The Weekly System Crash: Monday Syndrome

That urge to "escape from all this and do organic farming" that settles over you every Sunday around 10 p.m. while watching Netflix... Feeling, every time you hear your phone's alarm, as if World War III has broken out... This phenomenon, which popular culture tries to sell us under the name "Monday Syndrome"—as if we'd consumed too many carbs on Sunday—is in fact neither a psychological weakness nor chronic laziness. Monday syndrome is the blue screen that the gigantic operating system called capitalism throws up at the start of every week!

The Lies of "Personal Development" and Real Alienation

While LinkedIn gurus post every Monday morning "Start the day with a glass of alkaline water and send positive energy to the universe!", you are trying to get to work having grown as intimate as a relative with the stranger next to you on the metrobus or in traffic. The system tells us the problem is a "lack of motivation." But the real problem is not motivation; it is alienation.

Imagine: your salary isn't enough to buy the wheel of the car you assemble in the factory, your boss vacations in the Maldives off the profit from the code you wrote, or no one but your manager reads that 80-page presentation you prepared. It is precisely at this moment that your labor becomes alienated from you. As the human being becomes alienated from what they produce with their own hands, they also turn hostile toward the Monday morning on which that production begins. So, friends, the fault is not in your psychology; the fault is in those merciless gears that appropriate the value you produce.

Why Don't We Love Our Work? (Spoiler: The Boss's Car Is Very Nice)

Companies' human resources departments think that if they put colorful beanbag chairs in the offices and add "free filter coffee" to the kitchen, we'll all fall in love with work. But the matter has structural troubles far too deep to be solved with a coffee bean:

• The "We Are a Family" Fairy Tale: Somehow, in this family we always pay the bills but the boss always eats the inheritance. And when it's time for downsizing, the first to be sacrificed are the "self-sacrificing family members" (that is, us).
• The KPI and Performance Mania: Because of targets that push human limits, meaningless metrics, and performance systems that try to turn us against our coworkers, workplaces have practically turned into a "Survivor" island. The only difference is that the eliminated get eliminated from the office tower.
• What They Call "Flexible" Work: Ever since the work-from-home model arrived, our bedroom has become the office and our kitchen the cafeteria. We have to be reachable 24/7, because capitalism never sleeps (and doesn't want us to sleep either).

In short, what we don't love is not working or producing; it's getting up at the crack of dawn to rot away our youth for someone else's profit margin.

The Human of the Future Will Not Set an Alarm

So, will our grandchildren also lament every Sunday evening, "Am I going to see that manager's face again tomorrow"? Of course not. In a future where production is organized not around profit but around the human being and society, the phrase "Monday syndrome" will probably remain only in history books as an element of humor.

In the world of the future, advanced technologies will already do the routine, boring, robotizing jobs. Weekly working hours will be drastically cut. When a person gets up in the morning, they will sit down at their desk not with the anxiety of "Will I get fired today?" but with the excitement of "What can I contribute to society and to myself today?" Work will cease to be a torture endured for survival and turn into a creative act through which the human being realizes themselves.

The Password for Syndrome-Free Offices: Organized Struggle

Burn the neoliberal self-help books, do yoga only to stretch; because the cure for Monday syndrome is not meditation but organized struggle.

There is only one way to truly love the work you do, to feel no anxiety on your way to work in the mornings: to take control of our labor into our own hands. The day we come together side by side in workplaces, unions, and grassroots organizations and democratically bang our fist on the table, that Sunday-evening anxiety will give way to the rightful pride of the class.

Don't forget: the greatest antivirus program against the bosses' greed for profit is solidarity. The future belongs to the organized working class that will live every day of the week with the joy of a Sunday!