Hustle Culture Has a Body Count: The Quiet Burnout Epidemic Among Young Nigerian Side-Hustlers

Ask almost any young professional in Lagos or Abuja under thirty-five what they do for a living, and the honest answer, more often than not, involves a comma rather than a period: a day job in marketing, say, plus a small skincare resale business run through WhatsApp Status, plus occasional freelance graphic design work picked up through a cousin's network. This layered income structure has become so normalised among young Nigerians that it rarely gets questioned directly — it's simply assumed, treated as common sense in an economy where a single salary, for most people, no longer stretches reliably across a full month.