I sometimes think we’ve all ended up working for a sort of ghost. Not the rattling-chains, moaning-through-the-wall kind, but something maybe worse: a superior who doesn’t even bother to haunt us directly.
Somewhere, in an office or maybe on a server, there’s a person, or an algorithm, that technically signs off on what we do. But I’ll never meet them. I wouldn’t recognize them if they stood in line behind me at the grocery store. And yet, that’s who I work for.
It wasn’t always like this. Back when neighbors grew things and traded them, you knew exactly where your labor went. I give you tomatoes, you give me eggs. Dinner happens. Everyone’s happy.
These days, I sit under LED lights at a job that produces something I can’t even explain at Thanksgiving. “So… what do you do?” someone asks. I open my mouth and realize I have no idea. Whatever it is, it pays for groceries. Groceries which, by the way, taste like they were designed in a boardroom.
The whole thing feels like living through a series of middlemen. You work, someone takes your work, sells it to someone else, and eventually it trickles down into a paycheck that flickers on a screen. You spend it on products manufactured in a country you’ve never visited, shipped by a company you’ve never heard of, and stocked by employees you don’t even make eye contact with. By the time you sit down to eat your “strawberries”, it’s hard to say if you’ve experienced anything at all.
What’s worse is how normal this has become. We’ve grown so used to it that the idea of handing your neighbor some zucchini in exchange for help fixing your fence feels almost exotic, like something that requires a permit.
And when people gush about farmer’s markets, I’m not convinced it’s about the lettuce. It’s about wanting to know that the person handing it to you actually exists.
This indirectness seeps into everything. Work. Food. Even relationships sometimes. We’re so used to middlemen that we half expect a customer service portal to pop up in conversation:
“Thank you for sharing your feelings. Please allow two to three business days for empathy.”
The truth is, we’re all starving for a little directness. Something we can touch, taste, and trace back to a real person. Until then, we’ll keep doing our ghost-work, feeding the machine, and wondering why life feels like a photocopy that’s been through the machine one too many times.
Join us in making the world a better place. You’ll be glad that you did.
Cheers, friends.