A few weeks ago, I was grabbing coffee with a friend, when I saw an acquaintance from high school working behind the counter. We exchanged the usual pleasantries, after which I asked his plans for the future. He proudly described how he was working three part time jobs, one of which for no pay, in hopes of saving enough to attend the local business school. From there, he expressed his dream of becoming a stockbroker, who makes millions while sitting on a beach in the Bahamas.

On its face, that story seems innocent enough. Admirable even. If I had a nickel for every time a boomer has offered bootstraps as a solution to my generation’s woes, I would be able to pay for his college.

But when examined more closely, this tale becomes more disturbing. This young man, with ambition and an obviously impressive work ethic, is working more than 60 hours a week without benefits or decent wages, just so he can strive for an education. Whatsmore, his life’s goal is not to help cure disease or give aid to the less fortunate; his dream is financial gain without contribution.

He is the exploited, and his greatest hope is to become the exploiter.

While frustrating, I can’t blame him for that ambition. We are all slave to a system which encourages exactly that behavior. As Steinbeck put it, we Americans see ourselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires. We support the mechanisms of our own oppression because of a religious belief that we will one day do the oppressing. The greater our desperation, the more we worship that dream.

The further into the cave we fall, the more we hate the light.

Today, nearly 20% of Americans work part time jobs. We lead the developed world in part time workers per capita. Services like Uber and Lyft, whose recent profitability is only matched by their cruelty towards their workforce, have exploded in this freshly coined “gig” economy.

The newest tool of exploitation is weaponized desperation. For the belief that they will one day rise to the ruling class, workers shed their rights to health, happiness, and dignity.

As a college grad in my Facebook feed recently put it:

The new normal

Unfortunately for us, the extent to which corporations are willing to exploit that raw desperation knows no bounds. As I regularly mention, last year a startup launched which sells the blood of millennials to the vampiric wealthy as an anti aging treatment. Worse still, they advertise as being a source of textbook money.

Our culture has become so enamored with the bootstrap fable that we not only work for low pay, few benefits, and token experience, but we sacrifice our own vitality in hopes of one day being able to survive. Meanwhile, our debt continues to grow, our lifespans continue to shorten, and our public institutions continue to erode.

The “gig” economy is nothing more than a farce which exploits the suffering it creates to suck a bit more blood out of an already zombified generation. It baits us with the dream of royalty, while sentencing us to servitude.

For this reason, I demand that we shed the cutesy facade, and call our market what it really is: the economy of desperation.