Nobody Wants to Work Anymore

This isn’t a boomer take.
This isn’t me shaking my fist at a cloud.
This is just what I see —
and I see a lot.

I walk past churches every day, trying to clear my head,
and there’s always someone standing out front,
screaming about the end of the world
or handing out Bible study pamphlets like they’re trying to buy a timeshare in heaven.

My dad’s widow — yeah, they were two weeks from finalizing the divorce —
interjects “Praise God” into conversations about brunch, car tires, or paper towels.
It’s a reflex. A nervous tic dressed up in faith.

My friends — the same ones I used to drink with, fuck around with, live like we had something to prove —
they’re back in church now. Weekly.
Wearing button-downs and pretending that certainty still exists.
Meanwhile, the preacher’s kids?
The ones who used to drag me into Hell House haunted horror shows?
They’re atheists now.
Angry, brilliant, empty-eyed atheists.
Like the pendulum swung too far and broke the clock.

But you know what they all have in common?

They don’t want to work.

I’m not talking about jobs.
Most of them are employed.
They’ve got titles, nameplates, ergonomic chairs.

But none of them want to work.
On themselves.
On the rot.
On the mess that lives under the nice clothes and Instagram captions.

The religious folks?
They’ve outsourced their effort.
If something good happens, it’s God’s plan.
If something bad happens, it’s still God’s plan.
He’s the duct tape on the cracked foundation.
The cheese on the burned steak.

It’s all God.
So they don’t have to be anything.
Just compliant. Just plugged in.

And the atheists?
They’ve got one foot in the grave and the other in a Reddit thread.
It’s all meaningless, so why bother.
They’re not wrong, not exactly —
but they still wake up with that ache,
still secretly want to matter,
still crave some fucked-up version of peace they don’t believe in.

And yeah — I get it.

Life is hard.

Right?

Wrong.

Life’s not hard.
It’s bloated.
It’s rigged.
It’s overcomplicated on purpose — so someone else can profit while you drown in forms and fees and fucking hold music.

I’m dealing with my dad’s death right now.
His bills.
His estate.
His digital footprint.
His secrets.
His mess.

And you know what?
It should be simple.

There should be a room.
A pile of money.
A few people who mattered.
And a handshake agreement that says:
"You take what you’re owed.
We’ll take what’s left."

But instead, there are hoops.
Paperwork.
Procedures.
Deadlines.
Lawyers licking envelopes like it’s a blood ritual.

Why?

Because we built a society that needs to manufacture struggle to justify jobs.
We confuse friction with value.
We think if something doesn’t feel like a grind, it isn’t real.

Your car needs tags?
Great.
You should be able to click a button.
Instead, you take a day off work to get judged by a guy with a name tag and a fluorescent light twitching overhead.

But none of this shit is hard.
It’s just stupid.

And we do it —
we keep doing it —
because we’re afraid of stillness.

Afraid of what we’ll hear in the quiet.

Because if the noise stops,
we might have to admit we’ve been wasting our lives
on other people’s expectations
and someone else’s definition of success.

You want freedom?

Write your to-do list for today.
Then burn half of it.
Not because you finished it.
Because none of it fucking matters.

Nobody’s going to remember whether you organized your sock drawer.
Nobody’s going to care if you mopped the kitchen floor on a Wednesday.
Buy the goddamn robot vacuum. Let it do the meaningless work.

And with the ten minutes you just got back?
Don’t fill them.
Don’t doomscroll.
Don’t reply to that Slack message.
Don’t start a new chore to prove you’re still a “productive member of society.”

Just exist.
Feel something.
Taste your coffee.
Let your shoulders drop for the first time in months.
Let the silence ruin you a little —
so you can start again, honest this time.

Because here’s the punchline:

Nobody wants to work.
But you do.
You’ve just been working on the wrong things.

You’ve been sanding down your edges to fit someone else’s mold.
You’ve been running laps on a treadmill someone else built.
You’ve been polishing your image while your soul atrophies in the basement.

Stop.

Work on waking up.
Work on remembering how to feel.
Work on kissing your person longer than necessary.
Work on laughing at the wrong time.
Work on being fully, disgustingly, gloriously human.

That’s the only work that matters.
The rest is noise.
The rest is bondage with a timecard.

So look up.
Look around.

Your life is right there.
And it’s fucking waiting.


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The Gate Collapsed

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The Calm Is What Hurts the Most