Dwain Northey

Monday Doesn’t Mean Shit

Every Monday, social media fills up with the same tired memes. Garfield hates Mondays. Coffee memes. “Is it Friday yet?” memes. Pictures of people face down on their desks because apparently the greatest tragedy in modern civilization is that the weekend ended.

Monday. Monday. Monday. We get it.

What always strikes me as odd is how these memes assume everybody works the same schedule. The classic American dream—or nightmare depending on your perspective—is still portrayed as a 9-to-5, Monday-through-Friday office job.

The problem is that a huge chunk of America doesn’t live in that world.

If you work in healthcare, patients don’t stop having heart attacks because it’s Sunday night. Nurses, doctors, respiratory therapists, EMTs, and countless others are working every day of the week. Monday isn’t some dramatic return to reality. It might be their second day on shift. It might be their day off. It might be the middle of a twelve-hour stretch they’ve already lost track of.

The same goes for food service. Somebody has to cook the burgers, stock the shelves, wash the dishes, deliver the groceries, and pour the coffee while the rest of America complains about going back to work.

Transportation workers don’t get to tell airplanes, trains, buses, and trucks to take Mondays off. Law enforcement doesn’t close for weekends. Fire departments don’t lock the doors on Saturday night and reopen Monday morning. Utility workers don’t ignore power outages because it’s a holiday.

Even beyond those careers, millions of people work rotating shifts, overnight schedules, split schedules, weekends, holidays, and whatever hours their employer decides are necessary.

For a lot of us, Monday is just another square on the calendar.

I’ve worked enough odd schedules in my life that I sometimes had to stop and think about what day it was. Tuesday felt like Saturday. Thursday felt like Monday. Sometimes your weekend lands on a random Wednesday because that’s when you happened to get a day off.

The sun comes up. The alarm goes off. You go to work.

The calendar doesn’t care.

What’s funny is that the Monday obsession says something about who gets represented in popular culture. The office worker with weekends off became the default setting for what Americans think work looks like, even though millions of people are living completely different realities.

The nurse getting off a night shift at 7 a.m. Monday isn’t worried about Monday. They’re worried about sleep.

The line cook isn’t worried about Monday. They’re worried about making rent.

The truck driver isn’t worried about Monday. They’re worried about getting the load delivered on time.

The single parent working two jobs isn’t worried about Monday. They’re worried about surviving another week.

Monday is mostly an inconvenience for people lucky enough to have predictable schedules.

For everyone else, it’s just another day.

So every time I see the avalanche of Monday memes, I can’t help but laugh a little. Not because they’re wrong, but because they’re written from a very specific slice of American life that gets treated as universal.

Meanwhile, millions of us are standing there wondering what all the fuss is about.

Monday?

Monday doesn’t mean shit.