I will keep telling you about Design Is a Job, the Necessary Second Edition until you actually read it.

It has come to my attention that some people are hesitating buying the second edition of Design Is a Job because they read the first edition TEN. YEARS. AGO. I can't stress how different this edition is.

Remember when you read the first one ten years ago and thought “This book is excellent, it’s exactly what I needed to read at this exact moment in time. It’s giving me goosebumps.” Ok, maybe you didn’t phrase it exactly like that, but you were thinking it.?Design Is a Job?was the book you needed at the start of your career because it honestly dealt with the shit going on at the time. So it was very satisfying, and you underlined every sentence. Well, now it’s ten years later. Things have changed. A lot. So I rewrote the book. A lot. I wanted to make sure that people reading it for the first time got that same hit of zeitgeist adrenaline that you got ten years ago. And who knows, you might read the second one and get to relive all those good feelings from ten years ago.?

Trust me when I tell you it’s a very different book. For example, here’s the excerpt that you are needing this exact moment in time. It wasn’t there before, but it is now:

It’s Not Mondays You Hate

If you happen to scroll through Twitter on a Sunday evening (which I don’t recommend because it’s full of Nazis and lonely white boys trying to convince you crypto is real), you’ll see folks tweeting about how anxious they are about the upcoming work week, a feeling sometimes called the Sunday scaries. You’ll also see plenty of memes about hating Mondays, some including Garfield and some not. But the effect can be pretty chilling.

The deal that our Socialist ancestors made with the Captains of Industry was very clear: we sell you our labor Mondays through Fridays, and the weekends belong to us. Both parties have reneged on that deal. Plenty of people reading this use their Saturdays to catch up on work from the previous week and spend their Sundays stressing out about the week to come.

I once asked my therapist what the difference between anxiety and stress was, and she put it clearly: anxiety comes from within and stress comes from without. I’ll give you an example. If you’re heading on vacation and decide you need to pack ten books about design because you feel guilty about relaxing instead of getting ahead in your craft? That’s anxiety. It’s coming from within. If your backpack snaps from the weight of all those books? That’s stress. The stitching didn’t break on its own. It broke from the external weight of the books.

The Sunday scaries? That’s not anxiety. That’s stress. It’s coming from the weight of previous traumatic workweeks.

The greatest trick capitalism ever pulled was convincing you that the trauma it was causing you was a problem inside your own head. It’s a problem born from dealing with bullshit in toxic workplaces. And if you’re thinking that you’ve never worked in a toxic workplace, you might be part of what’s making it toxic, Chad.

I mention this because the first part of solving a problem is to adequately call it what it is. And with every newspaper article I see lamenting “the problem with today’s workers” or “why doesn’t anyone want to work anymore,” we’re being actively gaslit. The problem isn’t us.

If we are going to create better workplaces, we need agency. The first part is to acknowledge what is actually broken. It ain’t us, it’s the workplace. The second part is to understand our role within that workplace. We are what makes it possible. The third part is understanding that, for the people in charge, it’s already a great workplace. It works well for them, so they’re not in a hurry to change shit. No one is looking out for us but us.

It’s not Mondays you hate—it’s capitalism.?

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Buy the damn book.