I’d Rather Be Broke

Choosing Work in Trump’s America

It’s about 8:30 on some random weeknight. My wife is driving me home from volleyball practice. I’ve been in the gym for the past three and a half hours with over 50 excited girls who want to play varsity volleyball. All I want to do is take a shower and go to sleep. My leg is tired, my back hurts, I’m sweaty, but all in all I’m excited and I can’t stop talking about each of the girls, how they did, and what I think I want to do tomorrow.

She keeps asking me questions, I keep answering them, and she’s feeding off of my excitement because I am excited. Since I started this gig, almost daily she tells me that this is most certainly my kind of deal. She couldn’t imagine me in an office. In fact, when other people suggest office jobs that I can apply to—mainly because in the greater Sacramento area being an artist isn’t a “legitimate actual job”—she almost always has the same response:

“I’d rather be broke.”

This is a hilarious statement coming from my wife because she absolutely hates being broke. I know this to be true because she was very clear when we first started dating that she absolutely expects gifts. Receiving gifts is her love language—and tangible, real, open-a-box gifts are the kind of gifts she means. I tried to talk her out of a relationship with me because, at the time, I had just resigned from my full-time job and had no idea what I was going to do next. Ever so often in my life I don’t know what the next chapter looks like, so I point blank told her I was not going to be able to provide any material things for her. Instead of being bothered by my admissions, she just kept showing up each week at my house with grocery bags and toys for the kids.

The economy has gotten worse in the past few years since we started dating, and certainly since last year when we got married, so the same habits that we started the relationship with we certainly could not continue into 2026 and decisions had to be made. I have been living this life of an independent artist and an independent historian, and I was starting to feel like hey, maybe I should take on external gigs to contribute to my household. I didn’t want all of the financial responsibility to fall on her, but she has made it very clear lately: I am not allowed to take any soul-crushing job. That is not my purpose in this relationship, and that is not going to be my purpose in the future. She is very clear whenever I tell her about a position that I’m going to apply for:

“I’d rather be broke.”

She said the same this evening as we traveled down El Camino Ave toward home. A neighbor or relative had suggested an office job for me to apply for, and she respectfully declined. She was my first supporter for the Labor Pains project—my literal Day One, who sat in the bed (albeit naked 😉) and listened to my idea. She knows how much building and creating is where I flourish. That is where I dream.

It’s very comical whenever she says this to me because I know how much she hates being broke. She is a self-described hood kid whose parents did not buy her the Jordans and the Nikes that she wanted as a child. So when she got her big girl job, made her big girl money, and was in her big girl marriage with her big girl expense accounts, she spent her money on sneakers. She has amassed an amazing sneaker collection. She owns more sneakers than I have ever worn over the course of my 43 years of life. She has sneakers for every occasion, for every color scheme; some of them go with special Nike suit collections that you can no longer find. This is a common trait in Black households of a certain economic status because this material manifestation—the sneakers—is a demonstration of wealth that was not had at an earlier point in life. Usually in adolescence, Black culture feels the need to show off how far we’ve come, which in the end just shows how little we’ve learned.

You may have felt these ideologies confronting each other in recent years. Black culture’s need for a 24/7/365 hustle in order to make the bag is now being combated with Black women’s resolute stance that we need rest, and we are going to take a break from what everybody else is doing. Black women have finally started to draw very serious boundaries around their labor and energy, and the rest of America is freaking out.

She is distinctly different from me when it comes to labor and work. My wife will tell you that she will do nothing unless given explicit instructions by a superior to do so. She will tell you that she does not want to necessarily imagine or build a system or a thing; she really wants to get paid lots of money to do nothing. Now, that’s what she’ll say, but that’s not really what it is. She admits that she wants to do something that brings her joy. The only problem is that she has spent the last almost 20 years working and not even asking herself what brings her joy. And now, as we settle into the beginning of our oldest daughter’s senior year of high school, she is realizing that she does in fact have time and space to dream—but she’s not even sure what those dreams are made of.

Black American girls are conditioned from birth to believe that their time, energy, and talents are for the benefit of other people. I have built an entire research incubator around exploring this issue, so there’s no way that I can sum it up into a nice neat little bow right now. What I will say is that many Black American women her age and mine (and she’s 37 years old) are starting to ask themselves: What is the point?

We have been raised and told this lie that if we work really hard we will be noticed and we will be rewarded. And then so many of us did exactly everything that we were told to do, only to find ourselves in our late 30s and early 40s without retirement, without wealth assets, without anything. Despite the fact that we have worked our entire lives, we are made to feel as though we are dependent upon systems that have no desire to care for our humanity. But we continue to work because we have to work.

So let’s totally dismantle that train of thought.

If you had six weeks to pursue something purely for your own joy—not for your job, your kids, or your household—what would you do? The first step to liberating yourself from all of this, is imagining yourself elsewhere.