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Hustle-porn attempted to rebrand the instability of living paycheck to paycheck to sound fun and flexible but those doing the work know the real story.

One of the ways that gig companies have been able to define their workers as independent contractors is by exploiting the allure of individualism. The contractor has their freedom, the thinking goes, so why would they exchange that for a full-time job with benefits?

But another culprit emerges from popular culture: the trendy pidgin to describe contract work tends to glamorize such work. Our jobs, for example, are now “flexible,” because we are the ones contorting ourselves to work at all hours, or we were professionally “nimble” because we were trying to survive on freelance gigs. The lingo around living paycheck to paycheck routinely tried to make the dreary carousel of contemporary life sound more fun.

“These words have gained a strange kind of prestige from downwardly mobile, college-educated tech workers,” said John Patrick Leary, the author of Keywords: The New Language of Capitalism.

It was part of what Reddit’s founder, Alexis Ohanian, has called “hustle porn,” cheerleading multiple jobs and their backbreaking exertions, giving a cheerful spin to the full 30% of Americans who do something else for pay in addition to their full-time jobs, according to an NPR/Marist survey.

Read the complete Fast Company article BY ALISSA QUART: https://www.fastcompany.com/90869575/the-con-of-the-side-hustle

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