Everyone with an internet connection, it seems, is rising and grinding. And somewhere in between the rising and the grinding, these risers and grinders find time to tell the world that they are, in fact, rising and grinding. They use the hashtag #RiseAndGrind as a clarion call not just to those fellow risers and grinders grinding away out there in the world, but to those who are not rising and/or grinding.

For one to rise and shine seems quaint in this Age of Rising and Grinding on various social media outlets brimming with the rising and grinding hoards attached at the eyeballs to their Twitter and Facebook and Instagram accounts. We must grind, then publicize the grind. I've tweeted for a couple years about this pervasive rising and grinding, having a little fun along the way at the expense of the droves of devoted risers and grinders. This book is filled with many of the satirical missives that, hopefully, make a point about the culture of rising and grinding while bringing a smile to the faces of those who might roll their eyes at always-earnest rise-and-grind tweets.

The rising part of the two-step process has remained the same, for one must rise before one does anything. It's noteworthy – disconcerting, I'd argue – that the latter step has changed, morphing into something implying drudgery, some sort of undesirable, irrepressible, desperate effort. No longer do we shine when we awake – arms stretched overhead, brains slowly coming into focus for a new day. Now we grind. We work, we sweat, we strive, we move, we push, we do, we will ourselves: we grind.

Drudgery has become sport in this grind-centric culture – a badge of honor we wear with puffed chests. We brag about working long, exhausting hours. We take pride in our lack of sleep, our refusal to listen to our bodies and rest. We don't dare imply that we have time to relax, to do nothing, to offset the effects of the grind. We must, at all costs, convince people that we grind and grind and grind because there's dignity in grinding.

What were we created to do if not grind? God made grinders, and they were good.

The wholesale replacement of shining with grinding is equal parts telling, inevitable, and, in my considered estimation, worrisome. Rise and shine surely means different things to different people, but to me the phrase implies something overtly and unashamedly positive, something cheery and uplifting. My mom, when she woke me up for school from my dead adolescent sleep, would declare that it was time to rise and shine. She would rub my back with the sort of tenderness that can't be mimicked. I still – as a 30-something married father of two – miss that wonderful awakening. I guess I always will.

There's a carefree element to rising and shining. To rise and shine is to simply be – not to force anything, not to make anything happen. Rise and be yourself. Rise and do what needs to be done, but also do what you would like to do. If you're alive in a developed, post-industrial society, you likely have to do some amount of grinding to maintain a roof over your head and food in your belly. Grinding undoubtedly has its place: to ensure your survival. But it's only one of those two – shining, not grinding – that brings to mind my son's Sesame Street books, full of idyllic scenes in which people (and furry monsters) work, but also do what they want to do, what conjures joy. They paint and sing, they play games and dance, they laugh and talk about nothing of import. In short, they shine.

Shining – to give forth or glow with light – has a communal element. You're not shining just for you, but for those around you – family, friends, and strangers alike. Something that shines is radiant and bright. It reaches out beyond itself.

To shine is to obliterate darkness. I'm a cynical person, so I have no illusions that darkness can be repelled forever. It can't. Whether you think darkness is the end of your existence or simply a transition to some other level of existence is up to you. Shining, it seems, is the way to hold back that darkness, if just for a bit. Life is a short, warm moment, as Pink Floyd said. Shining makes it so.

Rising and shining has an undeniably utopian element, whereas rising and grinding – its grittier, stone-faced, fun-shunning cousin – has a most definite post-apocalyptic feel. You know who rises and grinds? Characters in the Mad Max movies. They grind in abject misery, in a world of libertarian fantasies, where civil society has been summarily replaced by a brutal hellscape in which everyone fends of themselves and no one else.

That, in summary, is grinding.

I don't think it's a coincidence that that phrase – that dictate – has come to prominence in the age of crushing economic austerity, roiling, hopelessly corrupt international markets racked by bowel-shaking greed and fear, and an entire generation of political leaders that has never once questioned the underpinnings of unfettered self interest. What's good for you is good for you. Get yours. Do you. If your neighbor didn't get hers, she didn't deserve it. Plain and simple.

Grind on and be free: the phrase almost oozes from the American ethos. If everyone were a dedicated riser and grinder, we hear, everything would be okay.

There's an innate selfishness in rising and grinding. There's an implication that you are all that matters, that there is no vast universe, but only your needs and desires. Grind to eat, grind to purchase, grind to upgrade, grind to get more and more and more, grind because someone somewhere is grinding harder than you. Grind because you're afraid. Look over your shoulder and grind. Fear and grind. Feel pangs of terror in your heart and grind.

No one ever shined their way to the top, we're told. They grind to the top, like a possessed upside down drill spinning recklessly through the floors of a skyscraper, destroying everyone and everything in its path without a modicum of remorse because there are no victims in the World of Grinding. There are only volunteers.

Humankind competes today for diminishing resources. That goes for everyday working people more than any other group. Wages have stagnated and oceans of money sit above our heads, out of reach, protected by elites and safe from taxation. We've been left to fight in the Thunderdome for the scraps – the crumbs – falling from the tables of our moneyed masters. So we grind. We grind over and through each other. We grind in offices, hoping and praying that our grinding will one day – someday – pay off. We are pitted against each other in a daily grinding match. There's no time to even question why we're grinding, or who benefits when we grind against fellow workers. We become machines programmed to do one thing: grind.

Who benefits from your endless grinding? Who cares? Just grind. And when you're done grinding, grind some more.

The deafening drumbeat of the daily grind has only recently taken on the form of tweets, but the message that drives our collective grind has been with us for a long while. And it's worked for those at the top of the grinding food chain. A steady rise in worker productivity was met with an almost identical increase in worker wages from 1948-1973, but a 73.4 percent spike in American workers' net productivity from 1973-2015 coincided with near-total wage stagnation, according to a study from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI). This means, in short, that Americans are working harder than ever, producing more than ever, with nothing to show for it. If wages had grown as productivity jumped, an American worker with an annual income of $50,000 today would make upwards of $75,000 per year, according to EPI research.

We're not reaping the fruits of our daily grind. It's the beneficiaries of your grind – your labor – who don't want you to know these ugly little economic facts, or to ask who has, in fact, reaped the fruits of your labor. Yet we have billionaires fighting any and all efforts for fast food workers to earn a livable wage. Business magnates have set out to dismantle labor unions to ensure that collective grinding – and bargaining – is made toothless. People who own more homes than you own pairs of pants refuse to let you share the benefits of a 42-year increase in productivity. They rise and know you'll grind.

Our eternal grind is at least partly based on our cultural obsession with chasing happiness. An entire industry has developed around our desire to be happy, to be content, to do whatever it takes to achieve some level of serenity. Books, DVDs, and all manner of media appeal to our wrenching desperation to be happy. Tweets about the ways in which people rise and grind indicate – if not outright declare – that grinding is the path to happiness. Much of the rise-and-grind subtext charges that grinding is, in fact, the key to happiness.

The opposite is true.

A Stanford University study that drew data from more than 500,000 people, tracking "day-to-day fluctuations and patterns in people's emotions," found that people's feelings of well being were lowest during the workweek. Those good feelings – that happiness – peaked on the weekends. These findings might not stun you. What proved surprising, however, was that the pattern was the same for unemployed people who responded to the survey. Their stress and anxiety were highest during the workweek, just like their counterparts who were sitting in cubicle farms, sweating under a hardhat, or hustling out food and drinks for ungrateful customers.

But there we have it, in indisputable, cold, hard numbers: happiness levels spike on the weekends both for people who work and those who don't.

That's because, according to researchers, the weekend doesn't just serve as a respite from the horrors of the workweek grind. The weekend gives us what truly brings happiness: time together with friends and family. Grinding or no grinding, being together with those we love is when key happiness indicators go through the proverbial roof. Grinding away at the job that we may or may not hate might offer a path to some semblance of a happy life, but grinding in and of itself – according to half a million people – is not the happiness skeleton key.

It's hardly an overstatement to say that we're happiest when we're freed from the clutches of the grind, if only for forty-eight fleeting weekend hours.

There's more than a kernel of isolationist thinking in rising and grinding. Read the avalanche of tweets trumpeting various versions of rising and grinding and you'll quickly see that grinding is done by oneself, for oneself. There are certainly people grinding (working) every day for their partners and kids and family members, but the phenomenon is, in many ways, a uniquely American one: we are cowboys, alone in the expanse, independent of everyone and everything, alienated from everyone and everything, cast out into the world to get what we can get.

There is no such thing as rising and grinding as a team of people with a common cause. There is no longer a collective grinding – a massive sigh of relief for those at the top who know, deep in their marrow, that collective grinding would be the demise of the gravy train they believe will never end.

Social science has shown that human beings value fairness highly, and that we're not innately selfish creatures who prefer to exist alone, separated from the tribe. The system in which we exist preaches individualism over everything. Selfishness is the ultimate virtue. We live in Ayn Rand's dream world: one of laissez faire capitalism for the middle and working classes, and of comfortable socialism for the upper echelon. They have their vampire fangs sunk deep into our flesh. Those fangs have been there so long, jammed into us, that we hardly notice anymore. We don't fight the bite. We instead buy into the worldview of the people and institutions that put those fangs there. We learn to love our sharp-toothed parasites. We've decided, as a people, that grinding is our best option. Perhaps it's our only option.

Rise and cede to the hypnotism of our masters and grind.

Does grinding have its place? I don't think there's a question that yes, it does. The single mother of two grinds like hell so her children won't starve. The married couple grinds so they can take care of a sick mother whose body no longer allows for grinding. The college kid from the slums grinds to make the most of his scholarship, or his parents' hard-earned cash. The high school athlete grinds past the limits of exhaustion because she loves the game – it makes her happy.

Grinding surely has a place in the world.

But rising and grinding as a credo – as a slogan for how you live out the oh-so-finite days of your life – is a myopic approach that doesn't just limit the shine in your life. Unquestioned devotion to grinding snuffs out the shine. Grinding culture says people are expendable, human connection is meaningless and that, at heart, everyone is a killer.

I reject that.

No part of me doubts that everyone has a desire to shine somewhere underneath the persona they've created, the one presented to the world every day, with varying degrees of honesty. Any person who has been compelled to perform a mindless task in exchange for a little money must eventually ask the question: Is this what I was put here to do?

What a terrifyingly important question.

To question the purpose of your existence is inconvenient, uncomfortable, gut wrenching, and critically important. Without pondering that question, what are we but talking monkeys with checking accounts? And to shine, in my estimation, is to do that which offers a satisfactory answer to that all-important question.

For some, shining might be creating: writing, drawing, painting, filming, molding, building. For others it might be working in nature, ending the day with dirt caked beneath fingernails, drenched in sweat from the unrelenting heat of the sun, admiring things and creatures that neither grind nor shine, but just are. Shining might be helping those caught in the merciless undertow of grinding culture, folks who need a helping hand, a bite to eat or a place to stay. Shining for some might be as simple and common as reading a book that changes the way you see a sliver of your world, or watching a movie that forces you to feel something long hidden — to confront something buried. Rising and shining can be a revolutionary act.

Shining is happiness, both giving it and receiving it. Grinding and happiness are not mutually exclusive, but that grind is not centered on the answer to that infernal question: Is this what I was put here to do?

Maybe, just maybe, the directions to shining over grinding lie in a classic lyric from a classic song: "Remember when you were young," begins Pink Floyd's "Shine on You Crazy Diamond." "You shone like the sun."

You rose and shined as a kid. I did too. We all did. Make like the you from so long ago and don't grind. Shine.