you're sad because you make nothing

on "i don't dream of labor"

You’re sad. Every day you’re sad. You wake up in the morning and crawl out of bed, checking your smart watch to see how deep your sleep was and how much of it you got. You go to work at the job you despise but feel you should be grateful for, because you have one at all. You work out in the evening, walking nowhere on the inclined treadmill. In the bathroom, you stare at yourself in the mirror, wondering if you should start addressing the changing skin on your face. You spend your last dregs of the evening trying to catch up to what you lost during the day, watching the television shows you love or scrolling through content where strangers’ lives seem more fulfilling than yours (or at least more romantic in their mundanity). The clock ticks closer to the morning, and even though you know the “That Girl routine” dictates you should get enough sleep to really capitalize on the next day, you don’t, because you only have so many hours that are yours alone, and the thought of sacrificing your fleeting moments of freedom for something you don’t want to do (after a day of doing what you don’t want to do) feels like someone crushing your windpipe with a cement block. So you stay awake. Scroll some more. Fall asleep too late. Get up and do it all again. When the weekend comes, you spend money. It feels good enough to do it again.

It’s obvious why “I don’t dream of labor” has become such a widespread mantra on social media. Wages are not rising at the same level as the ballooning cost of living, layoffs are widespread with no hope of new jobs on the horizon, and with the dawning realization that tariffs and AI will wipe out a huge percentage of white collar jobs, we’re looking at each other and thinking, so what’s the point of trying to work hard? Girlboss culture was a scam. Nobody actually gives a fuck if you’re Leaning In or not. It becomes easier to dream of quiet quitting. Of a soft life. A routine where you don’t have to work so hard for such meager results—in fact, how about one where the relationship is totally reversed! How about little work for abundant results? A low-effort, high-paying, totally remote job? That is the life you deserve to live after years of putting your nose to the grindstone. That’s the reward that you really want. What kind of idiot looked out at the great expanse of the Pacific Ocean and decided to create Microsoft Teams?

There is such heartbreak in this, even if we don’t want to admit it. There’s heartbreak in your tedious job, your quietly humiliating routine where it always seems like you give more than you get. Nothing feels good about being disappointed, about being told you can be important before being shown how truly dispensable you are. Promises of meritocratic reward were made to us before we could internalize the weight of them and shattered over and over again, often before we had the chance to understand why and how they were broken.

The phrase was first said by James Baldwin to Nikki Giovanni in 1971 as a critique of this exploitative capitalist system (“I have no dream job”), but since it’s become a TikTok soundbite in 2022, it now feels more like a rebranding of people’s heartbreak, an escape exit out of having to grapple with existential rage. The rinse-and-repeat dissemination method of digital activism has always been to boil down a concept to its SEO bones and throw this term back out to the masses for their own interpretation. In its virality, “labor” has been redefined from a job to work in its entirety. Its application now feels more like work is the bad boyfriend who embarrassed you and then dumped you, and the statement is the thing that you tell me in an effort to make it seem like you’re less floppy and pathetic than you actually feel. No, no, no, you didn’t get dumped. It was mutual. I don’t dream of it. I don’t even fucking want it. Any of this. I have agency. No, really.

The discrepancy here, of course, is that instead of redirecting this energy towards other pursuits, people have decided that it is socially acceptable to give up dreaming entirely. Look no further than the rise of tradwife videos, of hypergamy influencers push dating rich men as a feminist act, of the many facets of girlhood content that are really more about fear of womanhood than any love for childhood. All these things are about ceding individual agency to some external life manager, and soon after, offer consumption as a salve (what’s TikTok without TikTok Shop, you know). Barbara Kruger said “I shop, therefore I am,” and we see this still here. Get a sweet treat for your sadness, get a trinket for your inner child. You can dream of an apartment filled with things, of an iced latte every morning, of a snatched waist that you build in Lagree classes. That’s much easier, and so much more within your control.

It’s not to say that these little things aren’t important. Evidence of survival is meaningful in so many ways. But none of these things are solutions to the core issue. You’re still sad, even in all your worldly comforts, because you make nothing. In this spiral, you feel unfulfilled because your life is entirely centered around extraction and consumption.

I think there is something romantic about having a dream for yourself and your community that can exist away from the extractive, sad work that you must do in order to pay rent every month. There is great love in labor. It’s why people still try and do good at jobs that they feel dispassionate about; it feels like at least you’re not totally throwing your time down the drain. bell hooks said working with love renews the spirit and all that. My friend wrote (personally, in an email to their friends, not in an article) about going to the Labor Notes conference where one of the speakers said that a successful labor movement requires organizers to be good at their jobs. People believe in an organizer’s abilities more when they have accumulated respect and trust among their colleagues as a figure people can turn to with their problems. Love and labor.

I also find the TikTok-era usage of “I don’t dream of labor” to be quite untrue. I see people everywhere who do dream of making things, of building something better, but they say they don’t dream of labor when the real problem is that they fear articulating their actual dreams. They do not know, or perhaps are frightened to admit, the work involved in moving closer to these dreams. I don’t think you have to have a dream job. But I think some of you itch to work. I think it’s why you are flocking to craft-based activities like pottery and crocheting, propelled by TikToks about the importance of finding hobbies, why you are still so outraged by the state of the world.

You really don’t dream of labor? Any labor? I kind of think you do. I think you dream of creating something with your own two hands and cradling it with the satisfaction that it belongs to you alone, even if it is as small as making a meal for yourself and a friend. I think you quietly dream of making something that you can be proud of, so that the time spent in your flesh bag of a body isn’t solely remembered by digital transmissions of Excel charts and emails that legally belong to a corporation. I believe you dream of a life where you don’t have to work so hard for nothing, of a world where everyone can enjoy peace and safety, but you feel as though there is nothing you can do in the face of powers-that-be, and it scares you to admit that you dream this at all, because this is an uphill battle with promised sorrow along the way.

I think this and feel the same despair you do. I believe things will get worse before they get better. But I think I will dream of better anyways. I want to get up and work these days. And to be honest, I think it’s the only thing that matters.