Capitalism doesn’t pretend to care.
It doesn’t bother with illusions.
It presents you with a fact:
you exist to be used.
Your value is measured by how efficiently you can be drained
without collapsing in a way that causes inconvenience.
You’re not a person in this structure.
You’re a resource.
A consumable.
A temporary asset that costs more to replace than to exploit.
The system’s brilliance is that it convinces you
this degradation is normal –
even respectable.
Every institution you interact with
is designed to keep you obedient through exhaustion.
Jobs that demand loyalty and offer nothing in return.
Leases that strip you of dignity.
Hospitals that bill you for surviving.
You learn quickly that pain is not a glitch in the system –
it’s the operating principle.
The profit motive has no conscience.
It rewards whoever can monetise your desperation most efficiently.
It admires the landlord who raises rent because he can.
It celebrates the corporation that cuts wages to “increase value.”
It treats human breakdown as an excellent business model –
a predictable revenue stream.
If you suffer, the system shrugs.
If you beg, it looks away.
If you collapse, it steps over you.
And then it replaces you with someone hungrier,
someone more afraid,
someone willing to tolerate even less.
People talk about “hard work”
as if the system has ever cared about effort.
It cares only about output –
and how cheaply it can be extracted.
Your dreams, your family, your body, your sanity
are all acceptable collateral damage.
And here’s the part that makes it truly vicious:
capitalism doesn’t just expect you to endure this.
It expects you to smile while doing it.
To broadcast your productivity.
To disguise your exploitation as ambition.
To post about your grind
as though you chose it freely.
Any tenderness that survives inside this machine
survives “despite” the system,
not because of it.
Compassion is a malfunction.
Empathy is inefficiency.
Care is a threat to productivity.
The system would eliminate all three
if it could function without them –
but it can’t.
It needs people to quietly cushion its brutality,
patch the wounds it inflicts,
and keep each other alive
just enough to keep the economy running.
Capitalism is a parasite
that humiliates the host
and then demands thanks for the privilege.
It thrives by draining the humanity
it claims is irrelevant.
It destroys the very people
who keep it afloat.
And the most brutal truth of all:
if everyone suddenly mirrored the system’s logic –
if everyone took as much as possible
and cared as little as possible –
the entire structure would collapse
within a single generation.
It survives only because
the people it exploits
are still more human
than the system deserves.
