushing 180K subs and he managed to leverage
himself as an e-personality. But Gad is one of the few legitimate psychologists to
successfully transition to the new order hustle. More psychologists struggle with it
because they still cling to an old order thinking that their pre-New Enlightenment
educations were founded upon. They may still hold private clinical practices that they
developed some 10-20 years ago. That’s the way you did it as a therapist in the old
order. In fact, one reason I never pursued a postgraduate in behavioral psychology was
because the only way to make any “real money” was to get a doctorate and start a
practice. Masters degrees would get a you a job as a social worker.

Today, legitimate psychologists must actively compete in the Hustle Economy to make

the hard work, time and money they invested in their degrees pay off as well as an
online self-help Guru or Coach‘s hustle; some of whom have had their
own practice open online with a 99 page “e-book” available filled with positivity
pablum lifted from The Secret, going for as long as they’ve been in school. When
WebMD first launched in the late 2000s doctors everywhere had to contend with their
patients diagnosing themselves with whatever disorder they believed their symptoms
indicated according to what they read on the site. The age of the self-educator had
begun in this regard and online “clinicians“, both certified and holistic, saw the
opportunity to profit from the symptomatic fears of people about their
health. Real doctors had to either fight a losing battle of reeducating and allaying the
fears of increasingly more people’s health concerns one by one, or find their own angle
in the Hustle Economy and leverage their title and credentials to add validity to it.
Today, an honorific is respected in name, but it’s by no means the path to earning
potential – at least in the short term.

I occasionally encounter the critic who will claim I don’t site sources or my own work
is speculative or just opinion. Wherever possible I do in fact cite sources, stats and
research, but in the new order information age quoting stats or correlating studies has
become an exercise in “dueling research”. And that’s assuming a critic has the time and
interest enough to consider what you’re citing and counter it with their own. If you’re
diligent enough it’s likely you can counter even the most basic of scientific
presumptions with some research, TED talk or meta-study data. The truth is most
people simply don’t develop their personal belief sets based on the data of multiple
peer-reviewed, independently funded, experimental research PDFs someone links them
online. They usually go with experience, emotional resonance and what “sounds right”
according to how they were raised. If anything, rationality and critical thinking – the
kind of mental presence sorely needed in higher education – is distrusted above all else
in the Hustle Economy.
So, I can certainly see the frustration most old order career professionals have with the
online template success models of their new order competitors. Add to this that they
are both vying for the very sparse attention of the same customers – all of whom
are little experts themselves – and you begin to see the practicality of, “if you can’t
beat ’em, join ’em”. Thus far I’ve used psychology as the illustration, but this Hustle
Economy dynamic applies to all old order businesses, academia, government systems,
and religion. Religion in particular (as I’m writing about) was, and is, one of the first
spheres to eagerly embrace the Hustle Economy. With everyone online being a little
expert and everyone having some relative platform on which to prove it, religion,
spirituality and magical thinking were easily monetized and template-formed. And
their profitability is made all the better when one sphere’s template (religion)
complements or amplifies another (government, psychology, fitness, sex, etc.).

Garbage In, Garbage Out

Kicking and screaming will the old order thinkers be dragged into the Hustle

Economy of this new age of digital enlightenment. Back in the late 2000s I can
remember being told that to make ends meet a family needed two incomes and a side
hustle. Now that side hustle is the main thing. The old plan of going to 4, maybe 8
years, of college to get a good job that paid well is hard to sell in the age of hustles that
can pay far more than a formal degree does. Don’t think for a moment I’m in any way
celebrating this development. A good education should be its own reward. Being well
versed in a variety of areas, and understanding critical thinking and how to learn
should be a priority for well-educated people. But even our institutions of higher
learning, our esteemed universities, must also contend with the Hustle Economy. As
COVID forces us to stay home, and classes, and jobs, are moved online, people are
only now realizing just how unprepared their schools and employers are to deal with
the new order way of learning and working. They’re beginning to see how many hours
of their lives they waste in pointless formalities and commutes, but more so, they see
how antiquated the old order systems they relied upon for security for so long really
are. And in turn, those universities and corporation must now enter the Hustle
Economy themselves if they want to survive.

This is the essence of the Red Pill. While I believe that Red Pill ought to only be used
for intersexual dynamics, I do see the parallels in transitioning from a reliance on old
order thinking to seeing how deceptively false the premises of that thinking are in light
of new order, readily accessible, information today. We are presently in a state of
radical transition – made all the worse because most of the last 4 generations neither
realize it nor understand how to deal with it – and the old systems based on old
presumptions are failing right before our eyes. These generations are ill prepared
because all they know, all they’ve been taught, are failed, failing or outmoded ideas of
the old order.