© Jimmy Kimmel
There's a saying that is sometimes attributed to Karl Marx or Slavoj Zizek—apocryphally, in both cases—that tidily sums up the existential angst some Americans feel at the start of a traditional work week:
You don't hate Mondays. You hate capitalism.The simple thesis here is that there's nothing intrinsic to "Monday," which is just a word we've invented to delineate every seventh day, that makes your average 9-5 worker miserable. The despair comes from the system, which invests "Monday" with meaning—this is the day you return to the cycle of repetitive, unsatisfying labor that fills you with loathing and anxiety.
This
system is the thing you should rage against; this is the thing you should change. "Monday" is a metonym, but a deceptively harmful one—a metonym in camouflage—because it has a way of diverting a person's attention from the boot heel that is grinding her soul into dust. Instead, she takes the oppressive system as a given, and transfers her negative emotions to an inanimate, meaningless symbol—"Monday"—that is both immutable and impervious, since it is, very basically, nothing more than a day of the week. You may as well get mad at a rock. The dual effect of this transference is to deny the person any chance at changing his circumstances—since blaming Mondays instead of capitalism turns potential activism into fatalism—and to shield the system from criticism and reform.
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