Hustle Culture Glorification Contradicts Cyberloafing Behavior Among Gen Z on Social Media
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17977/um087v3i22026p119-131Keywords:
Digital disengagement, performative labor, platform economy, online identity, youth work ethicsAbstract
Indonesia's Generation Z, the largest cohort in the country's demographic bonus, navigates digital spaces shaped by both hustle culture and cyberloafing. Existing scholarship treats the two as separate or opposing constructs. This study examines how Gen Z constructs and performs success under hustle culture, the forms and motives of cyberloafing, and how the two shape each other. Using a netnographic design, we analyzed 98 posts and 18 comments from 40 accounts on Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter/X, published in 2023–2025 and collected between February and May 2025 through hashtag searches. Content was included if publicly accessible, Indonesian-language, and explicitly about work or study productivity or disengagement. Data were coded in two cycles using summative content analysis and interpreted through performative labor theory, digital capitalism, and symbolic interactionism. Hustle culture appeared as romanticized overwork, aestheticized productivity, and community validation; cyberloafing appeared as stress relief, micro-resistance, and identity negotiation. The study's contribution is to show that the two form a continuum rather than opposites: the visibility pressures of hustle culture generate the need for disengagement, which is then reintegrated into the attention economy. By recasting cyberloafing as a performative practice rather than workplace deviance, it extends digital labor scholarship with Indonesian platform evidence.
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