For much of the past two decades, Silicon Valley has done more than produce successful companies. It has shaped the global imagination of what entrepreneurship is supposed to look like.
Success, according to this narrative, is measured in dizzying speed. Founders are expected to scale relentlessly, ‘embrace’ uncertainty, pursue venture capital and treat growth as the ultimate objective. Somewhere along the way, the modern entrepreneur also acquired an oddly specific lifestyle: waking at the crack of dawn, surviving on four hours of sleep, chugging protein shakes between investor calls, tracking every biometric imaginable, extolling the virtues of breathwork, cold plunges and the latest ayahuasca retreat, all while somehow remaining impeccably fit and endlessly productive. The entrepreneur who sacrifices almost everything else is not regarded as someone struggling to keep pace, but as someone sufficiently committed to their vision. Hence, exhaustion has become evidence of ambition.
The influence of that philosophy extends far beyond California. Through books, podcasts, accelerator programmes and social media, it has become the dominant language of entrepreneurship and of a successful life almost everywhere. We have adopted its vocabulary so completely that we rarely pause to ask whether the assumptions beneath it hold true.
This is not an argument against Silicon Valley…far from it. It has transformed industries, accelerated technological progress and produced companies that have fundamentally changed how we live and work. Nor is it an argument against ambition. Ambition has always been one of the most powerful drivers of innovation. It is, however, an argument for recognising that we have built and even romanticised a way of life the human body was never designed to sustain, and that the achievements we celebrate are being won at the cost of what constitutes a meaningful life.
We are working with a body that took several million years to arrive at its current specification, and we have spent perhaps 40 years assuming we can ‘hack’ what it needs in order to serve our ambitions. We cannot. Sleep is not a preference or a weakness of character; it is the process through which the brain consolidates memory, clears metabolic waste and restores the capacity for judgement. Chronic sleep deprivation degrades attention, working memory, emotional regulation and risk assessment, all of which are what good decisions are made of, and decision-making is a large part of a founder’s job.
Sustained stress narrows cognitive flexibility and reduces creativity. Social connection is not the reward to be won at the end of a hard day, it is one of the strongest predictors of how long a person lives and how well. None of this is new information, but it is being brought to light more often now because of the problems our hustle culture has exposed. We have simply outrun the environment we were built for, both figuratively and literally, and then decided that speed was a virtue.
Almost everything we know about hustle culture was written by the people it did not break. The founders who abandoned the game at 34, whose health failed, whose marriages did not hold, whose companies folded quietly, are not the ones writing the books or hosting the podcasts. When a hundred people take the same wager and one wins, we do not usually call the wager wisdom. Whatever the achievement is, it is bought at the expense of sleep, of health, of the people left waiting for you, of the friendships that quietly lapse because you have nothing left to bring to them, and most of all of the curiosity with which you once approached life, before every moment was planned and spoken for. Those are not the costs of a life well lived. They are very close to a definition of one.
And a good deal of the price is not paid by the person who agreed to it. It is paid by children who learned that presence is the first thing sacrificed, by partners who absorbed everything that was set down, by parents who were visited less. They did not take the wager. They are simply carrying part of it.
This is the inversion at the centre of the whole arrangement. People start businesses to solve a problem, to earn a living, to build something of their own, to find meaning and autonomy and the ability to be useful and present. When the business consumes the life instead, the machine has started running in the wrong direction, and no amount of growth corrects for that.
Why did you start doing what you are doing? And are you moving towards that reason or away from it?
The archetype has one more problem, and it is a modelling error rather than a moral one.
Much of the global conversation about entrepreneurship still assumes a founder whose time belongs entirely to the business. That person is only possible if somebody else is absorbing the care of children, the care of elders, the running of a household, the thousand forms of invisible labour that never appear in discussions of innovation. He was not a universal human being. He was a specific arrangement, and the arrangement required someone else. A great deal of that invisible labour falls to women, not only in Pakistan but everywhere.
For most women, time has always been negotiated rather than owned, which is usually diagnosed as a disadvantage. The conclusion drawn is that women need to become more like the archetype. That is not possible, in our society or in any other. A mother will always be a mother, and no relationship is truly replaceable, but the work of keeping relationships alive has historically fallen more to women than to men.
I have come to believe we should be learning from women instead, from how they run businesses alongside everything else they carry and show up for. A person who has always had to build inside real constraints, with finite hours and other people to answer to, has been practicing something the archetype never had to learn. Building a business that coexists with the rest of life is not a compromise. It may be the more sophisticated design. The part that troubles me most is not what this does to the people currently living it. It is what we are transmitting to the young people around us.
A generation is growing up watching adults treat depletion as achievement, watching the four-hour night reported as a triumph, learning by direct observation that a life is something you spend rather than something you cherish and build. We are not merely enduring this culture. We are handing it on, with approval attached, to people who will inherit the same unrevised biology and a still more demanding set of expectations. I see the result in the hiring room. Having interviewed young candidates every year for some time now, I have watched the middle disappear. One kind arrives having swallowed the myth whole, already fluent in optimisation and already without much of a life outside the work.
The other has recoiled from it so completely that turning up on time reads as a concession to a system they have decided is not worth the effort. It is tempting to call the second group undisciplined. I think they are the same casualty. Both have been shown a single model of working life, one that asks for everything and calls the asking opportunity, and they have taken the only two positions it leaves open: comply, or withdraw. Neither is a good way to build a career or a life.
I understand how we arrived here. Founders care deeply about what they are building. There are seasons when the hours are long, the decisions difficult and the uncertainty relentless. Entrepreneurship has never been easy, and no one should pretend otherwise. But difficulty and self-destruction are not the same thing, and somewhere along the way we confused depletion with dedication.
Pakistan does not need less entrepreneurship. If anything, it needs a great deal more of it. We need founders who solve meaningful problems, create employment, strengthen local industries and build globally competitive companies. What we do not need is a definition of success that treats the founder as a consumable input.
Perhaps the people who shape the next chapter will not be those who scale the quickest or speak the loudest in the boardroom. They may be the ones who understood that a human being is not a resource to be depleted in service of a valuation, and that a business capable of sustaining both its founder and its future was the more ambitious goal all along.
The article does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Business Recorder or its owners.