Trump is selling Americans the dream of returning to a golden age of factory jobs. It's not so rosy: Believe me, I worked on the assembly line, and it was hell.

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I once witnessed a friend going through a severe midlife crisis. Basically overnight, this formerly serious and well-adjusted middle-aged man dumped his wife for a much younger girlfriend, got a face tattoo, and built a full-sized halfpipe in his house. (He hadn't ever ridden a skateboard before.) Soon, we were barraged with music recommendations (all stuff he'd listened to in high school and college) and life updates laden with "hip" "slang" ("Despite the age gap, my situationship with Triniteigh is lowkey lit"). It was a transparent -- and, from a certain perspective, even sympathetic -- response to a universal anxiety: He'd seen that the good times were over, and that only decline lay ahead. But, like all nostalgists, he didn't realize that you can't ever truly go back; you can only go backward.

The United States, under President Donald Trump, seems to be undergoing a similar midlife crisis, as this reactionary administration attempts to brute-force the country back to a golden age that many people are realizing either didn't exist in the first place or has been permanently lost to the mists of time and modernization. There is much to be embarrassed about in this particularly humiliating hyperacceleration of American decline, but one of the cringiest aspects -- the pear-shaped fortysomething with a new lip ring and emo bangs in the room -- is the administration's insistence on bringing back factory jobs. The promise of a "manufacturing renaissance" was a key part of Trump's presidential campaign, and it has remained a fantasy dangled over constituents' heads in the intervening months, jerked up and down with each successive flip-flop on tariffs and trade policy. It's a testament to this administration's lack of imagination that they think bringing back the soot-blacked, punishing factory floor is the way to make America great again; it's like giving yourself severe acne to recapture your youth.

Do Americans actually want those jobs back? Some think they do, but that's only because most of them don't know any better. Unfortunately, I do; I worked in a factory once. To this day, it remains one of the worst experiences I've ever endured. Believe me: If more people knew what it's like to work these jobs, they wouldn't be so eager to return to them.

I only took the job, at an Iowa cookie factory in the late '90s, at my parents' insistence. My father had grown up on a farm and my mother had worked in a factory in Korea in her teens, occasionally hiding candy in her beehive hairdo to give her siblings at home; they both subscribed to a parenting philosophy that believed the best way to prepare a child -- or a shiftless 18-year-old on summer break, fresh from his first year of college -- for the world was to forcibly expose them to the very worst parts of it, so they'd form a firm understanding of just how bad things could get.

I got my job through a temp agency, which is how many factories get around union hiring rules: The temp agencies supply disposable temporary workers, and in return take a cut of their earnings. It doesn't save the factory much money, but saving money isn't the point; the point is to dilute the power of the union. I made a little more than minimum wage -- a whopping $8 per hour -- but when I took my first-day tour, the manager was careful to point out that I also got as many free cookies as I could eat. My first two or three days, I must have eaten my weight in cookies, but by the end of the week you couldn't have made me eat another one at gunpoint.

There are very few places that are exactly as bad as its haters claim -- Los Angeles is one, and the factory is another. A factory is a space of monumental proportions, built to accommodate machines instead of humans, and you scurry through it along circuitous pathways, among banks of whirring belts and industrial-strength mixers that would pull your arm out of its socket if you tried to grab a quick handful of cookie dough. The noise is like being at the center of a perpetual explosion. With its concrete surfaces, security guards, and perimeter of chain-link fencing, hundreds of workers in matching coveralls shuffling along a path painted on the floor, it felt more like a prison than a workplace.

The section of the line I was assigned to was worked by a crew of four. In addition to myself, there were two sisters: Desiree, a shy, soft-spoken girl, and Simone, a very tall girl with albinism who was not shy at all, and who was officially or unofficially our crew's forewoman. The fourth member of our group was Brad, a middle-aged blond guy with a mustache the exact color of his skin who had enough seniority that he could refuse to work the line.

He was always running off to the bathroom and then returning to put the forklift through microscopically precise maneuvers, his eyes bright and unblinking.

The work was simple: The three of us stood at a conveyor belt, onto which emerged an endless queue of clear plastic trays. Each plastic tray was divided into four slots, and each slot was supposed to hold four oatmeal cookies, for a total of 16 in each package. The trays were supposed to emerge onto the belt already filled with cookies, but the loader machine was unreliable. Our job was to stand at the line, head down, monitoring the trays as they passed; when you spotted one that was short, you took cookies -- rock-hard, days- or even weeks-old things, with the consistency of acoustic ceiling tiles -- from bins at your waist and quickly brought it up to full capacity.

The incomplete trays usually held 14 or 15 cookies, so you only had to drop in a couple of extras, but on days when the loader was temperamental, trays might roll past with only two or three cookies total, and you'd have to quickly, without taking your eyes from the rapidly advancing tray, find a dozen acceptably whole cookies in the reserve bin -- not always easy, as many of them had been broken into pieces by our fumbling or when they'd been dumped in -- and get them lined up in your hands and loaded onto the tray. If you weren't fast enough, and a too-light tray reached the scale at the end of the conveyor belt, an automatic shutoff was triggered, a loud bell sounded, and your fellow loaders stared at you like you were a fool while you hurriedly brought the offending tray up to weight. When you were finished, Simone the forewoman would walk over and hit the restart switch. The filled trays were then conveyed into a packager and emerged on the other side sealed in still-warm plastic. We took turns working an hour at a time at this station, stacking the newly sealed packages in a box and then moving the full boxes onto a pallet to be forklifted away by Brad as soon as he got back from the bathroom.

I'd expected that working in the factory would be boring, and it was. Like most people, I thought of boredom as anodyne, not really an unpleasant sensation itself so much as the absence of sensation. But what I discovered is that in a factory you experience a strain of boredom that's uniquely crushing. If you're sitting in line at the DMV without your phone, you might be bored, but your mind is unconstrained; you can daydream, examine the people around you, walk out and come back another day. Even at the dreariest office job, you can click away from the spreadsheet, go for a coffee or a cigarette, or lean over and ask your cubicle neighbor if they saw the game last night. On the factory line you are bored, but your mind is not your own; your consciousness is pinioned to the line and its ceaseless movement. You have no control over the pace of your work or the direction of your attention; you are fully controlled by the machine. If your mind drifted or broke free for even an instant, you soon heard the heavy ka-chunk of the line auto-stopping, and the bell (which, in retrospect, had no purpose except humiliation), and off you scampered with a handful of cookies. In a different sort of factory, you might be pulled back from your momentary reverie by having your finger or arm severed.

And yet, despite knowing the folly, your mind continually tries to break free. No matter how much you lock in, the work at hand just isn't sufficient to hold your full attention, and there's a part of your mind, not the subconscious but not quite the conscious either, that persistently tries to pierce, disrupt, derail, or otherwise break through the hypnagogic state of resignation, like a hungry cat pawing your leg while you try to sleep. Philosopher and mathematician Norbert Wiener called repetitive assembly-line work "deadly uninteresting," and there is something murderous, almost suicidal, about factory boredom. You feel as if you're drowning, and resisting the urge to fight against the tedium is nearly impossible. Repetition has always been understood as the purest form of torture; Sisyphus' punishment isn't pushing the rock up the hill -- it's having to do it over and over. Studies have found that repetitive work induces a physical stress response, fatigue, depression, and even, in some cases, derangement. At the end of my shift, I was mentally and emotionally exhausted, but I had no idea why; all I'd done was stand in one place and do a whole lot of nothing. When I walked outside, I was almost surprised to find that the world was still there, that normal life had continued while I was off in the netherworld. I felt some fleeting relief, but before I even left the parking lot, I was already dreading the next day. Very early on, I realized why so many blue-collar workers went directly to the bar after work; I have never needed a drink like I needed a drink after I clocked out of the factory.

My experience wasn't unusual. From the beginning, Americans hated working in factories. In his book Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World, history professor Joshua Freeman quotes early Ford workers who say they're "going to break under the strain" of working on the line; they called the state of nervous exhaustion that afflicted line workers "Forditis." In the semi-autobiographical novel Journey to the End of Night, the French writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline, who studied working conditions at a Ford plant in Detroit in 1927, described the assembly-line mindset as "a sort of suspense between stupefaction and frenzy." It took a toll; wives of factory workers reported that their husbands came home with "the shakes" and could barely eat before collapsing into bed. Factory work was so distasteful that many people quit after a very short time. In 1913, the first year that Ford operated his famous assembly line, the turnover rate was a ludicrous 370 percent -- that is, they had to hire nearly 52,000 workers to maintain a force of 14,000 -- and an internal Ford report found that 71 percent of employees who quit didn't even give notice; they just stopped showing up.

In the ensuing decades, unions won wage and quality-of-life improvements, but the work was still the work. By 1970, according to America's Assembly Line, by historian David E. Nye, turnover remained high, with 25 percent of Ford workers quitting their jobs that year; in some General Motors plants, turnover approached 100 percent. In 1971, GM line workers were interviewed about their work; the majority said they'd never intended to go into assembly-line work as a career, and virtually all of them said they'd choose a different line of work if they could go back and do it all over again. (And most of these workers were conservatives; only 16 percent of respondents in this poll identified as liberal.) A GM worker in Ohio said, "Every day I come out of there I feel ripped off. I'm gettin' the shit kicked out of me, and I'm helpless to stop it."

It wasn't just the tedium -- there was also the physical toil. Nye writes about one woman who worked on the line at GM in the 1970s, each shift ending with bruises along the backs of her legs from sitting on metal car frames all day. Sounds a lot like the British cotton mill and factory workers who experienced "pain in the back, hips, and legs, swollen joints, varicose veins, and large, persistent ulcers in the thighs and calves," as described in philosopher and political theorist Friedrich Engels' 1845 survey The Condition of the Working Class in England. Even at the relatively cushy cookie factory, my neck ached from looking down all day, and turning to the left (always left) with a 40-pound box hundreds of times a day inevitably wrecked my back.

You might be thinking that all I needed was a prescription for Adderall, and there's probably some truth to that. I thought about asking Brad for a connection, but it didn't make financial sense -- on his union wages, his habit was less an addiction than an investment in his job security, but on my temp-agency wages, I would've essentially been working for meth. There was also the freakout I witnessed my first week there, which sort of dampened my enthusiasm for any black-market performance enhancers. Coming back from break one day, one of the other workers suddenly experienced, right there in the fenced-in parking lot, what seemed to me to be religious ecstasy, shouting some unintelligible phrase over and over, his arms raised to the sky, his eyes filled with tears. Over the course of half a minute, his cries went from joyous to desperate and shrill. Other workers ignored him; I surmised this was a common occurrence. When I asked Desiree about it, she shrugged and said, "Most of the people here are on something." I never smelled alcohol coming off anyone, but at the end of each shift, after the cars cleared out of the lot, I often noticed a rough grid of brown-bagged empties left behind.

It just wasn't a job you could do sober, and I hated it with a passion -- though, in fairness, I've hated every job I've ever had. A job is a job, and, when you get right down to it, jobs suck. Everyone who's ever had an office job has at some point thought to themselves, "What if I stood up right now, got a running start, and dove headfirst through that floor-to-ceiling window?" I have what some people might call a fake email job now, and it's no picnic, either. The persistent ache at the base of my neck from squinting down at my laptop every day sometimes prevents me from falling asleep at night, and arrowing from cell to cell of a Google spreadsheet as I operationalize this quarter's SEO strategy often feels like shuffling through the pale and windblown ruins of my youthful hopes and dreams. But although I've had a lot of bad jobs in my life -- I once worked the graveyard shift at a 24-hour porn store, and I was briefly the top telemarketer in the country -- factory work was uniquely and categorically the worst.

I wasn't actually fired from the factory, but I didn't really quit, either; one morning I just couldn't get out of bed, and I stayed there for a week. It wasn't anything serious -- I was just suicidally depressed. To this day, I still can't smell oatmeal cookies without feeling sick to my stomach.

Do we really want to bring these jobs back? That sort of depends on your definition of "want." After decades of wage stagnation, widening wealth inequality, and the precarity of the gig economy, the workforce has become so demoralized that many are desperate to try something, anything else. But, as a much-discussed recent survey by the Republican pollster Frank Luntz suggests, people like the idea of factory jobs more than the reality. Luntz found that 80 percent of Americans think America would be better off if we had more manufacturing in this country, even while only 25 percent said they'd be personally better off if they worked in a factory. The implication is clear: assembly line for thee, but not for me. While the abstract concept of manufacturing maintains a magical pull on the American imagination, most Americans, evidently, know better than to try to get a job in what Charles Madison, an early Ford factory worker, called "a form of hell on earth," as cited by Nye.

And even for that 25 percent, how many of them have worked in a factory before? If they had any idea what it really takes, would they still want to? My money's on no. There's the literal money, for one. For all their physical and mental demands, most of these jobs aren't particularly lucrative, and the dirty secret is that, in spite of the post-war fantasy of earning a good wage at the auto plant to support a white-picket-fence dream, they never really were. In 1970, the average factory worker made $6,000-$6,500 a year, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics; that same year, the Bureau of Labor Standards set the poverty-level budget for a family of four at $6,960, as the historian Judith Stein writes in Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies. Why would we get a better deal under reindustrialization? The reason capital moved factories out of the U.S. in the first place is because foreign workers would work for a pittance; the only reason they'd bring them back is if they thought Americans could be induced to do the same. Now that worker protections and the power of organized labor have been steadily eroded, if not eviscerated, a factory job will be no more well-paid than the service jobs so derided by the right -- and certainly no more secure.

Job security, for all that pundits bloviate about it, is a two-way street: Your boss might be perfectly willing to let you come to work every day until the sun exhausts itself, but how long are you willing or able to drag yourself in for yet another day of screwing thousands of tiny screws into widgets? The data on factory turnover is clear: For the vast majority of people, working in a factory is something you do for a short while, until you just can't anymore, whether due to physical breakdown or crippling depression. When you falter, there will be three people standing right behind you who are happy to take your place -- until they burn out, too. Manufacturing isn't the solution to job precarity. On the contrary, it creates and feeds on it.

But what, you might ask, about the promise of turning American workers into highly skilled, highly paid factory workers? It's true that there is some lucrative precision work that consists mostly of monitoring automated processes -- these jobs are few and far between, however. In 2022, GM announced that it was spending $7 billion on four Michigan plants in their efforts to bring back some of the jobs they'd offshored. For that $7 billion, they'd create about 4,000 new jobs, at a cost of about $1.75 million per new job. That's a slightly worse return on investment than a decade earlier, when a reshored GM plant that opened in Baltimore in 2012 cost $244 million and created only 189 jobs, as discussed in Nye's book. At fewer than 600 jobs per $1 billion in investment, this has got to be one of the least efficient job creation programs in human history.

Working in a shiny new factory that boasts high-tech automation and streamlined futuristic processes may sound like something out of a Pixar movie, but the reality is likely to be a lot more like the blood-and-grease brutalism of one of Henry Ford's factories 100 years ago.

Tesla, once held up as a model of modern American manufacturing, has been accused of having "factory floors ... stuck in another century," rife with allegedly hostile and unsafe working conditions, according to an investigation by the Nation. American electric automaker Rivian, a Tesla rival valued at $15-odd billion (down from its $100 billion valuation when it went public in 2021), has similarly been accused of horrific factory conditions, with reported manglings, grievous injuries, and a paint-shop employee who allegedly expelled blue-tinged vomit after management denied her request for a respirator, per a Bloomberg exposé.

No, this is not the utopia that workers are being promised -- quite the opposite. Tomorrow's factory employees will almost certainly be electronically micromanaged into complete submission. Future factories will likely use employee surveillance measures modeled on Amazon's, a system that monitors the number of steps you take, and the duration of your bathroom breaks, and penalizes you if you work too slow or if you work too fast; under the eye of this A.I. Goldilocks, you'll work at just the right pace or you'll be flagged. Tesla already uses similar A.I.-assisted systems to monitor productivity or "[enhance] overall efficiency," and the U.S. maker of Ram and Jeep trucks has explicitly discussed making some of its plants more like Amazon's fulfillment centers, as reported by the Detroit News. In the coming factories, the only reason the bosses won't replace you with a robot is because it'll be cheaper to just turn you into one. We'll be doing 1920s-style factory work, at 1970s wages, in a 2025-style digital panopticon. And if we're anything like previous generations, most of us will only be doing it for a very short time before we burn out or collapse. Then what?

A few years after my stint on the factory floor, in the early aughts, I ran into Desiree on the street in Iowa City. We embraced with real warmth; there was that feeling of seeing someone you'd suffered with, the relief that you'd both made it through. We talked about what we were doing with our lives, but when I mentioned the factory, she became very cold. I don't want to talk about that, she said. We exchanged numbers when we parted, but I never spoke to her again.

In retrospect, I shouldn't have brought it up. The past should remain in the past; only a fool thinks otherwise. Unfortunately, the fools are at the levers of power right now. The industrialists and salesmen running this country can't imagine a way forward, so like a small-town divorcée drunk-Facebook-messaging their high school sweetheart, they are defaulting to the past. What they fail to understand is that regression isn't restoration. Bring back factories, and we'll get the bad jobs, low pay, and severed limbs back, but not the boom that accompanied them. All reactionary projects have, at their core, an essentially magical promise: that you can go back. The problem is that, strictly speaking, you can't. As my fortysomething friend who turned his living room into a skate park learned, you can exhume the trappings of youth -- the manufacturing jobs; the Jimmy Eat World T-shirts; addressing everyone, including your cardiologist, as "homie" -- but you'll never recapture its essence. Even attempting to is a grave symptom of disease, and the first step down a path that can only end with becoming an object of pity and ridicule. It looks like America is about to learn this lesson in the most humiliating terms imaginable.

Personally, I try to guard myself closely against any impulses toward nostalgia. I don't listen to the music of my youth, I don't stay in touch with my exes, and I refuse to argue with people about how many points Michael Jordan would score in today's NBA. All that "back in the day" stuff is for -- and I mean this in the most respectful way possible -- losers. That's the unstated tragedy about people who talk about "returning to tradition": If the only direction you're looking is backward, you've already given up, even if you don't know it yet.

Against my will, however, I do occasionally think about my time in the factory. Usually, it's during the famine part of the writer's feast-or-famine cycle, when I'm under a certain amount of stress, and I start having anxiety dreams. Between nightmares of my teeth falling out, a woman pointing at my groin and laughing, or being paralyzed as I'm attacked by someone wielding a knife or syringe, my subconscious will occasionally subject me to a vision in which I'm back at the assembly line; the conveyor belt suddenly thuds to a halt, the bell screams, and several dozen co-workers stare at me with dead-eyed contempt while I scramble to find the tray that's one cookie short. When I wake up, heart pounding, I could swear there's a trace of oatmeal cookies in the air. The past always smells sweet; it's decaying.