996: The Myth of Choice

A Few Thoughts on Hustle Culture From Someone Who also Works too Much

A pair of screens as a pair of glasses — source: morningbrew.com

I read an article about 996 this morning. You know the drill: 9am to 9pm, six days a week, 72 hours of work per week (Nice!). A schedule that was born in China’s tech boom, declared illegal there in 2021, and is now making a comeback in Silicon Valley, and apparently, in French startups too.

My first reaction was visceral. Something between anger and judgment. And honestly, that reaction came fast. Too fast, maybe.

Because here’s the thing I’ve learned about strong emotional reactions to articles like this one: they’re rarely just yours. Media outlets, consciously or not, are pretty good at writing headlines and framing stories in a way that triggers exactly that kind of response. Outrage drives clicks. I’m not saying the topic isn’t worth being angry about. I’m saying I’ve learned to pause when I feel that spike, and ask myself: what am I actually reacting to here?

So I sat with it for a bit. And what came out was more nuanced than pure outrage and more interesting, I think.

the official image from 996.ICU — source: github.com

So, what exactly is 996?

The name is pretty self-explanatory once you know the code: 9am to 9pm, six days a week. That’s 72 hours of work per week, for those keeping score at home (I know you do!).

The practice originated in China’s tech industry during the 2010s. Companies like Alibaba, ByteDance, and Huawei were growing at a pace the world had rarely seen and long hours became both a tool and a symbol of that ambition. Founders romanticized it. Employees went along with it, hoping for promotions, stock options, and a seat at the table of something big.

It didn’t end well. Widespread burnout, sleep deprivation, mental health crises, and in some cases, death. In 2021, things came to a head: a viral protest appeared on GitHub under the name *996.ICU. *It’s somekind of a dark play on words, because ICU standing for Intensive Care Unit. (Small digression: I was already in the tech industry and I didn’t know about that before writing this post). Shortly after, China’s Supreme Court officially declared the 996 model illegal.

And yet, here we are in 2026 and the conversation is back. Silicon Valley startups, particularly in the AI space, are openly embracing extreme work schedules again. Some companies are posting 70+ hour workweeks directly in job descriptions. Others are sending internal memos telling employees that 80-hour weeks are now the baseline. One CEO put it bluntly: “We don’t believe in work-life balance.”

Meanwhile, the trend is starting to surface in French startups too. Which is, I think, what made me reach for my coffee a little harder than usual this morning.

a nice background image for desktop (Work Harder) — source: wallpapercave.com

The official story: “We choose to work this way”

If you listen to the people promoting 996, it sounds almost noble.

The argument goes something like this: we’re in the middle of the most significant technological race in history (which is true). AI is reshaping entire industries at a speed no one fully anticipated (which is also true). In that context, working hard isn’t just a choice, it’s a responsibility. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt said it openly: we’re competing against China, and China works 996. Sergey Brin, who is leading Google’s AI efforts, reportedly sent a memo suggesting 60-hour weeks were the “sweet spot of productivity.” Some startup founders go further, framing extreme hours as a filtering mechanism. In other words, it’s a way to find the people who are truly committed (which is also also true).

There’s also a more seductive version of this narrative, aimed at younger employees. The idea that you’re not just working a job, you’re building something that matters (lol). That the long hours are an investment in yourself, in your career, in a future where you’ll look back and be glad you went all in. Tech legends worked like this. Why wouldn’t you?

It’s a compelling story. I’ll give it that.

But notice what it does: it reframes constraint as identity. It takes something that is, in many cases, demanded of people, and turns it into a badge of honor. It makes saying no feel like a lack of ambition rather than a reasonable human boundary.

And that’s exactly where I start to get skeptical.

Thank you for your advice, Stephen Curry — source: quotefancy.com

The employees: when “yes” isn’t really a choice

Let’s start with the people at the bottom of this equation. The ones who aren’t founding companies, who aren’t being interviewed by Forbes, and whose names don’t appear in any press release. It could be me 😅.

The tech job market has contracted sharply over the past few years. Since 2022, close to 400,000 tech jobs have been cut. Intel, Microsoft, Meta have all slashed headcount. For every open position in tech right now, there are more candidates than the market can absorb. That’s not a feeling. That’s just arithmetic.

So when a job description mentions “70+ hours a week” or a recruiter asks whether you’re open to a 72-hour workweek during an interview, what exactly is the realistic answer for someone who needs that job? In a country (the US) with no meaningful unemployment safety net, where you can be let go with almost no notice, and where a significant portion of the workforce is carrying five or six figures in student debt, the “choice” to say yes looks a lot less like ambition and a lot more like survival.

While writing this post, I came across a Forbes piece that dedicates an entire section to the idea of “996 by choice, not pressure” , interviewing founders in their twenties who sleep on mattresses on the floor and screen candidates on their willingness to do the same. And the people who line up for those jobs? The article presents them as equally passionate and equally driven. Maybe some of them are. But I’d gently suggest that the line between passion and desperation is a lot blurrier when rent is due and your loan repayment isn’t paused.

This isn’t a cynical reading. I just think this system has created the conditions in which saying no is genuinely costly, and then it reframes the people who say yes as exceptionally motivated. That’s a convenient story for employers, but it’s definitely a much harder one to live.

…and also because you don’t have other option, Tony — source — quotefancy.com

The founders: when “passion” is just another word for “no other option”

Now let’s talk about the founders themselves. Because I think there’s something we’re missing when we take their discourse at face value.

Yes, some of them genuinely love what they do. I don’t doubt that. But when a 24-year-old CEO tells you that working 996 is “chasing escape velocity” and not “chasing burnout”, I think what I actually hear is someone who is terrified of failing in one of the most competitive and unforgiving environments that exists right now.

Think about the context. We’re in the middle of an AI race where models leapfrog each other every few weeks. Entire product roadmaps become obsolete overnight. Investors are more selective than they were three or four years ago. Capital is harder to get, and when you do get it, the pressure to show results is immense (or at least, bigger that what it used to be). On top of that, the geopolitical context, wars, economic uncertainty, trade tensions, doesn’t exactly create a relaxed atmosphere for building a company.

So when a founder says they choose to work like this, what I read between the lines is: the market doesn’t really leave them much of a choice either. It’s not passion driving the 80-hour weeks. It’s fear. Fear of being too slow, fear of running out of runway, fear of watching a competitor ship what you were building.

And that’s a very different story from the one being sold.

Small hint: this is not me — source: vecteezy.com

I work evenings and weekends too.

I want to be honest here, because I think it matters for what I’m arguing.

I work outside of office hours. Regularly. Right now, I’m writing this post on a Monday night. I have two side projects I work on in the evenings. I read, I experiment, I code. And I genuinely enjoy it. My brain likes being busy and I’ve learned to listen to it.

So I’m not someone who thinks that working hard is bad, or that ambition is suspicious, or that you should switch off at 5pm on the dot and never think about work again. That would be a bit hypocritical coming from me.

But here’s the thing, nobody is asking me to do it.I think this is the crucial distinction,

I work on my side projects because I want to, not because my landlord or my student loan or my visa status depends on it. I can stop when I’m tired. I can take a whole weekend off without consequence. And crucially, I know that the moments where I’m not working are not wasted time. Meditating, reading something completely unrelated, watching a stupid show on Netflix, seeing friends, and drinking beers: those things are not the opposite of productivity. For me, they are part of it. That’s where the brain recovers enough to do something useful the next day.

996 doesn’t leave room for any of that. And a brain that never rests doesn’t produce better work. It just produces more of it, for a while, until it doesn’t anymore.

If you feel any of this, please call of your doctor — source: bradsugars.com

996 is not a culture. It’s a symptom.

I want to come back to where I started. Do you remember that spike of anger I felt reading the news this morning? I think I am starting to understand it better now.

It’s not just about the hours. It’s about the story being told around them. The idea that working yourself into the ground is a sign of ambition, vision, and/or exceptional character. That the people who push back are somehow less committed, less serious, less deserving of a seat at the table.

That story is doing a lot of work. And most of it is work that benefits the people at the top of the equation, not the ones sleeping on mattresses on office floors.

Because here’s what I actually believe, having thought about this for a while now: nobody, no matter how passionate, no matter how driven, genuinely wants to spend 72 hours a week at work. For sure, you can do that sometimes and not all of the time, it simply doesn’t work that way.

What people want is to build something meaningful, to feel useful, to progress, and to be recognized: it’s the Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Those are deeply human needs. 996 hijacks those needs and uses them to extract something that the market, the economy, and the power dynamics of the moment have made very difficult to refuse.

It’s not a culture of passion. It’s a culture of pressure wearing the costume of passion.

And the antidote, I think, isn’t working less for the sake of it. It’s being honest about what’s actually driving the choices we make and building the kind of conditions, individually and/or collectively, where saying no doesn’t cost you everything.

I wrote in 2023 that it was urgent to slow down, not out of resignation, but by choice. I still believe that. The word “choice” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. The whole question is whether we actually have one.

There’s a bigger story behind all of this and I don’t think we can ignore it.

996 doesn’t thrive everywhere equally. It thrives in places where workers have no floor to fall back on, where losing your job means losing everything, where healthcare is tied to employment, where student debt makes risk-taking a luxury. It is, in many ways, a uniquely American phenomenon. And the fact that it’s starting to bleed into other contexts, including France, says something worth paying attention to.

I’ve written before about the economic pressures building up around us. I think 996 is one of the symptoms of that same fragility, a world where more and more people are one bad month away from a very difficult situation, and where that vulnerability gets dressed up as drive.

That probably deserves its own article. But for now, I’ll leave it here.