Self made, self employed and self promoting, hustle culture has gone mainstream. Is this a rejection of outdated corporate career paths, or a generation simply surviving an unstable gig economy?

Rachel Richards retired aged 27 with a portfolio of properties and investments. Now with a series of books, podcasts, courses and a social following of millions, she teaches other would-be entrepreneurs the way to “passive income, aggressive retirement”.   

MoneyHoneyRachel, as she’s known on TikTok, is part of a growing wave of financial influencers finding an eager audience online. Their easy to understand videos with titles like “Things that wealthy people know that the average person doesn’t” de-mystify topics like taxes, mortgages and budgeting, promising greater personal freedom and an escape route from the daily grind.

Behind the popularity of these self-made self-promoters lies a longstanding suspicion that school doesn’t prepare you for the life of work, creating a knowledge gap that funnels generations of unquestioning young people into a conveyor belt corporate system that takes care of everything for them, so long as they arrive with a smile at 9am. 

But as we’ve seen with the rise of ‘quiet quitting’, that trade-off is beginning to wear thin. 

In a recent survey by recruitment company Robert Walters, 72% of Gen Z respondents said they favoured “an individual route to advance their career”, with over half saying they don’t want to take on a middle management role. 

It’s not difficult to see why loyalty to toxic organisations, sacrificing mental health to reach arbitrary targets, or engaging in divisive office politics to further your career isn’t appealing to young people. Was it ever? But whereas self-employment was once seen as a risky detour from a stable career, the reality for many today is that job security in any form is simply non-existent, a quaint relic of the past like affordable mortgages and Saturday morning cartoons. In a world where any white collar career feels like a losing battle against AI and the great redundancy, why not gamble for the biggest payoff? Do you really have a choice?

We’re seeing clues to the ‘entrepreneur-isation’ of work across wider culture. Shows like Dragons Den and Shark Tank made celebrities of self made millionaires like Stephen Bartlett, whose Diary of a CEO has been Apple’s most popular podcast for two years running. Cult beauty brand e.l.f recently launched a Roblox game where players learn how to run a startup, even happy-go-lucky Pinterest partnered with a sensible financial planning company. 

What does this tell us about culture?

The Hollywood version of this story tells us that ‘the 21st century business world has been defined by self-starters and anti-establishment mavericks who’ve disrupted industry and changed the way we live’. While that might be true for those with a financial safety net (MoneyHoneyRachel attended a $40,000 a year private school), for many it’s not an ambitious choice to hustle, but an absolute necessity. Low paid, zero-hours gig economy contracts, skyrocketing university tuition fees, and financial precarity in almost every sector mean that for many, the hustle is to heat their house, rather than to buy it outright. 

However, while both drivers are different, the hustle remains the same. Given “we’re all floating on the same ocean, just in different boats”, the democratisation of information through platforms like TikTok is benefiting everyone, and we believe that we’re going to continue to see an acceleration of startup culture as traditional career paths crumble. 

Thought starters for brands

• Marketing to mavericks. How often does your brand lean on old tropes about the working day? How often have you talked about weekends as filled with leisure time? A simple step here is not leaning into stereotypes around the working week – but the next level up would be celebrating the hustle and hard work that has become de rigueur. 
• Open Sourced. One of the greatest innovations to come from technology was the development of community based standards and ideas – more commonly known as Open Source. This concept of creating something that benefits everyone might feel like it stands in opposition to the hustle culture, but in many ways social content is a sort of open source business information. So what could your company ‘open source’ that would help democratise information and help the hustlers?
• Doing it for the (cash) culture. Too often culture marketing limits itself to music, fashion, and sports, but business, finance and technology all have their own value systems, rituals, and artefacts too. A huge opportunity area for brands that are directly or indirectly involved with business, finance, or technology is supporting – or even funding – the next generation of entrepreneurs. This could extend into NPD too – what product or service could your brand create that helps hardworking hustlers?

To unlock more insights, email discover@culturelab.co 

^{(Sources: CultureLab CultureIndex, January 2025)}