Are you hustling?

I've been thinking about a guy I met on Bumble. Yes, the dating app. It was years ago. While we exchanged tons of text messages, we didn't meet. I stopped responding to him. Yes, I'm guilty of ghosting. He was out of the country, on a business trip. He irritated me. He was one of those people who described themselves as cultured because they visited famous art museums in Europe but never stepped foot in a local art museum. 

At the time, both of us lived in the greater Los Angeles area. The Broad, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (better known as LACMA and currently under major construction), Museum of Contemporary Art with two locations in Downtown LA, The Getty, The Getty Villa, and Hammer to name a few, but yet he hadn't been to one. He wasn't even interested in visiting one. 

Photo by Helga Wigandt on Unsplash

I've been thinking about him, actually why he had irritated me. He didn't appreciate art. He appreciated checking off the "Isn't my life great?" list. He couldn't appreciate the grandeurs that surrounded him near and readily available. He could only appreciate art that he had to hop on a plane and get his passport stamped.

I can't even recall his name, but he has been popping up in my thoughts as I have been pondering about slow living. What is slow living? For me, it isn't about slow walking tasks and chords. It isn't about pushing off facing life's challenges, difficulties, and stark truth. It isn't about physically moving slower.

Slow living, for me, is about slowing our minds from always wanting, hunting for the next satisfaction, validation, or catharsis. Slow living is to not slow but stop hustling in our work, social, family, and individual spaces. I know in some corporate cultures hustle is considered a positive attribute. Some of us consider hustle as a lifestyle. I wonder if they even know the definition of it. Hustle is to force, push roughly, coerce, pressure, swindle, and cheat. Have you been hustling yourself for a lifestyle rather than living a gratified life? 

I have, at times, done things that seem fabulous, just to check it off. You know so that I can feel like my life is happy, but that fabulousness fades quicker than time. I found myself hungrier and looking for the next object or activity to keep me afloat. It is a vicious cycle of want, chase, obtain, and start with another want again, often bigger and more frequent. Our hunger for the next happy fix eventually consumes our lives, working us to chase and hustle.

It is challenging to stand still with just ourselves, without that next thing to keep us going. Are you thankful for what you have or are you thankful that you are working for that next thing? Will your hunger for more end with the next acquisition? Or will you be hungry again? 

Can you stand alone in silence, without a single societal attachment? Will you feel gratitude in that moment or feel anxious because life just seems lacking without that next destination or object to acquire? And will that anxiety, insecurity that your life may be lacking, itch you to chase and hustle?