I had never heard of this book by Molly McGhee before Nerdette announced it as their January book club selection. The audiobook was readily available from my library, so I went ahead and borrowed it.
I’m still not sure how I feel about it. It’s definitely interesting, well written, and even had me laughing out loud at different points throughout the book. So I think I liked it?
The concept is that Jonathan Abernathy is buried under debt, and thanks to compounding interest, he’s getting more in debt every day with no way out.
His parents both died when he was young, leaving him with a pile of credit card debt. He went to college, but dropped out, leaving him with another pile of student loan debt and no way to get a job that pays enough for him to be able to pay off the debt and his rent and buy food. At one point, he gets a minimum wage job and realizes that, at the end of the month, he’ll have enough to pay for two of those things, but not all three. Been there.
Abernathy seems to get a break when he gets an opportunity to make money in his sleep. It’s part of a government program, which means working there gives him a chance to pay off his massive debt.
The gig is going into people’s dreams and identifying anything in those dreams that might be upsetting to the dreamer. Once he’s identified the upsetting material, another worker will come in and suck it up into a kind of vacuum.
In theory, this is supposed to keep American workers happier, which makes them more productive, which is allegedly good for everyone even though only executives at certain large companies are offered this supposed benefit. Low-wage grunts like Abernathy just have to put up with their nightmares.
I feel like the problem with this was pretty evident from the beginning. Dreams are our brain’s way of processing information and events that happen to us during the day. If you eliminate any of those things before we have a chance to process them, our ability to function would decrease, not increase.
But wait, there’s more! Later on in the book, it’s revealed that the disturbing parts of these dreams don’t just disappear or get destroyed. Instead, the company hangs on to them so they can weaponize them as needed. At one point, there’s even a comment along the lines of, “If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product,” which is clearly referencing the way social media collects and sells all our data.
The book was very weird, largely because it was dealing with dreams, all of which are pretty trippy by nature.
But the corporate aspect felt all-too real, including the ways in which companies take advantage of prisoners for free or low-cost labor, the types of people who tend to get promoted, and the meaningless metrics these companies use to determine who gets promoted and who doesn’t.
I don’t think this book was the most elegant way of talking about late-stage capitalism, but I can’t say it was off base in any of the points it made.