We wake up at 6 AM or earlier. Not because we’re inspired—because the alarm goes off and the day doesn’t wait.

We pull on work clothes, grab whatever counts as breakfast, and go. Into traffic. Onto a job site. Into a warehouse, a plant, a store, a truck cab, a hospital corridor, a terminal, a call queue. Some days it’s steady. Some days it’s piecemeal. Some days it’s two or three kinds of work stitched together just to keep the numbers barely true.

We work with our hands. Our backs. Our attention. Our patience. We lift, fix, drive, stock, clean, deliver, repair, manage, de-escalate. We follow procedures written by people we’ll never meet. We answer to supervisors who rotate in and out. Hours get cut. Schedules change. Benefits shrink. Rules never apply upward. Pay gets taxed. Purchasing power gets quietly bled out through inflation.

At night we’re tired in a way sleep doesn’t fix. The kind of tired that comes from effort that doesn’t accumulate. You return to an empty place you don’t own. You eat, scroll, fall asleep—and do it again.

We did what we were told. And it didn’t work.

Something essential is missing. You can feel it too.

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