AIBU to think people are jealous?

[cherrypieandcheese]

NC for this one!

I work very hard running an online business that has helped a lot of people and gained a lot of traction. I tend to keep it very quiet. I take a very small salary thats not enough to pay bills and I hope one day in the future I can go full time. In the mean time I work part time. I scrape by every month. I try and not tell everyone what I do on the side because I'm a little embarrassed and I find people at my work are put off. If they ask me if I have another job and I tell them briefly about my side hustle, the conversation goes dead, so I change the topic.

Everyone at work seems really friendly and I think people like me. I still feel new, been there just over a year, but get along with everyone. Yet I am still not invited to parties. There are group chats I am not apart of, but people who have started working there in the past three months have been welcomed into. I am the only one. I held my own party and no-one from work came, despite all being invited. Others from outside work came so it wasn't a flop. I am the same age and have a lot on common with these people.

We have all just been put on unpaid leave. Three of my colleagues have posted on Facebook tagging every singe colleague at my workplace on how sad they are that they are no longer working together, except me. Again. Theres no-one I am close enough to ask about it without being worried everyone will find out my concern.

Everything went well in the first two months and only happened when people found out about my side hustle. I don't know if people feel as if we're too different because of my side hustle? I have opened up to a friend who has told me I should be so proud of how many people I have helped, but I am not. I am embarrassed. I feel the side hustle makes people feel as if they have nothing in common with me.

I have received a couple of sly comments about it from people at work. Someone suggesting I am going to leave as soon as my side hustle takes off, so i'm not really loyal to the company, another saying I must not have time for friends and family because I work so hard juggling two jobs and dont have the right priorities Just comments I can ignore in the moment but felt really off. This has happened from 5-6 people.

I really don't think there is anything wrong with my personality. I get involved, I am friendly and outgoing. My friend said my colleagues are jealous. Could this be true? There is nothing to be jealous of because what I do is very lonely, hard work, and I have thought about giving in a million times. Or is there likely another problem with me?

I have never had any problems in any other work place. This is the only job I have had since starting my side hustle and the only one I have trouble integrating. If anyone could shed some light it would be appreciated, thank you.

The thing I would say is that even though colleagues may not be explicitly jealous, your side-enterprise may challenge their view of the world. In my experience, if someone's view of a good way to live is to do a day's work, go home and watch TV (nothing wrong with that!), then they can feel slightly affronted to find that someone is running a business, counselling drug-addicts or studying for an OU degree in their spare time.

It can also be about social class differences, which are far more entrenched than we like to admit these days.

It’s arrogant to think people are jealous

It’s arrogant to think people have no reason to dislike your personality.

Maybe it’s your arrogance that rubs them up the wrong way.

Saying what your ‘side hustle’ is,isn’t that outing’ & is somewhat crucial to your thread.

I'm trying to think about what I could do online to help vulnerable people, that is so rare that it would be outing

Fuck all, side hustle is what all the boss babes do hun

I just looked up envy and jealousy and realised I’ve been using it wrong my whole life - thank you for the education!

Is it something like Mush?

“Side hustle” is very very very common language where I am. I don’t know a single person who doesn’t have a side hustle (usually tutoring or selling handmade crafts on Etsy). I also don’t know anyone who associates side hustles with MLM - that’s just a Mumsnet thing - so making petty bullying jabs about “boss babes” and “huns” is just weird and makes you look jealous.

The OPs coworkers clearly don’t think she’s involved in an MLM.

No, the precise nature of her project is irrelevant to this thread.

They sound really unfriendly. Some offices are ridden with cliques and it’s always miserable. It could well be jealousy, or some belief that you have ‘One foot our the door’. If so it’s their problem not yours, though I appreciate that doesn’t make it easier to put up with.

All of the people saying that because you make money you’re being exploitative need to get a grip. Without knowing details it’s impossible to make that judgment, and I will happily take it on trust that you aren’t doing anything wrong. I used to work for a charity and I was paid; I don’t consider that to be exploitative.

Irrespective of the nature of your online business. (Also fascinated by the puting nature!)
From what you have written i really dont think they are jealous, it sounds more like a poor culture fit

@gingersausage
Not a hunbot, whatever the hell that is, and I don’t buy or sell any MLM products.
I asked the OP if she was a hairdresser who made wigs, thought it would be too close to home for her colleagues to approve.
Now piss off .

This thread is like a game of “spot the hun-bot bingo” 🤣.

@CastleSalem I love how you had to clarify it was a joke!

Wow @Mummyhaggis71, that’s a bit rude!

"I get the feeling people are just not interested in getting to know me more"

Tbh, a lot of part time workers find that. If on top, you have given the impression that you'll only be around until what you consider better, takes off, then they aren't going to invest time and energy into getting to know you.

That isn't envy. Just because you are chasing what you are, doesn't mean that other people want it.

@Mummyhaggis71 sorry you had that bitchy comment directed to you.

Very narrow minded to equate wigs with Juiceplus or whatever @gingersausage was going on about. She’s probably a failed hunbot herself.

Had anyone got the the tune "do they hustle" if their brain now?

“Side hustle” is very very very common language where I am.
Swerf do you mind me asking where you are (in the UK?)

A PP posted a definition of side-hustle as a piece of work or a job that you get paid for doing in addition to doing your main job, but it did state that it was "mainly US".

It's one of those phrases that your social circle might use all the time, in which case it wouldn't ring any alarm bells.

However, in the UK it has long been used to describe a swindle or con. Hell, wasn't their even a TV programme a few years ago called Hustle about a group a gang of con artists?

Side Hustle’ is an imported term that sounds dodgy as fuck to huge swathes of people.

A horrible combination of ‘bit on the side’ and ‘grift’. Doesn’t matter how the Instagram/Deliveroo crowd use it, it still has criminal undertones to many.

Anyone remember the TV show, ‘Hustle’?

‘Drama series about a team of con artists’

www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/b007gf9k/hustle

And then the American film about two female ‘scam artists’:

Or the 60s classic, “The Hustler’,

‘Newman (Best Actor nominee) is electrifying as "Fast" Eddie Felson, an arrogant, amoral hustler who haunts backstreet pool rooms fleecing anyone who'll pick up a cue.’

‘Hustle’ has been used this way since the 20s and in conjunction with ‘side’ since the 50s. The current use is an appropriation, although this NYT article describes that linguistic appropriation as a con job in itself.

www.nytimes.com/2019/04/06/opinion/sunday/tax-day-side-hustle.html

The Con of the Side Hustle (extracts)

Yet this sales pitch for the “side hustle” takes what we once called, more drably, another job and gives it a gloss, with a tiny shot of Superfly, disguising unstable working hours and a lack of bargaining power as liberation. You can see the twisted alchemy of what Reddit’s founder Alexis Ohanian has called “hustle porn.”

This language tries to make the dreary carousel of contemporary life sound more fun. “The phrase the ‘side hustle’ has gained a strange kind of prestige from downwardly mobile, college-educated tech workers,” said John Patrick Leary, the author of “Keywords: The New Language of Capitalism,” a sharp recent book on this troubling new lingo. Its glitz and energy derives from “a hip-hop genealogy,” although the side hustles name-checked in that genre are perhaps not the same as those imagined by Uber.’

As workers, we might acknowledge that “side hustle” is an insidious term and resolve never to use it again. More broadly, we must fight other forms of this falsifying new jargon and seek out more truthful language. We could follow Raymond Williams, the cultural theorist, who once wrote that we should interrogate the language of contemporary society and “change as we find it necessary to change it, as we go on making our own language and history.”

From street con-men gritting unsuspecting strangers for cash to exploitative big businesses conning people into thinking their unstable, second job is glamorous.

I doubt they're jealous. Everyone has very full and busy lives outside of work and I imagine many of your colleagues have their own 'projects' which they may not wish to discuss in the workplace.

But some American terms are increasingly popular here. I don’t like the phrase ‘grown ass woman/man’ but it’s used a lot on MN. I don’t get all the surprise at ‘side hustle’, it’s a phrase, it exists, ordering OP not to use it is pointless, especially when she has already said she doesn’t refer to it as such in front of colleagues.

Don't waste your energy on why they behave like this. You are not hurting anyone, let them get on with their pettiness. Block them on SM and get on with your life

^
This...

Also see the mean girls and boys are out in force on this thread.

FWIW, I assumed you were using the term “side hustle” to mean something on the side, no big deal. I hope it takes off for you.

Are you a sex worker? Sell used shoes online? Have a live video stream or chat line?

That meets all the criteria posted.

I don’t think it’s anything to do with your second job. I think it’s a simple case of you’re not their kind of people.

You probably haven’t done anything to piss them off and they probably do like you and get on with you, but you just don’t fit in with them as a group and get on with their interests/jokes etc. Hence why people who have joined after you have been invited to groups etc.

And that’s okay, not everyone will be close to everyone else. They aren’t doing anything wrong; if they don’t feel you’re the right fit for their groups or parties they don’t have to invite you.

You have to accept in life that even if people like you and you haven’t done anything “wrong”, they are still going to be closer to others and form a bond with them that they obviously haven’t with you. That’s just being human.

It's definitely not jealousy 🤣 my sister thinks people at work are jealous because they don't want to hang out with her... I love my sister but its more that she has become a bit of a superior healthy eating and wellness obsessive and was a bit smug and obsessed with her wedding (last year), so was very condescending to anyone inviting her for a drink (bad for you) or to anywhere like harvester or wetherspoons for food (I eat low carb, fast at intervals etc).

I know because she did the same to me, my mum and aunty - we used to go to McD's or Costa or similar every other Saturday with younger cousins and that was banned or she'd sit there with a cats bum face 🤣

We know and love her so it's different but there's a girl at my work who is very similar and I can imagine her coming out with the 'they're jealous' line as that's all we've ever known about her.

If I had to guess you probably act like you're better than the people you work with and they don't have a bond with you already so they cba with you?

Making money out vulnerable people isn't exactly altruistic. Don't you think you sound a little bit silly, OP?

Yup! Sounds like they think you are manipulating the vulnerable and they don’t think you are a very nice person.

Also see the mean girls and boys are out in force on this thread.

Yes. Some of the comments on this thread are very nasty.

Who knows, perhaps you just don’t fit in there? I’ve worked lots of places in the past and mostly got on well with my colleagues but one year I worked in a department store and my face just didn’t fit for some reason. At the time I wondered if people were jealous or intimidated that I was educated and had a degree but in retrospect I just had little in common with them, they all had worked there for years and friendships were already formed. Ultimately your workmates are just that your workmates don’t expect them to be your real friends.