In a world that demands constant productivity, the cost of keeping up is often invisible, until it becomes impossible to ignore. For young Indians today, hustle culture isn’t just a lifestyle but a survival strategy in an uncertain world with growing unemployment. Behind the facade of ambition, deadlines, and curated success stories lies a quiet, growing crisis: the mental health of an entire generation.
Coming of age amidst a pandemic, many young people began their professional lives in lockdown, interviewing for their first jobs over patchy Zoom calls, entering an economy struggling to stand on its feet. As the world rolls back to normal, there’s always something erupting: war, layoffs, inflation, rising living costs.
For the economically vulnerable, the largest group of youth in India, the ability to find employment, feed their dreams, and succeed is becoming impossible. Young people throw themselves into work with an unspoken belief: Do more, and earn my way to security. This constant hustle, a work culture that thrives on exploiting youth, comes at a steep and deeply human cost. Hustle culture sells a dangerous dream: that success is solely a function of hard work, and rest is for the weak. Burnout isn’t seen as a problem, it’s worn like a badge of honour.
Several CEOs in recent years have made headlines for glorifying overwork. Narayana Murthy, co-founder of Infosys, sparked a national debate when he suggested young Indians should work 70 hours a week to improve national productivity. Elon Musk once said, “Nobody ever changed the world with 40 hours a week.” These statements, often delivered from places of enormous privilege, ignore a basic truth: most people are already working far beyond what is healthy.
The human toll
In Indian metros, it’s not uncommon for young professionals to work 10–12 hour days, respond to messages late into the night, and spend weekends catching up on “urgent deliverables.” Anxiety, insomnia, and disconnection are not rare symptoms, they’re the emotional tax of simply showing up to work. According to a 2022 Deloitte report, 80% of Indian professionals reported mental health issues during the year, with millennials and Gen Z workers most affected.
And for some, the pressure becomes unbearable. In 2023, a young employee at Ernst & Young died by suicide, citing work-related stress. Similar incidents have occurred across industries, from finance to tech to advertising. These stories often disappear under institutional silence, but they represent a very real cost of our current model of success.
The hustle doesn’t just play out in glass-walled offices, it’s even more pervasive in the informal sector, where regulation is almost non-existent and survival itself demands overwork. Street vendors, delivery personnel, construction workers, and gig workers navigate unstable hours, unsafe working conditions, and daily uncertainty, without the safety net of contracts, healthcare, or fair wages. The mass migration to urban centres is driven by hope but sustained by a system that thrives on invisibilised labour. Here, hustle is a lived reality with no exit. The mental health toll is enormous, but rarely understood.
It’s important to acknowledge that not everyone can “opt out” of hustle culture. Many young Indians are the first in their families to earn a stable income, support siblings’ education, or pay off loans. For them, hustling isn’t aesthetic, it’s survival. Telling someone to rest when their rent depends on a bonus is cruel. But acknowledging the lack of choice doesn’t mean we stop questioning the system. In fact, it makes the conversation even more urgent. We need to build workplaces, communities, and economies where mental health is not a personal luxury, but a collective priority.
What can we do?
We must start treating mental well-being not as an HR formality but as a core metric of success. Companies need to ask: are employees sleeping well? Can they take leave without guilt? Do they feel psychologically safe?
To shift the needle, organisations must go beyond token gestures like webinars or therapy reimbursements. They must redesign their systems: revise workload expectations, normalise boundaries, provide access to mental health professionals, and reward sustainable performance.
But change cannot stop at the corporate boardroom. In the informal sector, where most of India’s workforce operates without protections, mental health support must be built into larger structural reforms. Community-led and government-backed solutions are key: public clinics, helplines, rest and safety in labour laws, guaranteed minimum wages, and portable benefits like insurance, sick leave, and childcare. NGOs, local bodies, and municipal governments can play a powerful role in creating “care infrastructure” in informal work zones: rest areas, mobile counselling units, or peer support groups. When people are working 12-hour shifts just to survive, rest should not be a luxury. It should be a right.
More broadly, our schools, homes, and public discourse must stop treating mental health as a personal failing and begin offering real tools for resilience. We need to inculcate emotional education, safe spaces to talk, and language to navigate fear, fatigue, and failure.
At a societal level, we must redefine what it means to succeed. Can “making it” include community, calm, and care? Can it mean having enough, not endlessly doing more? If we don’t build systems that centre well-being, we’re not just risking their mental health, we’re risking a future built on broken people.
A more honest future
The mental health crisis among Indian youth isn’t a footnote. It’s a silent crisis. The pressures of hustling, surviving, and performing in work environments that de-prioritise mental health over results is debilitating. Slowing down is a privilege and hustle is a lifestyle.
We may not all be able to step off the treadmill right now. But we can, and must, start asking better questions about where it’s taking us.
(Chapal Mehra is a public health specialist and the Convenor of Survivors Against TB (SATB), a collective of survivors, advocates and experts working on TB and related comorbidities. He can be reached at [email protected]. Vashita Madan is the communications lead with SATB. She can be reached at [email protected] )
Published – June 03, 2025 02:46 pm IST