There was a time when having a side hustle meant making a little extra money over the weekend. Maybe you baked cakes for birthdays, tutored a few students or sold clothes online. It was something you did on the side to save towards a holiday, pay off some debt or simply have a bit more spending money.
These days, it feels like everyone has something going on outside their nine-to-five. Your colleague in finance is also a photographer. Your friend in marketing runs a clothing brand. Someone else is selling products online, managing social media accounts or freelancing after hours. In South Africa, you’re almost more surprised when someone tells you they don’t have a side hustle.
There’s a lot to admire about this. South Africans have always been good at making a plan, and there’s something exciting about seeing people turn their skills and interests into businesses. The problem is that it’s becoming harder to tell whether people are doing it because they want to or because they have to.
For many young professionals, earning a decent salary doesn’t necessarily mean living comfortably. By the time rent, groceries, petrol, medical aid, insurance and the rest of the month’s expenses have been accounted for, there often isn’t much left. That’s before you’ve even thought about saving for a house, going on holiday or putting money away for a rainy day.
An extra R3,000 or R5,000 a month can make a significant difference. Suddenly, what started as a hobby becomes something you depend on to cover your expenses. You might still call it a side hustle, but when that income becomes part of your monthly budget, it starts to feel a lot more like a second job.
There’s also something to be said for the security that comes with having more than one source of income. We’ve grown up watching businesses restructure, people lose their jobs and entire industries change almost overnight. Relying on one employer to provide financial stability for the next 30 years doesn’t necessarily feel like the safest option anymore.
Having something of your own gives you a degree of control. If you don’t get the salary increase you were hoping for, perhaps you can grow your business. If things go wrong at work, at least you have another income stream to fall back on. It’s not difficult to understand why that appeals to people.
Of course, anyone who has actually run a side hustle will tell you that it’s rarely as glamorous as it looks on Instagram.
Behind the nice branding and exciting announcements are late nights, difficult customers, unpaid invoices, stock issues and weekends spent catching up on admin. Your workday doesn’t necessarily end when you close your laptop at five. Sometimes that’s just when you open a different one.
What starts as a few orders from friends can quickly become a business that needs constant attention. Before you know it, you’re answering WhatsApps during lunch, arranging deliveries between meetings and spending your Sunday evening sorting out invoices instead of relaxing.
You start a business because you want more freedom, only to realise you’ve somehow managed to give yourself another boss. Except this time, the boss is you, and you’re probably a lot less understanding about taking time off.
Social media doesn’t exactly help either. We’re constantly seeing people launch businesses, turn hobbies into income streams and share stories about how they built something successful while working full-time. It’s inspiring, but it can also make you feel as though you’re falling behind if you’re not doing the same.
Somewhere along the way, being busy became something to be proud of. Having a full-time job, running a business, going to gym, maintaining a social life and somehow finding time to sleep is presented as the ultimate example of ambition.
The reality is that there are only so many hours in a day, and something usually has to give.
There’s also nothing wrong with simply wanting to do your job well, earn a salary and enjoy your weekends. Not everyone dreams of being an entrepreneur, and not every hobby needs to become a business. Sometimes it’s perfectly fine to do something because you enjoy it, without figuring out how to make money from it.
That said, it’s important to recognise that not everyone’s side hustle comes from the same place. Some people genuinely love building businesses and see their additional income as a stepping stone towards becoming self-employed. Others would happily give up their weekend work if their salary covered everything they needed.
Those are two very different situations, even if we tend to put them under the same entrepreneurial label.
It also makes you wonder what we’re really celebrating when we talk about South Africa’s hustle culture. Are we seeing a generation of ambitious young entrepreneurs taking control of their futures, or are we seeing people working longer hours because the cost of living has made it increasingly difficult to get ahead on one income?
The answer is probably a bit of both.
South Africa absolutely needs entrepreneurs. Small businesses create jobs, bring new ideas into the market and give people opportunities that might not otherwise exist. There’s no reason we shouldn’t encourage people to build something of their own, particularly when they have the skills and drive to make it work.
At the same time, we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that running a business alongside a full-time job takes a lot out of a person. The extra income might be worth it, but so are your evenings, weekends and the ability to switch off without feeling guilty about not being productive.
Perhaps the bigger question isn’t whether South Africans should have side hustles. It’s whether we’ve reached a point where having one is becoming less of an entrepreneurial choice and more of a financial expectation.
After all, there’s a difference between wanting to work two jobs and feeling like you can’t afford not to.
So, are South Africans becoming more entrepreneurial, or are we just getting better at making ends meet?