Let’s talk about hustle porn.

A lot of hustle porn (a term I first heard from Alexis Ohanian Sr.) has the same bombastic quality as sexual porn; a recent article I saw on LinkedIn screamed that you absolutely should expect your employees to spend 20% of their time outside of work on professional growth activities, because otherwise they must be terrible performers (!?!).

That isn’t real. That is the movie version of an important, messy part of our lives. And just like porn can damage our understanding of reality, particularly for those who are new to sex, hustle porn can damage our understanding of what work should actually look and feel like, particularly for those that are new to the workplace.

As part of my work at Oceans, I travel to Sri Lanka for two weeks every two months. These are planned trips, with disciplined routines before and after that focus on non-work activities. And I sleep pretty well on planes, so the 27-hour flight isn’t normally too bad.

But this time I sat next to screaming babies on both connections (to be clear, I would also scream if no one explained why my head felt like it was going to explode), so on a leadership team call last night, I apparently took an unintended nap (the picture above, lovingly captured by my team from the recording).

We joke about it now (and of course there is a Slack emoji) but at the time, my team freaked out; they were worried that something was seriously wrong. And that is the right reaction: work kills people, directly and indirectly, every single day.

Fortunately, I’m fine and after a good night’s sleep, ready to get back to work worth doing alongside the fabulous folks at Oceans. But it is important that we are both honest about moments like these and that we don’t turn them into a culture of celebration.

This is one moment, in one meeting.

It isn’t a well-lit, in-focus shot of someone sleeping under their desk to show how passionate they are so a VC will deign to grace them with their next round of funding.

It isn’t the culture of Oceans and something we believe every employee should do, every day. It isn’t even something we think our C-suite should be doing.

Yes, sometimes work causes you to hustle a little more than usual because of its elastic nature; you can’t perfectly plan for every demand curve. But that’s a bug, not a feature.

How do we get rid of hustle porn? By not creating or engaging in it, of course, but that’s easier said than done; like porn, it exists because we consume it. So we need a better plan.

Maybe we need MakeWorkNotHustlePorn; acknowledging that sex is fun to watch and then encouraging the creation and distribution of sex that focuses on unsimulated reality is an appealing blueprint for how we tackle this problem. LinkedIn can do a better job of flattening the demand curve, reducing the availability of sensationalist posts. Posters can focus on authenticity and steward an understanding of work that is grounded in reality. And most importantly, we can choose to engage with content that is authentic and not always attractive (hello, shiny bald head).

Because it really does matter. How we work in public influences how future generations will work in private and if we don’t design that experience deliberately, we run the very real risk of damaging their relationship with one of life’s great joys. I believe in work worth doing; I don’t believe in dying for it.