For the better part of a decade, the internet was ruled by hustle culture. Scroll through YouTube in 2018 and you'd find a flood of videos with titles like “My 5AM Morning Routine That Made Me a Millionaire” or “How Waking Up at 4:30AM Changed My Life.” These routines were all about optimization—squeezing productivity into every moment, stacking habits, and starting work before the sun rose. Fitness, reading, journaling, meditation, goal-setting—all crammed into a single hour. And while there’s nothing inherently wrong with waking up early or being disciplined, this glorification of extreme structure began to feel less like motivation and more like pressure.
Enter 2024, and things are begin
...
