I want to sit in the garden in the sun and eat oranges with my shirt off

...instead, I chug my cold brew and open my laptop like a good girl

I wake up at 4am and immediately feel it. Capitalism has me by the throat again and is whispering in my ear like a needy lover: Where are you going? What’s your plan?

It feels like a sin to say it out loud: I do not care about my career. Work is supposed to be the center of everything! Growth, progress, promotions. Grind, bitch. Hustle. They say if you're not moving forward, you're falling behind. But behind what? Who is keeping score?

I wasn’t always like this. I was once the kind of person who believed in hard work. I spent the majority of my life proving something to an invisible audience. I was the person who stayed late, who answered emails while brushing my teeth, who enjoyed the sound of a calendar notification. I was the person who felt an almost erotic satisfaction in being described as driven. It was my entire identity and had been since I was very young. I thought this was what it meant to be alive.

Then cancer took my tongue. Most of it, anyway. Enough to remind me, even now, that it could come back at any moment and finish the job. Once you’ve faced a cancer diagnosis, the idea of climbing the corporate ladder starts to feel like an inside joke you’re no longer in on. I don’t believe in momentum anymore. I don’t believe in proving things. I believe in just waking up and still being here.

And it’s strange how much effort it takes to do nothing! To refuse the grind, to let the emails sit unanswered, to stop pretending that growth is a moral imperative. People don’t like it when you stop performing ambition. They look at you like you’re wasting your life. But I already almost lost my life, and honestly, I’m not interested in handing over what’s left of it to a job, just to make some rich guy at the top richer.

It is 4am for god's sake. I roll onto my side and try to negotiate with it. Maybe if I drink some water. Maybe if I turn the pillow to the cool side. Maybe if I could shut my brain up.

But no, the thought is here, fully formed: It is a crime to not care about my career. Not an actual crime, but the kind that makes people shift in their seats and glance sideways uncomfortably. The kind that makes managers blink three times before responding, recalibrating. I imagine saying it out loud during my quarterly one-on-one: I have no goals. I imagine their face buffering.

"Oh…but where do you want to see yourself in five years?"

Alive, I guess? Not exhausted, not answering emails in bed. They need me to say I am eager. Engaged. Not the truth, which is: I want my paycheck and my health insurance, and for my time to belong to me. A quiet morning with coffee and a dog-eared Bukowski novel. A slow walk without a podcast telling me how to optimize my fucking life.

“But growth is important, for your future,” they will say, as if my future isn’t just another long line of mornings like this one, awake too early, wondering if I have failed simply by wanting less.

I roll over and stare at the ceiling. I do not want a promotion. I want to be a person, not a career. I want to sit in the garden in the sun and eat oranges with my shirt off. I want to stop feeling like I am betraying something unnamed and enormous, simply by existing without a five-year plan. I am just an animal, living on a planet!

But capitalism requires the performance of ambition. You better always be striving, even if you have nowhere to go. I wonder what would happen if I did just say it out loud. Would they fire me? Would they say: "Thank you for your honesty, but we’re looking for someone more engaged"? Probably. I close my eyes again. In a few hours, I’ll log on and smile and say the things I’m supposed to say. But for now I will close my eyes and dream of something else.