Hustle culture borrowed athletic grind rhetoric and spread through social media bragging

Evidence

The parallels to athletics were explicit. The “grind” language appeared in a 2012 motivational video created for the Texas Christian University baseball team. Its narrator intoned, “A legion of voices are shouting their unanimous permission for you to hit the snooze button and go back to dreamland—but you didn’t ask their opinion. The voice you’ve chosen to listen to is one of defiance…. Welcome to the grind.” Social media served as a virtual clubhouse for bragging about disciplined lifestyle routines. During a week in June 2014, Twitter users were posting 9.3 “rise and grind” tweets per minute during peak hours. — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 315

Categorization

• SHARE: Specific stat — 9.3 rise and grind tweets per minute in June 2014 — for someone tracking meme/grind culture timelines.
• XREF: Connects to Beryl Satter / self-improvement-as-work discussions, and to later critiques of hustle culture as productivity gospel. — connects to: Twitter’s ascendance made its founders cultural models of entrepreneurial success in the Bay Area — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 209