My ‘dream job’ is… not working. No work. I don’t dream about labor.
| @thetrudz (2019)
…
@thetrudz now limits her feed to known Xers, so you can’t access the tweet directly.
In If You “Don’t Dream of Labor,” You Should Organize for Socialism1, written in April 2023 by Caitlyn Clark, we see a highlighting of the ‘I don’t dream of labor’ meme:
That’s the theme of a popular TikTok meme, which started off life as a viral tweet with a quite different meaning. The saying “I don’t dream of labor” has been everywhere on social media in recent years, most notably in a TikTok audio featuring the voice of user @mrhamilton stating in a mock mid-Atlantic accent, “Darling, I’ve told you several times before, I have no dream job — I do not dream of labor.” The audio has since been used in over 51,400 videos. The quote is often falsely attributed to the likes of James Baldwin; in fact, it seems to have originated with Twitter user @thetrudz, whose tweet “My ‘dream job’ is . . . not working. No work. I don’t dream about labor” went viral in 2019.
How different it all is now in 2026. Especially young college grads looking for their first job, but also people who feel stuck in their existing roles, blocked from promotion by the ‘slow fire, slow hire’ economy we are living in. Not to mention the threat of layoffs or the looming impact of AI replacement.
I first wrote about this meme in
A Lifetime Sentence
Hanna Brooks Olsen | Paradoxes of Engagement | I Don't Dream Of Labor | A New Restaurant Business Model | Factoids
One excerpt:
This vignette is another example of how a thought that holds up a critical mirror to our culture is merchandized into selling mirrors instead of reflecting on the original intent of the thought.
What Leaders Do
In What Leaders Really Do2, from 2023, John Kotter carefully parses the facets of leadership, debunking some myths along the way:
Leadership is different from management, but not for the reasons most people think. Leadership isn’t mystical and mysterious. It has nothing to do with having “charisma” or other exotic personality traits. It is not the province of a chosen few. Nor is leadership necessarily better than management or a replacement for it.
Rather, leadership and management are two distinctive and complementary systems of action. Each has its own function and characteristic activities. Both are necessary for success in an increasingly complex and volatile business environment.
No surprise: since he has characterized the business environment as ‘complex and volatile’, that sets the stage for his split between leadership and management:
Management is about coping with complexity. Leadership, by contrast, is about coping with change.
Management, complexity (planning and budgeting). Leadership, volatility (setting direction).
[Leaders] don’t make plans; they don’t solve problems; they don’t even organize people. What leaders really do is prepare organizations for change and help them cope as they struggle through it.’
Leaders are gardening, not engineering. Kotter warns ‘Most discussions of vision have a tendency to degenerate into the mystical’. Which is not where they should reside:
One of the most frequent mistakes that overmanaged and underled corporations make is to embrace long-term planning as a panacea for their lack of direction and inability to adapt to an increasingly competitive and dynamic business environment. But such an approach misinterprets the nature of direction setting and can never work.
Long-term planning is always time-consuming. Whenever something unexpected happens, plans have to be redone. In a dynamic business environment, the unexpected often becomes the norm, and long-term planning can become an extraordinarily burdensome activity. That is why most successful corporations limit the time frame of their planning activities. Indeed, some even consider “long-term planning” a contradiction in terms.
Kotter should be closely read and integrated into our understanding of the yin-yang of leadership and management.
Please support my work with a paid subscription, which I have made as marginal as possible. If you can’t afford yet-one-more-subscription, please help me by restacking this post to spread the word.
