It’s Monday, the beginning of losing control again.

You thought you wanted a college degree to get the high-paying job you never solidified in your head. Now you just wish you had morning peace.

You’re numb to your alarm clock shocking your system to a cortisol bath; it doesn’t matter, you’re about to commit another self-harm crime by adenosine destruction through chugging that K-Cup garbage sludge of coffee from that one Christmas gift your friends got you in support of your first “real” job.

You long for a slow morning again. The kind you used to have on Saturdays, watching cartoons as the day unraveled in the background.

But you’re an adult now, so this is it: 40 hours a week, for two thousand more weeks, and then you’ll get your mornings back, right? You weren’t in the room when they wrote that deal, and you won’t be in the room when they rewrite it.

You look out your window and see a couple of people already heading out in gym clothes. Early risers, you scoff, yet they do something for themselves first thing, like a walk, reading a book, or going to a pilates class.

In reality, you’ve wanted to try one of these, but you never wrangled your time away from your doomscrolling routine that you can no longer remember when it became your default setting.

You soothe yourself with the mantra, “a job’s a job”, a phrase you didn’t create, but it helps you stop thinking about your situation.

You shackle on your work clothes, the shirt with the monochrome blandness that sucks up all your individuality. Even the “cool” offices, the ones with the hoodies and the kombucha on tap, run on the same forty hours. The snacks are just better.

So you do what you do every Monday. You clock in, you step onto the 40-hour treadmill, and it hums the same hum it’s hummed your whole adult life.

But today, mid-stride, you make the mistake every machine dreads. You look down.

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Section 1: Our Hedonic Utopia

How did it all start? Did you take your first job because it was the first one that was offered to you? Was it to join a friend who also worked there, or was it simply because you knew you could possibly get an offer there and nowhere else?

We must start with the acknowledgement of this original sin, the first foot into the door onto the hedonic treadmill that has kept you in on the hamster wheel, always busy, never allowing you time and space to be aware that the door behind you was never locked.

You look at the 40-hour treadmill, and it’s signed “last serviced 1926”, the year it was invented, and no one around you is questioning it. This is just how it has been.

The rent is coming due, so you get back on the treadmill, but now that you’ve noticed the antiquated system running all of this… you begin to question what makes this job different from the next if they all run on 40 hours?

Of course, there’s a mission statement bolted on by the founder, something generic with no semblance of answers to why you’re all here. “To change the world, one product gizmo at a time,” or, if they’re more explicit, “To provide shareholders more value in their investment”.

So you look at your white-collar task on the Google Doc, you need to write your report for the week, and you’re finding it difficult to conjure the spirit to finish, so you look at the mission statement, “To change the world…”, and you find the will to… slam your head against the desk.

“Why can’t you do this?” you berate yourself, then continue to wallow in pity.

Stop. Rewind that.

You read the thing that was supposed to motivate you, but it does the opposite. Why? Asking why is good.

It’s vague; that’s why. It’s so generic that any other company in the neighborhood can copy and paste it as theirs.

So if this job isn’t as different as the next, where did we get this 40-hour treadmill? You look back at the service sticker peeling away; “1926” is dangling, and you peel it back. It’s actually 1817, and it was signed by Robert Owen.

Who’s this guy? Did he cast this 40-hour curse onto us?

Quite the opposite: in 1817, Robert Owen, a mill owner, dreamt up a slogan for his Utopia: “eight hours labour, eight hours recreation, eight hours rest”. He was actually trying to improve working conditions; back then they didn’t have many worker protection laws, or even child labor laws.

His own mills would have 25% of workers’ children around the age of 5 laboring over 12 hours a day.

So what made him change his heart?

He wasn’t born wealthy, but he grew into it and became an entrepreneur at the beginning of the industrial age, buying new mill machines that would be powered by steam engines.

As he got wealthy and recognized, he became a member of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society. I think it was here, where they discussed enlightenment and workers’ rights, that his budding ideas for better working conditions began.

Unfortunately, it never took shape legally, and he never got traction, as he was viewed as too extreme, especially after he denounced all religions.

So Mr. Owen died with the slogan, and his 8-hour idea got filed under “utopian nonsense,” and the machines kept running.

Here’s a number you’ll want to be sitting down for, as you might be death-gripping your armrests from outrage: it took 121 years for Owen’s phrase to become law in the USA under the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938.

This gap wasn’t quiet, but it wasn’t bloodless either. On May 4th, 1886, at 10:30 PM, a riot broke out, followed by a bomb explosion at Chicago’s Haymarket Square. Police shot and killed citizens who were striking. The reason for the strike? Demand for an eight-hour workday.

People were shot over the question of whether you get your evenings.

And it wasn’t a measly change from 50 hours to 40. When the government finally gave in and started tracking hours worked with the creation of the Bureau of Labor Statistics in the late 1880s, it found that people were working 100 hours a week.

Your 40 hours, the number you’ve been side-eyeing, was a discount, brought to you by years of radical ideas and blood on the streets.

So no, the treadmill wasn’t built to trap you. It was dragged down from 100 to 40 by people who were fed up.

Which brings us back to the sticker you peeled. If Owen signed the machine in 1817, who serviced it in 1926?

You rub the sticker back in its place; it sticks for a moment, enough for you to see H. Ford before it springs into place.

That’s right, the most famous industrialist of our time, Henry Ford, was sort of a people’s person. I say kinda because when Ford took his car factory operations down from 6 days to 5 without changing their compensation, he did so with a capitalistic intention.

Leisure, he argued, is good business. A worker with a free Saturday is a customer with a free Saturday. Into the Ford dealerships his own workers went, and so our weekend further solidified as more companies took the improved productivity as a goal and implemented their own 5-day work weeks.

You stare back at the sticker, in awe. The last person who serviced it was also the one profiting from it. Remember that… because as you may have picked up, we’re in the 5th industrial revolution, or as the World Economic Forum is naming, “The Intelligent Age”. I personally like the CAT Age, Cognitive Abundance Transition.

Owen tried to service the machine and got laughed out of the room. Ford serviced it and got a consumer class. Now the CAT Age mechanics are rolling up, and everyone’s crowding around asking what the new treadmill will look like. Four-day work week? UBI? How much?

You notice the wrench on the floor next to the mechanics. You pick it up. Your turn to make your edits to the machine. It starts with an hour.

Section 2: It’s time to build yourself

First thing you do with the wrench: write the spec.

Their mission statement was vague on purpose. Vague can’t be held accountable or checked, can’t be finished, so it never has to pay out.

Yours is different; it’ll be concrete AND inspirational. It’ll have intent that’ll be meaningful and memorable. And most importantly, it’ll help you eliminate decisions so you can make your best contributions.

Yes, this is from Greg McKeown’s book, “Essentialism”, and yes, it will work outside of boardrooms. Feel the difference in your hands: “Eighteen months of runway, then the van”, “Finish my short film by December”, “Saturday mornings belong to teaching the neighborhood kids chess”.

Whether it’s an escape hatch, art, community, I’m not here to pick your door. Your mission statement will have a finish line; then you’ll write another because it’s built to discover yourself and life.

Why write it now? Because 90% of knowledge work is becoming an easy task for AI. When we no longer have these jobs, we’ll need to find meaning elsewhere.

As Dario Amodei wrote in his essay, “Machines of Loving Grace”, in section 5: Work and Meaning: “As long as AI is only better at 90% of a given job, the other 10% will cause humans to become highly leveraged.” You can watch my breakdown video here. Part 2 coming soon.

This is your chance to be on the remaining 10% of jobs, treadmills or not. I can’t force you to opt in, but I can help you realize you can step off the treadmill and make time for yourself to figure out what’s worth your time.

That time has a name: the first hour. The one you currently donate to the “legendary pull” before the K-Cup even finishes brewing.

One rule, and it runs in one direction: they only get everything after the first hour, never before it. You don’t ask HR for it; there’s no form. It was never theirs. Read your offer letter: their treadmill starts at 9.

And before you turn this into a 5 AM guru routine, don’t. Ten minutes counts. The walk, the book, the pilates class you kept postponing, those were never self-care; that was you trying to stake this claim without knowing you already owned the lot.

You wanted your Saturday mornings back. This is where they live now, ten minutes at a time, seven days a week, before anyone can bill you.

I agree with Dario when he wrote in the same section, “I think meaning comes mostly from human relationships and connection, not from economic labor. People do want a sense of accomplishment, even a sense of competition…” he goes on to write that it’ll still be possible to spend years attempting difficult tasks like founding companies or becoming a Hollywood actor.

So spend 10 minutes, then eventually an hour figuring out how to spend time with friends and family more, and create your own goals that challenge and help you learn more about yourself.

Things are going to get more uncertain soon, and we need to not be afraid to influence our future; don’t wait for the Davos mechanics, make your own rules.

You too can service your hedonic treadmill

Ford predicted the week would keep shrinking, and history is on repeat. We have a frustrated workforce: China’s young workers lying flat, our American equivalent quiet quitting since COVID. We have revolutionary technology making knowledge workers obsolete. We have progressive companies running four-day workweek trials. It’s 1926 again, and the mechanics are already in the shop.

Will you wait 12 more years until the law catches up? Or will you take your life into your hands and make sure you and your close ones are better off? Don’t ask what the new job machines will look like.

Ask who’s signing the service sticker. Whatever gift they roll out, the four-day week, the UBI check, the agent that works while you sleep, flip it over first. There’s a receipt sewn in the lining. There always is. This time, make sure your name is on it.

Tomorrow, the alarm will still shock you into a cortisol bath. The K-cup sludge will still do the trick, and the treadmill will still say “last serviced 1926”.

But tomorrow, before the brew finishes, before the first social media pull, you’ll take ten minutes and write one sentence: the mission they’d never give you.

And on the drive into work, when you say “a job’s a job,” it won’t be a sedative anymore. It’ll be the terms on your new deal: it’s just a job. Forty hours, won for you by people who bled for it. The first hour, won by you.

Peel the sticker one last time. Sign it.

Last serviced, today. Technician: you.