Unscripted

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Unscripted: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Entrepreneurship — MJ DeMarco

The Monday That Owns You

Six-thirty in the morning. A phone alarm blares a Nickelback song, and a man drags himself out of bed to face a week he never chose. He pulls on an eight-hundred-dollar suit he bought on a credit card. He climbs into a Mercedes with fifty-seven payments left on it and points it toward a one-hour commute that ends at a seven-dollar parking spot and a cubicle on the sixtieth floor. Cubicle 129A. Fifty thousand dollars of student loans sit behind him. A girlfriend, a biological clock, and an expected engagement ring sit in front of him.

Then the news arrives. Manny, the guy in the next cubicle, has been fired. Manny had quietly outsourced his own job to workers in China and spent his days watching cat videos. With Manny gone, the man's workload climbs by an hour a day plus one Saturday a month. Same pay. Nobody asked his permission. And here is the part that should make your skin crawl: he can't quit. The credit cards, the mortgage, the fancy car, the loans — they have him by the throat. As DeMarco puts it, is a sheep that drives a Mercedes to the slaughterhouse still a sheep?

That night the man misses the football game because of an accident on the highway, drinks four glasses of Jack Daniel's, watches an infomercial for a fat-squashing compression girdle, and falls into a thin, joyless sleep. DeMarco opens *Unscripted* with this scene because it isn't one man's bad luck. It's the shared misery of millions, and almost nobody recognizes it for what it is — a script they were handed at birth and have been performing ever since.