One of my running partners runs without a watch.

The thought of that makes me inherently anxious. What if I don't know how long I've been running? What if I don't know how much longer I have to go? What if I accidentally run too long and don't leave myself enough time to get ready for work.

My friend, however, doesn't care.

I wish I could also not care not only about something that trivial, but about a lot of things. I preach not caring about accomplishments, salary, or numerical accolades. I have preached against the dehumanizing excesses of bourgeois hustle culture.

Yet on too many occasions, I don't practice what I preach, and on days that I don't work my day job, my earnings on Lyft or Uber are all I think about. It's not uncommon for me to be on my phone and refresh my Medium stats every minute, nor is it uncommon for me to refresh my email every five minutes. And a lot of times, now, when I run, it's all about making it to 40 or 60 minutes.

I'm in a new city with a lot of good new friends, many of them working in education, as well. These are good, kind people who I maintain mutual love and respect for. Yet the biggest knock on me is that I always seem like I have some place to go, or something more important to do. Whether it's in my incessant checking of my watch or constantly being on my phone, I struggle to stay in the moment.

Laura Barcella, on Forge,describes benign envy as a tool for self-reflection and fuel to become better versions of ourselves. My friend who doesn't care about time while running is someone I have benign envy towards, because I wish I could be like that more often. I have found that when I do just forget to wear my watch, I'm free from constraints.

I have other friends I have benign envy towards: the friends that recover easily from failure. This is something I feel myself getting better at. I recently went on an interview for a teaching job at a middle school. Also interviewing there was a good friend and member of my cohort. We joked with the whole cohort about being the school placing us in the Hunger Games and the decision being a test of our bonds.

He got the job. I didn't. He reached out to me to let me know so I'd hear it from him first. I appreciated it and wished him the best, and we moved on.

It was that simple, and although I had a slight sting of disappointment at not getting a job I wanted, I could make no complaints that the school didn't choose someone caring and competent.

And I knew it was no reflection on my own competence or aptitude. Princeton professor of psychology, Johannes Haushofer, once published a CV of failures, and the list was extensive. In reference to this CV, Haushofer wanted people to learn not to attribute failures to themselves, but rather to "the fact that the world is stochastic, applications are crapshoots, and selection committees and referees have bad days."

I envy the people who are free of hustle culture, who can sit at the dinner table the whole time without taking their phone out once. The very thought of that sounds like torture, to me. What if I get a really important e-mail?

I envy the friend who lost his wallet and just moved on to the next step, and didn't seem at all to care that much. He canceled his cards and used his passport to get through airports and enter bars. Two months later, he still didn't have a wallet. He had no driver's license, and still used his passport to get into bars. It never fazed him.

I would have gone crazy! That freedom from traditional constraints and records is something I wish I one day had.

Celinne Da Costa of Forbesdefines hustle culture as society's "collective urge...to work harder, stronger, faster. To grind and exert ourselves at maximum capacity, every day." She, like me, grew up in a poor immigrant family that valued working hard, constantly striving, and never, ever, giving up.

What hustle culture fails to capture is our need to slow down, and our need to be free of the hustle and busy-ness. Any moment I don't deem productive can be labeled a waste of time.

Now it's time I looked inward and asked: why? We're not machines. We're human beings, and humans need purpose and meaning more than hustle.