[...] After Mustard Lady, some part of me finally accepts that you need walls between you and the customers to survive here, and I start building them. I still do everything I’m supposed to, of course. I just… stop caring. Caring makes you vulnerable.

It’s actually hard to break the habit at first. But going the extra mile just doesn’t make sense. The extra energy it takes for me to do a very good job benefits the customers, our franchise owner, and the McDonald’s brand—and I get nothing but exhaustion in return. Good-faith effort is just too complicated to measure, and therefore doesn’t exist to the fingerprint time clock and staffing algorithms. Even if I were gunning for a promotion, managers barely earn more than crew members. The only reward is in owning a franchise, not It’s actually hard to break the habit at first. But going the extra mile just doesn’t make sense. The extra energy it takes for me to do a very good job benefits the customers, our franchise owner, and the McDonald’s brand—and I get nothing but exhaustion in return. Good-faith effort is just too complicated to measure, and therefore doesn’t exist to the fingerprint time clock and staffing algorithms. Even if I were gunning for a promotion, managers barely earn more than crew members. The only reward is in owning a franchise, not working at one.

[...]

But empathy is a two-sided coin. The shield protects me from screamers, but it also appears to filter out any satisfaction I used to get from making people happy. Without that, and without much opportunity to form friendships with coworkers, my shifts become hour after hour of mechanical movement at top speed, saying the same words and performing the same motions over and over and over. I start really dreading my shifts.

[...] There’s actually lots of ways to “infect” a rat with depression, though some are more efficient than others. A frequently cited 1992 paper reviewing the best methods concludes that you don’t actually want to traumatize or terrify your rats, like Selye accidentally did. The closest approximation of the depression that plagues modern humans can be achieved by bombarding lab rats with mild but chronic, random, and inescapable stress. You don’t have to terrify them—just remove predictability and control from their lives, and they’ll eventually lose interest in pleasurable things. When they do, you’re ready to test whether your experimental antidepressant will get them interested again.

The whisper comes from whatever it is inside me that gets angry when things are unfair, and thinks it’s possible to change things for the better. It’s what briefly hijacked my body to scream “HEY, FUCK YOU, LADY!” It’s the part of me that likes to help people, and can be hurt by them. It’s what makes me able to experience pleasure and fury—the exact part that went missing during my gray years of depression. It’s the idea that the world can be better. It’s the expectation that the world should be better.

I’d be a better employee without this little voice. If I hadn’t graduated from a good college, or had been born below the middle class, or had children very young, I’d probably have spent the last decade and a half struggling to sandpaper this troublemaking part of myself down to nothing.

I don’t know if it’s crazy-guy germs or just bad luck, but a couple of days later I come down with a nasty cold/flu and have to call out of a few shifts. Candela is less than pleased, but because this is San Francisco, I can call out sick without fear of losing my job. If I’d been working there a little longer, I’d even have been able to call out sick without losing the day’s wages.* But the next schedule after I call out sick, I only get fifteen hours instead of my usual thirty to thirty-five.

Cutting someone’s hours is a common punishment in fast food and retail—and the subject of an important class-action suit currently in the works against McDonald’s. In 2014, the National Labor Relations Board brought seventy-eight charges against McDonald’s and some of its franchise operators for punishing workers who’d participated in Fight for $15 protests by, among other things, cutting their hours.

That puts me in good company. According to a 2015 survey of thousands of US fast-food workers by the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health, 79 percent had been burned on the job in the previous year—most more than once. And not everyone got off as easily as I did.

“My managers kept pushing me to work faster, and while trying to meet their demands I slipped on a wet floor, catching my arm on a hot grill,” said Brittney Berry, whose forearm was severely burned, to the point of nerve damage, at the Chicago McDonald’s where she worked. “The managers told me to put mustard on it, but I ended up having to get rushed to the hospital in an ambulance.” A third of fast-food workers surveyed had been told to treat burns with condiments like mustard or mayonnaise.

“One of my coworkers and I have to empty the grease trap without protective gear, and since we were never given the proper equipment or training, we just dump the hot grease into a plastic bag in a box of ice,” said Martisse Campbell, who works at a McDonald’s in Philly and whose hand was severely burned by boiling grease from a fryer. He was also familiar with condiment-as-salve suggestions—“Once, my coworker got badly burned, and our manager told him, ‘Put mayonnaise on it; you’ll be good.’”

Businesses used to accept Wanda’s inefficiencies as a necessary part of their workforce—humans sometimes need to socialize, go to the bathroom, take sick days, drive Mom to a doctor’s appointment, attend funerals, stay up until four with the baby.

But at this moment, techno-Taylorism, the decline of organized labor, automation, and the ongoing destruction of shark-cage worker protections have tipped the balance of power in the workplace way, way in favor of employers. It’s gotten so out of balance that even many workers seem to truly believe that the things that make them less efficient than sharks or robots are weaknesses—moral failings, like original sin.

So millions of people battle millennia of evolution every day, desperately trying to be something fundamentally different from what we are. And when we inevitably fail, we torture ourselves with guilt over not being born a shark, or at least able to plausibly imitate one.

Fuck that. You’re not a shark. You’re a human being. It doesn’t make you a bad person if your family and friends and dignity are more important to you than some job. That makes you normal. The true outliers are the Taylors, the Fords, the Bezoses, the Ayns—people whose work is their life and life is their work. People who thrive alone in the cold ocean. People who can’t or won’t understand that almost all other humans have very different values, needs, and priorities. People with massive control over how stressful our day-to-day existence is.

So why is America so crazy? It’s the inescapable chronic stress built into the way we work and live. It’s the insane idea that an honest day’s work means suppressing your humanity, dignity, family, and other nonwork priorities in exchange for low wages that make home life constantly stressful, too. Is it surprising that Americans have started exhibiting unhelpful physical, mental, and social adaptations to chronic stress en masse? Our bodies believe that this is the apocalypse.

And on top of that, people with power seem totally blind to how dire life has gotten for much of the country. The state of the union is always strong. GDP is up. Unemployment is low. Everything’s fine. They’re so insulated from the real world that they don’t or can’t understand that, for most people, our current system is obviously broken. That’s why Make America Great Again caught on while Clinton’s counter that America Is Already Great didn’t—people aren’t stupid. They know something isn’t right.

All the rat has to do is climb the wall to the other side and she’ll be free. Rats B and C will figure this out and clamber over to the other side pretty quickly; so will any random sewer rat.

But Rat A’s entire life has been nothing but unpredictable, inescapable suffering, and it’s crippled her capacity to imagine anything better. So Rat A will just sit there getting electrocuted forever, even when relief is a short climb away. It’s a phenomenon called “learned helplessness.”

Rat A is so tragic because her despair makes sense. All evidence in her life so far supports her idea that everything just sucks, forever, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. When she assures you that climbing the wall is a waste of energy, she’s genuinely trying to save you the pain she knows firsthand.