The Brew | 'Hustle Culture Is Killing Me'

• 🎧▶️ WATCH or LISTEN to this episode of the 5AM StoryTalk Podcast - VIDEO AVAILABLE AT YOUTUBE or scroll down!

• 📖 READ this ep by scrolling down to READ 5AM REALTALK FEB. 24, 2026.

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Are you spending more time chasing the work than actually creating it? In this episode of The Brew, things get uncomfortable. I’m pulling back the curtain on the artist's gig economy and admitting things I’ve hidden from my closest friends for years. I’ve certainly tried to avoid talking about it here at Substack, though maybe you’ve read between the lines here and there.

If you’ve ever screamed "I can’t do this anymore" into the void of an 80-hour work week, this one is for you. I hope it helps.

On the itinerary this week:

⏳ How did I end up working 80 hours a week as an artist (screenwriter, novelist, essayist, and podcaster)?!
📉 The 21st century hustle culture/gig economy is killing creative lives
🧬 My father’s greatest gift to me…or was it a curse?
⚖️ The imbalance of time spent chasing screenwriting work and actually screenwriting
🎙️ A podcast too far
⚡ Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes because I can’t fake being happy anymore
🎬 I finally got out to the movies – and ‘Marty Supreme’ was just what I needed
💔 Except that line ‘You’ll never be happy’ hits me hard
🌿 Henry Miller and what artists get about the life more abundant

If you have any questions about what we talk about in this episode, drop them in the comments. If you want to share your own stories of creative burnout, I’m here for those, too!

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If 5AM StoryTalk adds anything to your life but you’re not up for a paid subscription, you can still support my work here by “buying me a coffee”. It’s hugely appreciated!

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If you enjoyed this podcast episode, you might also dig these other episodes of The Brew:

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READ THE BREW FEB. 24, 2026

Welcome back to 5AM StoryTalk, my friends. This is The Brew, a plog segment where you and I get to talk about what’s going on in my life as an artist, what I’m struggling with, and the arts and its industries in general.

Today’s episode is going to get a little heavy, because we’re going to talk about something I’m not just struggling with…but which has, I think, been slowly killing me.

I know that sounds hyperbolic, but it feels that way and, in hindsight, could ultimately prove to be true.

I expect more than a few of you will relate, especially given how so many of us are now trapped in a gig economy, a non-stop hustle culture. But not just that, a culture that has taught us to treat work as a kind of religious commitment – the trick capital has played on us, of course, after Henry Ford realized Adam Smith’s dream and turned us all into gears and cogs in someone else’s machine.

So, let’s start at the beginning because as scary as it might sound if I told you I’ve been working 70 to 80 hours a week for the past 14 months, that wouldn’t make as much sense as it would if you didn’t understand how it started.

It begins with my father, who was a blue-collar guy from Michigan who retired from three different jobs before he died a few years later.

When I was growing up, he worked for the Macomb County Road Commission that takes care of the county’s roads. During the long winter, he’d be on call almost non-stop. His beeper would go off all hours of the night.

Some weeks, he’d work more than 100 hours, salting roads, keeping them as safe as possible for drivers.

He and I had almost nothing in common, but after I found success in Hollywood as a screenwriter, I wanted him to understand his greatest gift to me was his work ethic. What he was willing to do to take care of his family, pay for the house we lived in, the food, our sports and other interests.

This, for him, was his big goal in life. That was his American dream.

When I reinvented myself as a freelance arts journalist (read about that here), I made more than almost every other freelance journalist I knew because of how tirelessly I worked, how inventive I was about how to turn every interview into five or six articles.

My record was writing 30 hours in a row once, which I took a lot of pride in for some reason.

But that work ethic helped me break into Hollywood, too, where my success, in a lot of ways, was predicated on how much more I wrote than everyone else around me.

At one point, I was writing four scripts I’d sold on pitch while I was simultaneously pitching to get numerous other projects.

My manager at the time loved me and, wisely because of my workhorse qualities, never discouraged this – never warned me I might burn out.

After my “Dracula” TV series was greenlit, which I created, I wrote and sold a spec and wrote a comic book series – all while in the “Dracula” writers’ room and dealing with the shitshow that series had become.

Meaning, a yearlong bout with what I’m pretty sure could qualify as depression – but let’s just say, I was depressed…lost.

Still, I wrote.

In the six months after my second son was born, I wrote a 600-page novel I sold, two TV pilots, and two drafts a feature script for Director Park Chan-wook.

If this all sounds impressive to you, it is.

I’m the writer many other writers have always told me they wished they could be more like because my ability to produce meant my odds of selling something – to pay for my life, to pay for my family’s lives – went dramatically up.

But at the core of this observation, what they meant was my chances of having a career – of making it – went up.

So, did I like living like this?

Actually, yeah – yeah, I did.

I loved it.

Here’s the thing, writing isn’t a job for me. It’s my greatest joy outside of things like travel and family and friends. If I have a calling, it’s to tell stories. If I could write for 70 to 80 hours a week, I wouldn’t mind.

Really.

I’m weird like that, like a shark like that – swim or die, write or die.

But when Covid hit, something shifted in the arts. Pursuing writing assignments became the full-time job rather than the actual writing.

More than that, I’d shifted my career largely out of America by that point for creative reasons. I enjoyed what I was doing in other markets more because these markets let me pursue stories Hollywood weren’t interested in. I could write character-driven period dramas, for example. My reps outside of America also wanted me to do things like write novels and plays. Big win, right?

It was, for four amazing years, but as the market contracted, I found myself working less – like most people – but now in markets that already had paid less than I was making in Hollywood.

The solution was simply to work harder, to pitch more.

Weekly hours began to climb.

Where once I only worked from 9 to 5 five days a week, I began to start work at 8am and then 7am. Soon I was in front of my computer at 5:30am. Then, I started squeezing in hours on the weekend to accommodate this new approach to professional success.

As my kids grew up, I began to disappear from our lives, a situation not helped by the death of my father, an international move I didn’t want at the time, and then, more recently, another move here in Australia that was forced on my family.

Don’t worry about our housing situation. We just bought, so we’re finally stable after years of nomadic living.

But my point is, I increasingly had no time for my family or to contend with things like trauma. I’m not even going to get into the existential crisis that comes with middle age either, except to say it threw me for a violent loop.

A few years ago, I began to experiment with publishing platforms, too. You might be reading me now on Substack, where I publish a newsletter alongside a podcast.

In a lot of ways, Substack was a transformative move for me. It liberated me to write personal essays and talk about art, to advocate for art and artists, on my own terms.

No gatekeepers.

Except with success there, I realized there might be a route to a sort of baseline security for my family.

If I could make X dollars from it, I could free up more time to spend…you know…living.

Except my father came back to haunt me.

Because he also taught me, if you’re going to do something, do it right.

He learned this from his own father – a simple carpenter who took exquisite pride in his work.

Consequently, Substack and, later, this podcast became all-consuming projects.

Fifty-hour work weeks became 60…then 70…then, more recently, 80.

I told myself I could endure it because the prize was security and the freedom to get back to pursuing more personal projects than I currently had time for.

Basically, in trying to make things easier for my family and make time for my own projects, what I was most passionate about, I actually lost all the time I needed to do exactly that.

So, what am I getting at here?

What’s the point of this sad, sad ramble?

Well, I had a reckoning with myself a couple of weeks ago.

I think I’ve had a few breakdowns in my life, where reality just brought me to my knees. That certainly happened more than once during the making of “Dracula”. This was one of those because I found myself thinking and despairing in unfamiliar ways.

I’d lost hope.

I started to spiral.

And as I did, I realized how wrong I was when I told my father his greatest gift to me was his work ethic.

It was actually a curse.

My father died relatively miserable. He’d died with few of his dreams achieved. His wife had left him. All but one of his four kids had moved out of state. His life was in no way one I’d ever want…and yet I could feel myself on that course, working myself into an early grave.

It was time for something to change.

By the way, I hope nothing I’m saying here is familiar to you. But if it is, I also hope something I say here helps you in any small way. Maybe I’ll just turn into a great cautionary tale for you about how not to find yourself in my boat.

God, it feels like so much of my life is a cautionary tale for others.

Anyway - so, what has to change in said fucked-up life?

For starters, the 5AM StoryTalk Podcast. I’d envisioned it as a place to interview a near non-stop line-up of fascinating guests. It’s still going to be that, but I can’t spend the 24 to 30 hours it takes to produce each of these episodes each and every week. I’m talking hard numbers here, start to finish.

Interviews, the precision I put into editing, the assets that accompany each.

Bear in mind, I’ve also been recording two of these RealTalk episodes every month.

All this with zero help. I had to teach myself how to do all of it. It was an insane thing to do to myself at the pace I committed to.

Going forward, I’m reorganizing the podcast around a structure more suited to my mental health and, as important, my enjoyment of it. I don’t want these episodes to be painful chores.

Art isn’t about the end result, it’s about the process for me – just like life.

That means, I’m going publish interviews every other week or so. In between, I’m going to publish these RealTalk episodes and other audio essays about screenwriting, storytelling in general, and the roles of arts in my life and our culture.

I’m also going to abandon any notion of seasons, just publishing weekly without a gun to my head.

That means the experience for you, my listeners, is going to be a bit more varied – but I hope you’ll be okay with that.

I know I need to be if I want to get back to writing –which is the other goal here and why I’m also reevaluating how I publish anything on Substack.

I’m a screenwriter, a novelist, a comic book writer, and an aspiring playwright.

My time working in these creative spaces cannot only be limited to the commissions I receive that are, increasingly at least in film/TV, to bring other people’s ideas or IP to life.

I need to get back to writing for myself, writing projects I don’t try to fit in in between the quintillion other real or self-imposed deadlines I create for myself every week cobbling together a life in the arts from so many different creative outlets and opportunities.

Frankly, I think this is going to help the experience of my readers and listeners at Substack and podcast platforms, too.

I want to focus more on pieces I’m inspired to write – and inspiration requires the mental space necessary to experience it.

For too long, I’ve been like a computer, jammed up with too many programs running at once, until everything starts to slow down and, ultimately, crash.

I want to be inspired.

If I’m lucky, maybe I’ll even help you find some of your own. It’s one of the great joys of the art life, I think.

I also just want to be happy, and I don’t think I’ve been for some time now, if I’m honest.

Maybe that’s why Marty Supreme shook me so much.

In the last ep of 5AM RealTalk, I mentioned how I hadn’t had time to check out any awards screeners. Well, the real reason was everything I just discussed, I think.

So, after my recent breakdown, I drove to Ballarat – that’s a small, but badass city near where I live in Victoria, Australia – and I bought a ticket to see Marty Supreme and hoped and prayed to the cinema gods it would lift me out of where I’d found myself.

Well, it did. But also, not exactly.

Marty, played by Timothy Chalomet, is an American Ping-Pong player who aspires to be the greatest in the world. It’s his mission in life. He’ll stop at nothing, no matter what he must do to himself or those who care about him. No matter how low he must bring himself to reach those heights.

But what the film is really about is the fact that this mission – this religious quest for success – will never bring him happiness.

There’s a lot going on in this film, which I recommend you check out – in part because every performance in it is perfect – but my personal takeaway, what I needed from it, was the reminder that art isn’t the point.

Art is an expression of life.

It brings me joy.

It provides me – you – a route to creative expression, to explore the biggest questions in our lives and the world, to help commune with existence in a manner, but it will not be the primary way I measure my life when I die – which will hopefully not be any time soon, but who knows?

Fascism, AI, climate change – kind of feels like we’re fucked – so why spend every minute I have in the meantime focused on success at all costs?

I’m going to wrap up now with a quote from an artist, as I like to do. This one will probably make sense given what I’ve discussed today.

The quote is from author Henry Miller, who wrote Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn – you get it, brilliant novelist.

He said: “Art is only the means to life, to the life more abundant. It is not in itself the life more abundant. It merely points the way, something which is overlooked not only by the public, but very often by the artist himself. In becoming an end, it defeats itself.”

Sit with that.

Ask yourself if how you’re pursuing your work – whatever that work – is the pursuit destroying your life? If it is, ask yourself how you’re contributing to your physical and emotional decline.

You might not be able to change it, I get it. I’ve had enough success in my life that I can reflect on what I’ve done to myself and have some flexibility to make adjustments to my lifestyle. Many of you can’t.

But maybe, just maybe, there’s some wiggle room.

Because your job – your art – is not the life more abundant.

It’s merely a route to it.

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If 5AM StoryTalk adds anything to your life but you’re not up for a paid subscription, you can still support my work here by “buying me a coffee”. It’s hugely appreciated!