India, Feb. 1 -- 'I am beginning to think God indeed exists.' Daddy, turning 70 this year, drops this bomb with his characteristic nonchalance. Munching on something, possibly gesturing to someone, he continues on the phone, "I think God keeps a record for everyone". My atheist yet culturally observant father's turn to agnosticism has been caused by the unusual amount of "work" he has been doing in the past two years, thanks to a new family project. Though excited, he resents it from his core. Last year, he had candidly admitted to me, "I'm irritated with everything and everyone these days." He doesn't enjoy work at all; never has. He joined his employees in hard manual labour some nights, but also grumbled loudly when his brothers couldn't come home for festivals because of work. Clearly, he's the opposite of what is again beginning to get celebrated today - the industrious workaholic, (re)building what is framed in a recent Financial Times article as "Grindcore". The celebration of "grindcore" as a cultural corrective to waning ambition is a familiar ideological repackaging. What is being sold as a return to discipline, grit, and excellence is, from a feminist lens, a re-entrenchment of masculinist norms of value. These norms have historically excluded anyone whose labour does not conform to hyper-visible productivity. My feminist lens towards work, I must admit, was set early on by my father's attitudes. Grindcore, a controversially borrowed term from rock music, reasserts the fantasy of an unencumbered subject with aesthetic aggression. The rhetoric of "hardness", "endurance", and "discipline" is not accidental. Drawing from militarised, athletic, and industrial masculinities, it equates worth with the capacity to withstand pain. Feminism has repeatedly challenged this equation because suffering has been weaponised as a moral test. This resurrection of the ideal worker, a genius propelled by "pure" ambition, disproportionately penalises those already burdened by structural inequality. Equally troubling is the rise of the performative male within grindcore culture. Feminist political economists have long shown that capitalism's ideal worker is implicitly male, a privileged male - not biologically, but socially - freed from domestic labour precisely because that labour is displaced onto women, underpaid workers, or invisibilised kin networks. This figure is not merely industrious; he must be seen to be industrious. Productivity becomes spectacle. Exhaustion is aestheticised, to be worn not so lightly on the brow and the sleeve. Emotional restraint is framed as strength. In this performance, vulnerability is disallowed, reflection is smirked at, and resting is moral failure. This is not resilience but the opposite of it. The glorification of the hustle culture comes with inevitable sentimental cannibalism. No other emotion, except pride, is allowed to exist. The performative worker thrives in digital capitalism because platforms reward visibility over sustainability. Work-work masculinity, as opposed to the frowned-upon work-life femininity, is, therefore, not about meaningful labour but about signalling dominance in a crowded attention economy. Feminist theory helps us name this for what it is: a crisis of masculinity displaced onto work. When traditional markers of male authority like job security, wage dominance and social status, erode under late capitalism, grindcore offers a compensatory script. Work harder. Sleep less. Feel nothing. Post proof. This fetishism around work delegitimises forms of labour historically associated with femininity, namely care, emotional intelligence, community-building, and maintenance, by framing them as distractions from "real" work. It also delegitimises feminist critiques by dismissing them as softness or laziness, in an era that supposedly demands hardness. But hardness has always been a political choice. Feminism, on the other hand, is about survival. Feminism does not argue against effort; it argues against the moralisation of suffering. It asks why productivity must be proven through self-erasure, why ambition must look like isolation, and why worth must be measured by output rather than impact. Grindcore cannot answer these questions because its power depends on not asking them. Most importantly, grindcore shifts responsibility away from systems and onto bodies. If you fail, you did not grind enough. If you burn out, you are weak. This logic is problematic because it individualises structural harm while celebrating those best positioned to survive it. The techbro in San Francisco can retire at 30, but his fetishising of work dooms gig workers to interminably long shifts. The latter's bare survival becomes a performance in Hunger Games. This renewed trend is less about excellence than about control - over time, over bodies, over narratives of success. This is also rebranding relentless self-exploitation as cultural virtue. I'm grateful for the "laziness" that has been my most important patrimony. It has allowed me to not abandon care, even in high-strung workplaces where insensitivity towards co-workers masquerades as efficiency....