The Dark Side Of Hustle Culture And What To Do Instead

By Emeka Chiaghanam

The Cold War wasn’t just a standoff.  There wasn’t anything cool about it, rather was a psychological warzone. And no, not just for the guys in power suits with nuclear codes. We’re talking about identity national, personal, even cultural. You think Americans ate hamburgers and loved blue jeans just because? Or that Soviets worshipped work ethic and vodka for the vibes?

If you think they were coincidences, they weren’t. These were crafted. It were sheer designed. As in: “You’re evil, so I must be good. You love conformity? Then I’m gonna marry individualism and have 2.5 freedom-loving kids.” Welcome to the Cold War; the ultimate identity crisis. Two world powers, shaping not just what they were, but what they weren’t.

The plot looked interesting and confusing. The Americans needed the Soviets. The Soviets needed the Americans. Not for trade deals or nuclear treaties, but for something far more primal: identity. Without each other to point at and say "that's not us," both empires would've faced an existential crisis that no army could solve.

As a young boy in the early 1980s, I grew up watching the Cold War's final act, President Ronald Reagan calling the Soviet Union an "evil empire" on our wood-paneled TV while my dad nodded along. What nobody told me then was how desperately both sides craved this rivalry. The Cold War wasn't just some historical accident, it was psychological oxygen for two systems that defined themselves by what they weren't.

Let's cut the crap about ideology for a minute. This wasn't just capitalism versus communism as many thought. This was a decades-long exercise in national therapy, where two global powers worked out their insecurities by creating a perfect enemy in their own image. And guess what? The world is still living with the psychological hangover.

The Perfect Enemy: Made to Order

The beauty of having an ideological enemy is you get to be everything they're not. Americans weren't just pro-capitalism; they were anti-communist. The distinction matters. One is an affirmation; the other is an identity built on rejection.

After World War II, America was having a bit of an identity crisis. They'd just helped save the world from fascism (alongside the Soviets, awkwardly enough), and suddenly found ourselves a global superpower without a clear purpose. True indeed. What's a military-industrial complex supposed to do with all those factories? Make toasters?

The Soviets, meanwhile, had lost 27 million people defeating the Nazis. Twenty-seven million. Let that sink in. Their country was in ruins, but they had this shiny new ideology they were dead set on proving could work. Both sides needed something to organize around, and hell, they found it in each other.

"Without the Soviet Union, we'd have been forced to invent them," a former State Department official once told a colleague at a conference, after too many drinks. "And frankly, we couldn't have invented a better foil if we tried."

He wasn't wrong. The USSR was perfect, geographically massive, ideologically opposite, militarily formidable, yet economically vulnerable. Perfect! Just right. And America served exactly the same purpose for Soviet leaders. Every time some poor peasant in Moscow had to wait in line for toilet paper, Party officials could point to the "imperialist aggressors" as the reason why.

America: Freedom™ (Terms and Conditions Apply)

Ask any American who grew up during the Cold War what made America special, and you'll likely hear about "freedom." Freedom this, liberty that and it goes forth on and on. They weren't just selling a political system; they were selling salvation. America wasn't just a country, it was the antidote to totalitarianism.

Never mind that they were doing some pretty un-free stuff ourselves. COINTELPRO, anyone? The FBI spying on civil rights leaders? Japanese internment camps still fresh in the rearview mirror? Inconvenient details.

The Soviet threat allowed Americans to paper over their own contradictions. Why worry about segregation in the South when there are missiles in Cuba? Internal criticism became unpatriotic when there was a Communist boogeyman to fight. McCarthyism didn't come out of nowhere, it grew from fertile soil where questioning American exceptionalism felt like treason.

"We will bury you!" Khrushchev supposedly threatened (though the translation was more like "we will outlast you"). Either way, it was the best thing that could've happened to American identity. Nothing brings people together like the threat of burial.

What did it result? Being American became synonymous with being anti-communist. The United State built interstate highways not just for vacation road trips but because they doubled as military transport routes. They added "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954 to distinguish their righteous capitalism from godless communism. They even sent jazz musicians abroad as cultural ambassadors while many of those same Black artists couldn't enter through the front door of venues back home.

America built its post-war image on being the opposite of the Soviets. They were decentralized because they were centralized. They were religious because they were atheist. They had consumer choice because they had bread lines. And we had "freedom" because they had gulags. Their national narrative required their existence.

Soviet Union: Workers' Paradise (Actual Workers' Experience May Vary)

In the intervening time, in Moscow, Soviet leaders were playing the same game in reverse. Every social problem could be blamed on Western interference or capitalist sabotage. Economic underperformance? CIA plots. Consumer goods shortages? Capitalist encirclement forcing military prioritization.

A foreign threat gives leaders an excuse to tighten their grip inside the country. Soviet citizens were told that extraordinary times required extraordinary measures, like one-party rule, limited speech, and restricted travel. And they believed. After all, America had spies everywhere! Those blue jeans and rock records weren't just fashion, they were imperialist propaganda tools designed to corrupt Soviet youth.

The Soviets had always believed they were leading humanity forward, creating the first truly fair society - one that fixed capitalism's flaws. But this historical mission gained urgency and meaning primarily in opposition to America's global influence. Soviet patriotism was built on resisting Western cultural imperialism and standing firm against North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) encirclement. The resistance stands in today’s Russian. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 was largely due to that resistance; Ukraine toying with idea of joining NATO.

"Strange as it may look, Americans call us backward," a Russian friend's grandmother once told me, "but we sent the first man to space while they were still keeping Black people as second-class citizens." For her generation, Soviet achievements were sweetened by how they challenged Western narratives about communist inefficiency.

Hold on - do you see what's going on here? Both sides defined progress in terms the other side would recognize. Soviets bragging about space travel while Americans boasted about shopping malls. They were competing within frameworks that acknowledged the other's metrics, even while claiming to reject them.

The Pop Culture Propaganda Wars

It’s really fascinating that the Cold War involved much more than speeches and missiles. It shaped everyday life too. It was playing out in living rooms and movie theaters.

Hollywood always showed Soviets two ways: either as cold robots or cruel villains with funny accents. Rocky IV is the 'Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2' of Cold War propaganda, slick, entertaining, and absolutely ridiculous. Ivan Drago wasn't just a boxer; he was the embodiment of soulless Soviet efficiency, contrasted with Rocky's scrappy American individualism. "I must break you" versus "Yo, Adrian!" The symbolism isn't exactly subtle.

The Soviets made just as many cartoon versions of Americans - they were either evil businessmen or wild gangsters with no rules. Both sides reduced the other to caricatures that reinforced their own superiority.

In the meantime, both governments were obsessively monitoring their citizens' ideological purity. The House Un-American Activities Committee and the KGB were different instruments playing the same paranoid tune. The enemy within was nearly as threatening as the enemy abroad.

Isn't it strange? The harder they worked to stand apart, the more similar they grew. This sounds strange. Both developed massive military-industrial complexes, engaged in global proxy wars. Both countries surveilled their citizens. Both used propaganda to maintain support. They were like two sides of the same superpower coin, defining themselves against each other while adopting oddly mirror-like behaviors.

The Identity Hangover

Then the Berlin Wall fell, and everything went sideways.

Russia had an absolute identity meltdown in the 1990s. Without the American enemy and communist ideology, what exactly was Russia supposed to be? The economic "shock therapy" that followed, where capitalism was introduced overnight with disastrous results, compounded the crisis. Russia's GDP collapsed by 40%. Life expectancy plummeted. The national trauma was severe and lasting.

And America? They celebrated for about five minutes before realizing they had the same problem. What does it mean to be "leader of the free world" when the unfree world just joined the club? They'd spent decades building national identity around containing communism. Without that mission, they were a bit like a dog that finally caught the car it was chasing.

"We were unprepared for victory," former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice once said. No kidding. Political scientist Francis Fukuyama famously declared it "the end of history," which in retrospect reads like the most premature victory lap ever taken.

The 1990s saw America searching for a new organizing principle. They tried "humanitarian interventions" in Somalia and Bosnia. They even dabbled in globalization boosterism. But nothing quite filled the void left by the Soviet threat. When 9/11 happened, there was an almost palpable sense of relief in Washington, here, finally, was a new enemy to organize against. The War on Terror became the new Cold War, another struggle between civilization and barbarism, good and evil.

Russia, meanwhile, eventually found a new identity under Putin, one deliberately constructed in opposition to American "hegemony" and Western liberalism. The old Soviet playbook got dusted off, just with Orthodox Christianity replacing communism as the spiritual glue.

The Ghosts That Haunt Us

Here's the kicker, these Cold War identities never really died. They just went underground, like psychological sleeper agents waiting to be activated.

When Americans debate healthcare, they still frame universal coverage as potentially "socialist", a boogeyman term that makes zero sense without Cold War context. Their political discourse remains haunted by Soviet ghosts. The entire American right-wing mediasphere still operates on the assumption that leftist ideas are existentially threatening rather than just policy alternatives.

In Russia, the state media still portrays the West as decadent, morally corrupt, and bent on Russia's destruction. Putin's popularity spiked after annexing Crimea in 2014  and now, invasion and war in Ukraine, precisely because it fit the narrative of Russia standing up to Western encroachment, a narrative with deep Cold War roots.

Both countries still have militaries structured largely for a conflict neither openly expects. Both still maintain nuclear arsenals that could end civilization. Both still engage in espionage and counter-espionage against each other. The infrastructure of enmity remains, even as the ideological battle has morphed.

What’s surprising is that people in both countries are getting nostalgic for the Cold War. Americans reminisce about when national purpose was clear and patriotism straightforward. Russians look back at superpower status with pride. Both conveniently filter out the terror of nuclear annihilation and the moral compromises made.

 Have you ever wondered why they can't seem to escape Cold War thinking? Because they built their modern national identities in that crucible. To truly move beyond it would require reimagining who they are without reference to the other, something neither side has fully managed.

The great irony is that after all that ideological conflict, both Russia and America have converged on a kind of authoritarian capitalism just with different flavours and degrees. America's vast wealth inequality and Russia's oligarchy look more like cousins than opposites.

So Where Do We Go From Here?

After spending decades defining themselves against each other, is it even possible to develop identities that stand on their own? Can America define itself by what it actually is, rather than what it's against? Can Russia?

I'm not holding my breath. National identity isn't rational; it's emotional and narrative-driven. The Cold War provided the perfect story structure, heroes, villains, existential stakes, moral clarity. Reality is messier.

Maybe the first step is just acknowledging how deeply these constructed identities shaped us, and continue to shape the world. The Cold War technically ended, but we're still living in psychological fallout shelters, organizing our understanding of the world along fault lines drawn decades ago.

The next time you hear someone describe universal healthcare as a slippery slope to communism, or when Russian state TV portrays NATO as an aggressive force surrounding poor defensive Russia, you're watching the Cold War's ghosts at work. These narratives persist because they're useful, not because they're true.

Boom. Reality check. We didn't just fight the Cold War. In many ways, the Cold War made us who we are. And until we confront that legacy, we'll keep sleepwalking through history, playing out scripts written long ago by leaders who found it easier to define their nations by what they opposed than by what they actually stood for.

The real question isn't whether America and Russia can get along. It's whether either country knows who it is without the other as contrast. After decades of being enemies by design, can they finally design themselves a new identity?