The Great Rebalancing: The Old Ways Aren't Working Anymore

What does it mean when whole groups of people have similar realizations around roughly the same time? Because I think it's indicative of something much, much larger happening, and I think it's been happening since 2020.

2020 was an enormous wake-up call for humanity in every way, socially, racially, economically, politically, and spiritually.

It forced us to confront so much of how we were all living up to that point, what we valued and the systems that we built all around us.

And for most of us, this was the first time in our lifetime that we experienced such a mass disruption, especially at that level.

However, for the most of us, we have experienced mass disruption in recent history just at a much smaller scale.

And I'm talking about that financial crisis we had back in 2008 that many people refer to as the Great Recession.

Back then, a lot of comparison was being made to the Great Depression back from 1929.

That financial crisis in 2008 destabilized money, finances, how people worked and how people thought about their futures because people saw their retirement wiped out in days.

And then look at the response that happened afterward.

Entrepreneurship became a very big thing.

Side hustles became a very big thing, especially around 2008.

I am a byproduct of that.

I started my pet photography business in 2008 as a side hustle while I was working a corporate job, the corporate machine, hating my life and questioning, is this all there is? What else can I do? You guys remember food trucks? Because Roy Choi started the food truck boom in 2008.

He started the Kogi truck mixing a fusion of Mexican and Korean flavors.

He blew up here and then the food truck revolution happened after that.

Monetizing yourself and monetizing your interests by moving toward what was your passion, what is more aligned with what you want to do, and starting side hustle businesses or completely quitting your day job to pursue entrepreneurship was a really, really big thing in this era.

And then eventually, we ended up in the mid-2010s, so probably around 2015, was peak hustle culture era.

I'm talking like hashtag rise and grind, optimize everything.

This is where we start to see the girl boss era getting really big.

And people were saying things like no days off, sleep when you're dead.

Everyone has the same 24 hours.

So make the most of it because if you're not, then you're just whining and complaining and not making the most of the same time that we all have.

Oh my God, I'm getting tired just thinking about all this.

And by the middle of the 2010s, hustle literally became a personality and an identity that you just really anchored yourself into.

And it was something that a lot of people took a lot of pride in.