For years I assumed someone was in charge.
Not a guy with a cat and a swivel chair, exactly. But someone. A committee. A logic with a name and an office, who had sat down and decided the rest of us should feel slightly replaceable at all times. [The purists may be wondering if that is a Blofeld reference while the humorists may be reminded of Dr. Evil. And if the reference was lost on you...I feel bad for you...while I judge you!]
Kher, I wanted that to be true. A villain you can fire. A plan you can leak. A conspiracy at least has the decency to be a thing.
There’s no guy. There’s no chair. That’s worse than the guy.
Here’s how it actually goes. A company has to grow, or a bigger one eats it. Growth means you keep buying. Buying means you keep wanting. And wanting means you have to feel, in some background hum you’ve stopped hearing, that what you’ve got is not quite enough yet. Every link is just someone doing their job and going home. Nobody’s twirling a mustache. The anxiety isn’t the goal. It’s the exhaust. And the exhaust runs the engine.
You can watch it everywhere now. The warehouses with their little productivity timers. The apps that ping you so you don’t wander off and have a thought. Workplaces treating how long you’ve stayed as a cost to trim. The insecurity isn’t a bug in how these places treat people. It’s the spec sheet. Someone who feels disposable works harder and complains less. You don’t need a cabal for that. You need a quarterly number and one competitor willing to be slightly worse to people than you are.
So we walk around in two fears, holding hands. Fear of being replaced, which keeps us at the desk past dark. Fear of missing out, which keeps us at the checkout past sense. One whispers don’t fall behind. The other whispers don’t get left out. Same whisper. Not yet enough.
Then the real trick. The contentment is always coming. Tomorrow. After the raise, the upgrade, the trip, the thing. We’re never miserable, exactly. Just not done. Happiness sits one purchase away, one rung up, forever, and the gap never closes, because the gap is the product. Nobody’s selling you the shoes. They’re selling you the version of you that owns the shoes. The shoes are just shipping.
Did the Machine put that hunger in us, or just find it lying around and plug it in? I honestly don’t know. That’s the one I can’t answer with a straight face. The Machine strikes the match. But we were sitting there bone dry. Status, comparison, the old terror of falling behind, nobody invented that in a marketing meeting. Look at the people who already got out. The rich, the retired, the ones who need nothing further and buy it anyway, on a Tuesday, for no reason. If escaping need cured the wanting, they’d be the calmest people alive. Have you met them.
So drop the manhunt. Swap every executive tonight for a saint who wants you free and home by five. Give it a year. They’re running the same playbook or they’ve been replaced by someone who will. It was never the person. The chair shapes whoever sits in it. It would shape me, and I’d feel terrible about it, and do it anyway.
The Machine can take a punch. It survives anger, protest, the guy on the corner who is, annoyingly, correct. The one thing it can’t survive is a population that simply stops wanting. That’s the input with no substitute. Which is why a life with not one quiet minute in it is so useful to it. A person who never stops never gets around to asking whether they needed any of it.
I don’t have the exit. I’m typing this on a device I’ll replace before it breaks, for reasons I’ll dress up as practical.
But you can notice the wanting. Watch it show up. Ask where it came from before you do what it says. Check whether the contentment you keep filing under tomorrow was on the desk the whole time, before someone taught you to wait for it.
I read a story as a kid, Forster’s “The Machine Stops.” People live so far inside the Machine they’ve forgotten there was ever an outside. When it breaks, it breaks badly. No clean ending. But that’s not the last note. The last note is that a few people, out on the surface, were never fully swallowed. And from them, something human starts again.
That’s all the hope I’ve got, and I think it’s enough. Not that the Machine stops neatly and we stroll into the sunlight. It won’t be neat. But there’s a part of us it never fully digests. The part that goes quiet. The part that asks why. As long as that part is breathing, the Machine doesn’t get the last word.
And whatever it couldn’t swallow is where we begin again.
"I was looking for a job and then I found a job. And heaven knows I'm miserable now" - J Marr/S Morrissey