It’s no surprise that Mondays are a day that many of us dread. For many people, they’re the start of the work week.

I wake up to an alarm that feels like violence. Not because I’m tired—though I am—but because every fibre of my being rejects what comes next. The eight hours of pretending that what I’m doing matters in any meaningful way beyond keeping me housed and fed.

But the thing is, I’m supposed to be grateful for this.

We live in a world where we’ve convinced ourselves that working to survive is not just inevitable, but fair. We tell ourselves we live in a meritocracy where the most valuable and skilled people naturally rise to the top, where exorbitant salaries are justified by the years of training and expertise endured before. We’ve built elaborate myths around why some people deserve abundance while others scrape by, pretending that artificial barriers and gatekeeping represent genuine value.

Monday is the weekly ritual where we collectively agree to forget that most of what we call “work” is an elaborate stage show. It’s where we pretend that the person making $300,000 a year is somehow providing ten times more value than the person making $30,000. It’s where we nod along to the fairy tale that if we just work hard enough, smart enough, deserve it enough, we too can climb the ladder.

We’re told our entire lives that success is a simple equation. Effort + Talent = Reward. Work hard, get educated, play by the rules, and we’ll be compensated fairly for our contributions to society. The manager earns more than the individual contributor because leadership skills are worth more than technical execution. The doctor earns more than the nurse because medical expertise is worth more than bedside care.

But the manager couldn’t manage a single thing without the individual contributors who actually do the work. The manager exists only because there are people to manage. Remove the ICs, and the manager has no function. Remove the manager, and the work still gets done—sometimes better, faster, and with less friction.

Yet somehow, we’ve convinced ourselves that the person who coordinates the work is worth significantly more than the people who perform it. That organising meetings about the work is more valuable than doing the work. That having authority over others automatically translates to providing more value to society.

Meanwhile, the doctor makes the diagnosis, but the nurse monitors the patient through the night, catches the complications, administers the medications, advocates for the patient’s needs, and often knows more about what’s actually happening with the patient than anyone else. The doctor swoops in for fifteen minutes; the nurse is there for twelve hours. The doctor went to medical school; the nurse went to nursing school and often has years more hands-on experience with patient care.

Yet somehow we’ve decided that one deserves three to ten times the salary of the other. Not because their work is that many times more valuable, but because we’ve created artificial hierarchies that have more to do with professional gatekeeping and historical power structures than actual contribution to healing.

Why? Because we’ve confused scarcity with value. We’ve confused power with merit. We’ve confused having access to money with being worth more as a human being.

Every Monday, millions of us wake up and perform this bizarre ritual: we put on clothes we may not like, travel to places we may not want to be, to do work that may feel meaningless, for people who may not care about us, all while telling ourselves this is normal. This is fair. This is how society should work.

But why? Why have we agreed that eight hours of our day—the most alert and energetic hours—belong to creating profit for a company? Why have we accepted that our survival depends on convincing authorities that we deserve to eat, to have shelter, to exist?

Because we’ve been sold a story. The story goes like this: “Look, we can’t all just do whatever we want. Society needs structure. People need incentives to work. If we didn’t have to work for money, who would pick up the garbage? Who would perform surgery? Who would build the roads?”

This story has a few problems. First, it assumes that without the threat of poverty, humans wouldn’t contribute to their communities. Second, it assumes that our current system actually allocates work efficiently—that the most important jobs pay the most, that people are doing work they’re good at and passionate about, and that we’re not wasting human potential on a massive scale.

But what is expertise? That surgeon who makes $500,000 a year? Yes, they trained for years. Yes, their skills are valuable. But we don't talk about how much of that training was actually necessary, and how much was artificial scarcity created by professional gatekeeping.

How many brilliant minds are kept out of medicine not because they lack the capability, but because they can't afford medical school? How many people could learn surgical techniques if we treated medical knowledge as a public good rather than proprietary information controlled by professional associations?

The truth is that much of education isn't about developing superior skills—it's about proving we can survive a deliberately punishing system designed to filter people out based on their ability to endure sleep deprivation, memorise vast amounts of information under pressure, and accumulate massive debt without breaking. Medical residency programs that work doctors 80-hour weeks aren't creating better doctors; they're creating doctors who've proven they can submit to institutional abuse. The hazing ritual of medical training has little to do with patient care and everything to do with maintaining the scarcity that keeps salaries high. And this is the situation for a profession that is actually useful and valuable to society.

This same pattern repeats everywhere, regardless of how truly valuable the work is or not. Lawyers charging $800 an hour for work that paralegal could do. Consultants earning six figures to tell companies things their own employees already know. Financial advisors getting rich by convincing people that managing money requires mystical expertise that ordinary humans couldn’t possibly possess.

We’ve created artificial complexity to justify artificial scarcity to maintain artificial hierarchies.

So here’s what I ask myself every Monday morning, somewhere between the alarm and the first sip of cacao: What would I do if I didn’t have to work for money?

Not “What would I do if I were rich enough to not work?” But what would I contribute to the world if my basic needs were guaranteed, if I could spend my time and energy on things I found meaningful rather than things that pay the bills?

And here’s the frustrating part: I know exactly what I’d do. I’d write more. I’d build software that actually helps people instead of maximises profit. I’d create games that challenge people to think philosophically, that make them question the systems we take for granted, that advocate for a world where human potential isn’t wasted on bullshit jobs. I’d spend time with people I care about. I’d learn new skills not because they’ll look good on a resume, but because they fascinate me. I’d contribute to my community not because I’m paid to, but because I’m part of it.

I already get glimpses of this life in the spaces where money doesn’t dictate my actions. I’m on my building’s strata committee not because anyone pays me, but because I live here and care about my neighbours. I ran a book club for over a year, choosing texts about political economy because I wanted people to understand how power really works in our society.

At work, I volunteer for the culture club, organising social events that bring people together and give them new skills. I help with onboarding programs because I remember what it felt like to be new and confused. None of it affects my salary. I do it because it makes the community better, and I’m part of that community.

The frustrating part isn’t that I don’t know what I’d do. The frustrating part is that I do know, and I’m already doing some of it—but only in the margins, only in my spare time, only after I’ve given the best hours of my day to the company. Because I’m too busy being grateful for the privilege of selling my time, in service of goals I don’t share, using skills that could be applied to problems I actually care about.

Every Monday morning, we make a choice. Not the choice between working and not working—most of us don’t have that luxury. But the choice between accepting the mythology and questioning it. Between treating our current economic system as natural law and recognising it as one possible arrangement among many. Between believing that we deserve whatever we get and asking whether anyone deserves to have so much while others have so little.

Your alarm goes off. The shower waits. The commute beckons. The eight hours stretch ahead.

But before you step into that shower, before you start that commute, before you spend another day pretending that this is the best of all possible worlds, ask yourself: What would you do if you were free?

The answer might surprise you. The answer might scare you. But the answer, whatever it is, is the beginning of everything.