Nowadays all we have now to do is to move, and if you aren’t moving constantly, you’re not making progress.

We now idolize constant movement and constant strides towards our goals, and this is our addiction to hustle culture. Hustle culture means that if you aren’t exerting yourself to your maximum potential, you aren’t succeeding. It seems to be apparent with students at FHC, an influence of just trying to get that better grade from slaving over a piece of paper. 

For students like senior Andrea Wang, who have taken difficult classes throughout her high school career, moving from junior year to senior year was much more simple. Comparing her senior year from last year, Andrea’s junior year was her most challenging year.

“I have two AP math classes, which are Stats and Calc,” Andrea said. “They’re pretty challenging, and AP [Literature] is a significant amount of work. I wouldn’t say that it’s super hard like jumping from AP [Language and Composition] with Scobell to AP [Literature]. It’s definitely a little bit easier than [AP Language and Composition] was.”

Having difficult classes mixed in with sports is very demanding of Andrea’s time. Shifting from a strenuous day of school to practice after school is tiring, but having to stay up to work on your assignments afterward is exasperating.

“I just didn’t get enough sleep, I would either stay up late to study for a test or get up early the next day,” Andrea said “It’s not even having difficult classes, it’s just that being coupled with playing a sport or that coupled with playing a varsity sport especially. In the spring you have a full day of school and then you have practice and then you come home and all you have time to do is eat and do homework then you can go to bed after, I’m usually really tired.” 

Andrea isn’t the only student that finds blending both sports and school work challenging, Junior Molly Vonk finds it tough as well.  

Molly dances competitively with FHC’s school team and a studio outside of the school. Just like Andrea, she has to go from working hard all day at school to working hard at dance and to working hard once again on her school work. Little to none of the time she spends at the studio is brief — sometimes staying late is necessary. 

“Thursday last week, I stayed there until eight-thirty and I didn’t get home until nine,” Molly said.  “I was up doing homework for three hours, until midnight. It’s definitely hard to balance. It’s doable, but it’s not easy.”

As you can see, the process can be tiring and it’s tough to find downtime in our hustle culture. The constant motion of the day can be hard to fit in some spare time to just relax. So we can resort to procrastination and especially with the big distraction of the internet, it’s easy to fall down it. 

“I think social media can definitely influence it,” Molly said, “like when I get lost on Instagram on my phone. When I could be spending time working on something for AP Lang or on an Algebra 2, but instead I spend that time on my phone. I have definitely counteracted by putting it down and shutting it off these last few weeks and it’s worked.”

But for some students, they believe that they can only grow with these pressures of having to be great. Junior Amelia Pointer says that the demand can make her go beyond what she usually can do. 

“Honestly I feel like if I didn’t feel all the external pressures to succeed I wouldn’t keep pushing myself,” Amelia said. “Because in our school district everyone is like that and if I didn’t feel that pressure I don’t know if I would [succeed] so I definitely would say it’s sucked me in a little bit.”

Amelia has gone through her worst obsession over school already and has learned to contain her fears of failing. 

“I obsessed over honors bio like ‘this is the most important thing in my life I have to get a one hundred percent,’” Amelia said. “There was this one night where I stayed up all night for a test because I didn’t understand this one concept and I stressed over it. It was awful. I liked it but I pushed myself much harder than I needed to.”

The culture of the constant hustle can be instilled by fear, fear of absolute failure. It’s hard to accept failure when all people use as fear is the idea of failure, and that’s the toxicity of hustle culture. Not to accept that you can’t do that and to feel like everything’s over before it’s even started.

“I feel that [hustle culture influences] can be the school atmosphere but also fear of the future,” Amelia said, “like if I don’t do good in this now I’m failing later in life. Because we’ve had that fear in us since we were little like ‘college is so hard to get in’ and ‘if you don’t go to the best college out there you’ll fail’ and at sixteen you feel like your life is already over.”