You tell yourself that once you hit the next salary milestone, everything will fall into place. The promotion, the six-figure goal, the relentless early mornings – they all feel like necessary sacrifices on the road to a life that finally feels good. Yet somewhere between the third coffee and the midnight email, a quiet suspicion creeps in: what if the grind itself is the thing standing between you and the contentment you are chasing? According to the professor behind Yale University’s most popular course ever, that suspicion is well-founded.
The costly myth we keep buying into
Laurie Santos, the psychology professor who teaches that record-breaking Yale course and hosts the podcast The Happiness Lab, has been vocal about a widespread misunderstanding. She explains that too many of us believe we should put our heads down, avoid social connection – whether at work or in our personal lives – and just power through the to-do list. In her view, that instinct is completely wrong.
The pattern she describes is a familiar trap. We convince ourselves that earning a million dollars will make us happy, so we hustle until we get there. When the happiness doesn’t arrive, we raise the bar – now it’s five million – and the cycle doubles down on itself. Santos sees this as the central misconception of hustle culture: the goalpost never stops moving, and the promise of fulfillment keeps receding.
And this is not a new phenomenon. The very concept of workaholism was named back in 1971, when psychologist Wayne E. Oates coined the term to describe how work can morph into a genuine addiction. More recently, social media influencers amplified the message by holding up Silicon Valley tech entrepreneurs as models worth emulating – the idea being that if you optimize every single moment of your day for maximum productivity, wealth will follow. Some voices went even further, suggesting that unless you sacrifice sleep and relationships for the sake of work, success will remain forever out of reach. So how much of that is supported by evidence?
What the research actually says about overwork and well-being
The science paints a starkly different picture from the hustle gospel. A Mayo Clinic blog post notes that working too hard can increase stress, depression, and burnout. A 2019 meta-analysis published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health went further, finding that overwork can have deleterious effects on occupational health – meaning it harms not just your physical and mental state, but your actual job performance as well.
Meanwhile, the things hustle culture tells us to sacrifice turn out to be the very ingredients of a satisfying life. A 2018 study published in Frontiers in Psychology found that people who get more quality sleep report greater life satisfaction than those who do not. Stanford Medicine reported in 2019 that the same holds true for people who maintain strong social connections with others. In other words, the sleep and the friendships you are told to set aside for the sake of productivity are precisely what keep you thriving.
Santos herself recommends taking breaks at work and reaching out more frequently to family and friends. And she has heavyweight research on her side. Marc Schulz and Robert Waldinger, directors of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, have described what they call social fitness – the practice of regularly evaluating your relationships and being honest about where your time is going and whether you are nurturing the connections that help you flourish. According to Schulz and Waldinger, social fitness is the number-one key to a happy life.
Signs the culture is already starting to shift
There are real-world signals that the worship of non-stop work may be losing its grip. A recent GoDaddy survey of 1,000 U.S. small-business owners found that 54 percent of respondents defined the American Dream as feeling happy in life, rather than defaulting to the more traditional answer of accumulating wealth.
According to Fara Howard, GoDaddy’s chief marketing officer, the American Dream is evolving. She pointed to economic conditions that have made homeownership less attainable – particularly for members of Gen Z – while the pandemic and the Great Resignation have pushed many people to prioritize being their own boss and gaining more freedom, comfort, and flexibility. Happiness, it seems, is quietly overtaking money as the metric that matters most.
This cultural shift aligns with what Santos and the broader body of well-being research have been saying all along. When people stop measuring their lives exclusively by bank-account balances, they create room for the habits – sleep, social connection, genuine rest – that actually move the needle on life satisfaction.
The bottom line
The evidence is consistent: grinding harder does not reliably lead to happiness, and it can actively damage your health and your performance. What does make a measurable difference is investing in quality sleep, meaningful relationships, and regular moments of genuine rest. You do not need to earn your way to well-being – you need to protect the parts of your life that already generate it. The next time you are tempted to skip dinner with a friend in favor of another late night at your desk, remember that the most popular course at Yale is not teaching students to hustle more. It is teaching them to connect.
