By Natasha Brennan
Congratulations. The system you've been posting about since your sophomore gender studies seminar has finally, finally arrived. The means of production have been seized. The landlords are gone. Your student debt? Abolished — along with, it turns out, your entire career concept.
The Central Bureau of Labor Allocation (CBLA) has reviewed your file. They noted your certifications, your vision board, your Substack readership of forty-seven people, and your deeply held belief that your particular set of skills would be essential to the new society. They considered all of it carefully.
Then they sent you a letter.
What follows is an honest accounting of what happened to several of your fellow travelers — each one certain they'd found their revolutionary calling, each one now doing something involving mud.
The Trauma-Informed Life Coach
What You Thought You'd Be Doing: Holding space in a yurt. Guiding people through their nervous system responses using a combination of EMDR, crystal bowls, and a sliding scale fee structure that started at $180 per session.
What the State Determined: The Volga-Ural Agricultural Collective Region 7 is experiencing a significant shortfall in its sunflower seed harvest. You are twenty-nine years old, medically able-bodied, and have demonstrated, through four years of yoga teacher training, an above-average capacity for physical endurance.
"Dear Citizen Mackenzie, the Bureau extends its warmest revolutionary greetings! We have reviewed your application to serve the People as a Certified Nervous System Regulation Practitioner. After careful consideration, we are thrilled to inform you that your labor will serve the collective in an even more foundational capacity. Please report to Harvest Station 14 by 0600 Thursday. Bring gloves. The People thank you for your flexibility. Literally."
The Sourdough Educator
What You Thought You'd Be Doing: Running weekend workshops teaching urban professionals to connect with ancestral bread-making wisdom. Possibly a cookbook deal. Definitely a newsletter.
What the State Determined: There are fourteen industrial grain processing facilities operating below optimal capacity. Your existing familiarity with fermentation processes, while ideologically useless as a class, is technically applicable at the Minsk State Flour Mill No. 3. You will work twelve-hour shifts. There will be no newsletter.
Photo: Minsk State Flour Mill No. 3, via images.rawpixel.com
"Dear Citizen Tyler, how wonderful that your passion for grain has brought you to us! The Bureau is pleased to redirect your enthusiasm toward a role with genuine productive output for the masses. You'll be operating the industrial dough mixing unit on the eastern floor. Your shifts begin at 4 AM because bread, as you yourself have noted in your workshop materials, 'doesn't wait.' Revolutionary regards."
The Narrative Podcast Host
What You Thought You'd Be Doing: Twelve-episode deep dives into the emotional lives of marginalized communities, accompanied by a carefully curated ambient score and thoughtful ad reads for ethical mattress companies.
What the State Determined: The State does not require podcast hosts. The State has one radio station. It plays approved content. You, however, have demonstrated through your audio work a familiarity with technical equipment and an apparent comfort with confined spaces. The coal infrastructure maintenance team in the Donetsk region has an immediate opening.
"Dear Citizen Phoebe, your dedication to storytelling has not gone unnoticed! In fact, the Bureau believes your talents are best expressed through the greatest story of all: the story of a functional society built on honest toil. You'll be maintaining ventilation systems in Mining District 4. We encourage you to think of it as immersive audio. It is quite loud down there."
The Astrology-Based Executive Coach
What You Thought You'd Be Doing: Helping mid-level managers align their quarterly goals with their Mercury placement via Zoom calls and a proprietary twelve-week program priced at $3,500.
What the State Determined: Mercury placements are not recognized as a productive force of labor under the materialist conception of history. You are, however, a Capricorn, which the Bureau notes with some irony suggests you are well-suited to disciplined, repetitive work. The potato fields of Belarus await. They are not on Zoom.
"Dear Citizen Jordan, the Bureau has reviewed your impressive portfolio of celestial-informed leadership methodology. While we admire your entrepreneurial spirit, we must gently note that the stars are not currently scheduled for collectivization. Your Capricorn energy — your words — will serve the people beautifully in Sector 9's root vegetable quota. The potatoes do not care about your rising sign, but they do need to be in the ground by April."
The Plant-Based Wellness Influencer
What You Thought You'd Be Doing: Sponsored content. Retreats. A line of adaptogenic supplements. A second line of adaptogenic supplements with better packaging.
What the State Determined: Influencers do not exist. Sponsorships do not exist. However, your repeated public advocacy for plant-based living has been logged, and the Bureau is genuinely delighted to place you somewhere your values can be lived rather than merely performed. The collective farm in Krasnodar grows tomatoes. Twelve thousand tons of them annually. You will be picking them by hand, which is, technically, as plant-based as it gets.
"Dear Citizen Briar, what a joy to welcome someone so aligned with agricultural production! The Bureau notes your extensive public commentary on the importance of 'getting back to the earth.' We have taken this literally. You will be very close to the earth. Often face-down in it, depending on the row. We trust this fulfills your vision. Warmly, the Bureau."
A Note From the Bureau (and From Me)
Look, I don't write the reassignment letters. I just report on them.
The honest truth — and this is the part that should haunt every "eat the rich" post written from a coffee shop with a twelve-dollar oat milk latte — is that the Soviet economic model didn't abolish drudgery. It democratized it. The trauma-informed breathwork practitioners didn't get to keep their yurts. The yurts became storage units for agricultural equipment. The practitioners became agricultural equipment, in a sense.
Every planned economy in history has faced the same fundamental problem: someone has to pick the food, dig the coal, and maintain the pipes, and that someone is almost certainly going to be the person who thought they'd be exempt. The intellectuals, the creatives, the coaches — historically, these are exactly the people the state eyes first when the harvest numbers come in short.
Your Mercury placement will not save you.
The potatoes need to be in the ground by April.
— Natasha Brennan, Actual Life Under Communism