The other day, I Googled the phrase “working in your sleep,” already harboring a grim premonition of what I might find. Initially, I found only self-help instructions (e.g., boosting your productivity by trying to recite “positive affirmations” while falling asleep) and Reddit threads full of overworked programmers who find themselves “dream coding” (“I fall asleep but feel half awake, since in my dreams I still code, but it’s code that makes no sense.”). Eventually, I stumbled upon a news item that made me slam my laptop shut. As of November 2023, Prophetic™, a lucid dreaming start-up, claims that tech engineers could perform site maintenance in their sleep—and therefore, I suppose, should. Their idea is that workers could be encouraged (though not compelled, obviously… right?) to wear computational “halos” in bed, which are apparatuses capable of capturing, somehow, all this hitherto wasted unconscious productivity. According to Prophetic, nocturnal dream-extraction technologies could greatly reduce the violence that workers’ slumber inflicts on the ruling class’s bottom line. Imagine Fortune magazine’s delight.

The halo launches in 2025. There is honestly nothing to worry about, or so the financier class assures us, in the steady trickle of reports of people dying from overwork (there’s now a word in Japanese for this phenomenon: karoshi). In May 2024, three Iranian nurses died, in their sleep, of karoshi syndrome. Likewise, a Bank of America employee perished at the advanced age of 35 with “acute coronary artery thrombus” after working a 120-hour week. But just a few weeks prior, a Bloomberg staff writer had griped that we should all be talking “about dropouts, not burnouts,” mockingly dismissing what he called “the apostles of overwork”—meaning social science literature as well as movements like the Big Quit (aka the Great Resignation) or the Chinese social movement Lying Flat—for “persuading us that we work too hard.” Anti-work novels like Ling Ma’s Severance and TV dystopias like Dollhouse presumably belong to this traitorous trend as well. In June 2024, two young tech workers in China dropped dead from 72-hour weeks. Suicides by content moderators have earned media attention for years. Those who are tasked, online, with siphoning off the masses’ psychic darkness, call it “no job for humans.”

Counterpoint: “Is hard work really such a bad thing?” the business magazine asks, apparently wholly unmoved by data of this kind. From the Bloombergian perspective, quite “enough people are lying flat already,” thank you very much: “The last thing that growth-starved economies need is another excuse for taking a nap.” Unless, presumably, the nap is monetizable. Think of all those untapped nocturnal hours! Man’s final frontier: his dreams! Meanwhile, from the worker’s standpoint, there simply aren’t sufficient hours in the day these days to earn the money one needs—or, if one is indebted, one owes.

The novelist Molly McGhee knows. McGhee herself owes about $120,000 to the United States government, and senses in her heart that “to be born poor is to remain poor”—she fully expects to die broke. “Being alive is really hard for me,” she said in an interview last fall. “I have to make the active decision every day.”

When her interviewer called her 2023 debut novel Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind “weirdly hopeful,” McGhee replied that writing it was a way of engaging with working-class hopelessness without being subsumed by it, “without feeling like I was just dying from pain.” In this form of loneliness, to be sure, one is never alone: From rural India’s farmlands to Britain’s council houses and Korea’s micro-apartments, debt is often the leading cause of suicide in the world.

Death is where her novel begins and ends. “His will not be a good death,” notes the narrator on page 1 (referring to the eponymous protagonist, a 25-year-old hotdog-stand vendor), giving us a heads-up that a slow death will commence in precisely three years’ time. Jonathan’s student loan debt is about $250,000—over twice McGhee’s. On top of that, he has a similar sum of inherited debt, because his parents, who were very deep in debt themselves, have died. It is illegal for creditors to attempt to collect money from relatives of deceased debtors, but Jonathan is dirt-poor, so “what is illegal when done to some people is not illegal when done to him.” The APR on his student loan, alone, is “so lethal it can kill in a week.” Ironically, the ineluctable death of our antihero begins with the sinister state “employment opportunity” he earnestly believes will save him. It is his very success in getting a government job—which pauses all these debt payments—that seals his fate. Work will not set Jonathan Abernathy free. Au contraire.

Current Issue

September 2024 Issue

The recruiters move in like jackals. The job they offer is with a private dream-auditing and psyche-cleaning company that “partners with the government” and sells its services to employers whose workforces “seem depleted.” Entry-level dream auditors like Jonathan clock in by going to bed wearing hazmat suits, whereupon they teleport into individual US professionals’ dreams, and mark down everything negative they see—anything that could harm productivity—for removal via vacuum nozzle. The position freezes one’s liens and pays 20 dollars a night with a “per-pay-period hundred-dollar incremental loan forgiveness component.” Upon hire, Jonathan cries with joy. Unfortunately, the science of identifying elements of a dream that point to anxiety and therefore “poor workplace performance”—falling teeth, burning money, crying children—requires some degree of psychological acumen, but he has never heard of Freud or Jung. Why, then, does the welcome packet describe dream-auditing as unskilled labor specifically designed for “unemployables”? Luckily, when he fails to “correctly” interpret certain dreams, our cheerful debt peon gets tapped for a compulsory training seminar “on identifying emotional states.”

“I’m always OK,” says Jonathan, even as, at the end of every day, he “practically collapses beneath the night as he lets himself into his small basement suite.” From his bosses’ point of view, of course, this willingness to maintain a cheerful affect under any circumstances is exactly what’s valuable about him. Already in 2011, the anti-work feminist philosopher Kathi Weeks noted, in The Problem with Work, that “the very distinction between a worker’s skills and attitudes” had become difficult to sustain, with profits in the “service- and knowledge-based economy” increasingly depending “on simultaneously activating and controlling, on releasing and harnessing, the creative, communicative, affective, and emotional capacities of workers.” In Jonathan Abernathy, the false antinomy between two streams of feelings—“You are worthless you are miserable you are good for nothing you are lazy you are unreliable” on the one hand and, on the other, “You are kind. You are competent. You are well respected and valued by your community”—is what keeps the constantly asleep insomniac whirring.

McGhee’s fictive world, much like our own, is one where a belief in one’s own temporarily embarrassed wealthiness, and society’s essential fairness, is a self-preservational psychosis. “Americans are very prideful,” says the narrator. “Would Abernathy consider himself impoverished? No. Absolutely not.” Despite the fact that he skips meals. At most, Jonathan would say he is “Experiencing a Hard Time.” The most unbearable point in McGhee’s novel is the fleeting moment when inter-worker solidarity is on the brink of forming. His colleague Kai—who does this dream-scrubbing work to win back her freedom from incarceration—tries to warn him: “Try to really critically think about why they offered the job to you.” She shows him the storage room full of removed fears and depressions, the “nightmares that are not had,” boxed up like swirling tadpoles. The boxes are breathing. They contain not only what was extracted but also “runoff” from people like him “who sacrificed their sleep to assuage the nights of others.” Jonathan holds the box with his name on it in his hands, a box that hasn’t been filled yet, and he wordlessly understands what is happening.

As the narrator explains, this fork in the road would have led to an alternative denouement in which Jonathan and Kai resist, together, thereby escaping their doomed fates. Instead, he says “the wrong thing,” namely: “I just want to do a good job.” (Indeed, “all Abernathy really really wants, when he thinks about it, is to do a good job.”) So much of a “dumbass” is Jonathan that he wants or needs to think of the system in which he is participating as public health. He even briefly convinces himself that the idea of all this complimentary “emotional management” is thoughtful and moving. (Also, “maybe one day it will be his dreams that are complimentarily maintained”!) “What I like about you is your attitude,” says the boss, patting Jonathan on the head.

The number of hours “our sweet boy” spends pseudo-asleep rises from eight to 10 to 14. Through incapacity or cowardice, in his waking hours he manages to betray his neighbor Rhoda, his only friend. Perhaps relatedly, he soon afterward gets promoted, from auditor to middle management. Right away, he starts abusing his subordinates just as he was abused. This makes him believe he is good at things, and that “makes him respect himself.” He does miss his dreams, however, and sometimes, “if he didn’t know any better,” he would suspect himself of feeling despair. Upon becoming a manager, he gets made privy to “the most secret heart of the secret hearts of what we do”: In the name of capital accumulation, he is helping to steal from people the very memory of loss. In fairness, he thinks hard about quitting, “he thinks this and thinks this and thinks this until his paycheck comes” and then he stops thinking. Having even a little bit of money feels like it is thawing him out and resurrecting him, even though he knows at what cost.

The interviewer who called Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind “hopeful” is right insofar as McGhee seems keen to ask: What might we become, other than ourselves? How might we reverse the direction of flow on the vacuum-device into which we gave up, out of fear, life itself? We have hustled and we have grind-ed: The very planet is dying, quite frankly, because of our work. The business pundits, unmoved, have been snarling at workers to get back into the office instead of sticking to the remote-work options ushered in by the pandemic. But in response, disability liberationists have kicked their movements for the right to work from home into a higher gear. The supposed conviviality of the “in-person” (better surveilled, thus more productive) workplace appears close to nil in many cases anyway. In August 2024, yet another bank employee died—in her cubicle at Wells Fargo—and was only found four days after she swiped into the building. No wonder US social scientists are sounding the alarm about burnout, albeit in terms calculated not to spook the owner class (much like Kamala Harris’s alternative to choosing between “tough-” and “soft-” on-crime policy, namely, “smart on crime”). Witness the titles of Brigid Schulte’s Over Work: Transforming the Daily Grind in the Quest for a Better Life and Malissa Clark’s Never Not Working: Why the Always-On Culture is Bad for Business, published by Harvard Business Review. Many are the gurus who mollify the market gods with assurances that “transformations” (not revolution) to “smarter” working will be good for everyone. But radical voices remain audible. For degrowth thinkers like Kohei Saito, author of Slow Down, historians like Erik Baker, author of Make Your Own Job, and feminists like Amelia Horgan, author of Lost in Work, there’s something hopeful about the prospect that—as Kim Kardashian accused in 2022—“no one wants to work anymore.”

What could be more humanist than a work stoppage? Since McGhee’s novel was published nearly a year ago, it has become inescapably clear to vast swaths of people around the world that our jobs are plugged directly—or indirectly—into a ghoulish apparatus inflicting a holocaust on Palestine. For years already, content-moderation laborers have described feeling progressively hollowed out by the compulsion to show up, day after day, and look exclusively at the most horrible things a society can generate; now, at the end of a shift, they go home and “scroll through genocide” like the rest of us. The violent couplet of debt and work, McGhee suggests, makes thing-like monsters of us. Recalling a Marxian formulation, she suggests that the rule of capital gives rise to frighteningly lively and dominating things (commodities) and uncannily subservient subjects (people, when they forget who created whom). The archival box with Jonathan Abernathy’s name on it becomes more and more alive the more it swells with everything painful—yet real—about himself, which he gave up by consenting to treat that stuff as “surplus” and disposable. Our souls are collectively on the line. By the end of the novel, the eponymous wage slave is no more. “Instead of Jonathan Abernathy, there is only a walking compendium of fear wearing his visage, doing as it’s told. Perhaps, one day, the body will arrive at your doorstep to collect from you.” When he knocks, McGhee wants to know, who—or what—will you decide to be?