Identity theft isn’t a joke
For a couple of months past year, my life felt like an episode of YOU on netflix — constant suffocation, felt my actions constantly observed, conversations overheard, my normality hindered and a lingering presence of a nemesis.
Hustle culture has romanticised competition aggressively but for the entirety of my college life — I choose to stay away from it, make progress at my own pace and achieve amicable relations.
While I nurtured a healthy competitive spirit, the worst of competition came back to me in the most crude way ever.
I’ve been told my personality is captivating enough to influence but little did I know my entire identity would be plagiarised by someone I knew closely.
I can only describe half the shock and first-hand embarrasment that rushed through me when a friend shared another screenshot:
It was like someone put my identity under a different name.
Not just that, my headline was copied word to word.
So it turns out that the h in hustle culture does not stand for humility, humanity and honourability but rather for hostility, hate, and hazardous.
It gets disheartening to see that something you’ve built with extensive caution gets replicated in the most unimaginable way possible. It’s even more disheartening to see that an AI plagiarism detecter would label this over 60% of plagiarism. To have someone do that to you is awful…to have someone you knew do that to you is awful beyond description.
While this post may seem like a call out — it’s a self reflection that I refuse to be a product of hustle culture and I refuse to be affected by it. I refuse to entertain people in my life who have intents of being products of hustle culture.
For what it’s worth, it’s farewell to unintended competition and comparison or further trysts with hustle.
