Breakfast and the slave I didn't know I was

Posted on: 28 December 2025

This morning at the café I understood something I didn't want to understand.

I was watching the waiter bring me my coffee and I thought: this man is serving me. In an hour he'll use an app to have lunch delivered to his place. The delivery guy will use a ride service to get back. The driver will pay someone to clean his flat. And that person, perhaps, will serve coffee to someone else tomorrow. We're all waiters to someone else. We've democratised servitude and called it the service economy.

The shattering of the butler

Once upon a time, the butler served one family. A vertical relationship, asymmetric but stable. You knew who you were: servant or master. Today we've shattered that relationship into millions of micro-transactions where everyone serves everyone, in rotation, convinced we're free because we can choose who to serve and when. But the sum doesn't change. The time you "save" using a service you "pay" by providing service to someone else. It's a zero-sum game disguised as progress.

The nobleman of the eighteenth century lived in an ontologically different world from his peasants. Access to culture, art, conversation, experiences that simply didn't exist for others. Today the billionaire and the office worker use the same phone, watch the same shows, fly on the same planes. The difference is quantitative, not qualitative. More square footage, more trips, more services - but of the same kind of things. We've standardised wealth and in doing so emptied it of meaning.

And then there's hyperspecialisation. Three generations ago my grandfather fixed his own taps, built furniture, knew how to butcher an animal. I can't do any of these things. I've delegated every practical skill to someone else. Am I more "free" than him? Or am I just more dependent on a system I don't control?

Counterproductivity

Ivan Illich had a name for this in the seventies: counterproductivity. When a system exceeds a certain threshold, it starts producing the opposite of what it was created for. Medicine creates patients. Education creates people incapable of learning. Fast transport, if you calculate the time you work to pay for it, moves you more slowly than a bicycle. Systems don't solve needs - they create them. And once created, you can't escape because you've lost the ability to do otherwise.

Hannah Arendt said something similar from another angle. She distinguished between labour, work and action. Labour is cyclical, tied to survival. Work is creating lasting things. Action is politics, relationships, appearing in the world with others. Modernity has glorified labour - the hamster wheel - at the expense of the other two. We produce and consume without ever building anything that lasts, or truly acting.

And Graeber, more recently, with his "bullshit jobs". Positions created just to keep people working. Roles that those who occupy them know to be useless. An economy that produces employment instead of value.

Here they are, three thinkers who described exactly what I was feeling watching the waiter. And what solution do they propose? Illich hoped for a collective awakening that never came. Arendt watched public space empty out, replaced by consumption. Graeber tried with Occupy. It didn't last.

None of them worked at system level. The exits that exist are individual, small-scale, and require accepting a certain marginality. Perhaps you can't get out. You can only reduce exposure.

The illusion of choice

But even this is an illusion. Because individual choice doesn't really exist. There's always someone who chose before us among our possible choices. We're never truly free to choose entirely, only among options the system has made available. Even Illich who "chooses" to die of his cancer his own way - that option existed because someone had made opium available, because he had friends with free time, because he had a place to do it.

The circle closes claustrophobically. The system creates interdependence. Interdependence eliminates autonomy. The absence of autonomy limits choices to those the system allows. And awareness of the mechanism doesn't open new doors. It just lets you see the walls more clearly.

Where analysis becomes dangerous

This is where I should stop.

Because awareness isolates. You see what others don't see, or don't articulate, and this separates you. But separation leads nowhere. You're not freer. You're not happier. You can't do anything with what you see. You're just more alone.

The system of forced interdependence, of reciprocal servitude - at least it connects people, even if in an alienated way. The waiter and I had an exchange. Brief, transactional, but real. Awareness of the mechanism extracts you from connection without giving you anything in return.

I look at the people around me. Small talk, polite greetings, no one who can really explain anything. And I feel superior. Wrongly. Because in the end there's no solution for "elevating" them. We're all in the same soup. No one is more elevated than anyone else. Someone got there before, wrote books, founded movements. And nothing changed.

I only get the result of being more aware, less suggestible, but at the same time more alone. Every pattern I see distances me. Every schema I recognise separates me from those who don't see it. And the ability to see patterns everywhere - which should be an advantage - becomes a prison.

The remix of the remix

You can't not see that melody echoing another. That photo being a variation of that composition. That thought already had by someone in 1973. Everything has already been done. Everything is a remix of a remix of presets. We're beyond the return of fashions and habits. We're at the remix based on presets. Each iteration moves one layer away from something that was perhaps authentic, until you don't even know what you're remixing anymore.

I'm mentally tired. Bored. Every path I try to take bores me. I stopped working out three weeks ago because health is fine but I'm still alone. I suffer from a form of existential loneliness that doesn't allow me to connect with others at a deep level. Not talking, not explaining, not analysing - touching, looking at each other, understanding. Connecting in any way that isn't language.

Which paradoxically is my strong suit. Words. Analysis. The ability to articulate what others feel but can't say. And this ability isolates me from them instead of connecting me.

The masks

Sometimes I play dumb so I don't seem too clever and tiresome. Sometimes I play the intellectual to establish who's in charge. I oscillate between masks depending on who's in front of me. Not to manipulate. To survive. Because always being the one who sees too much is unsustainable.

You should be yourself, someone says. I know. But that's exactly the point.

Who am I?

It's not a rhetorical question. It's not a philosophical exercise. It's the thing I don't know. After forty years of observing systems, after dismantling social, economic, psychological mechanisms - I can't answer the most basic question.

Perhaps "who am I" doesn't have a fixed answer. Perhaps I'm someone who changes shape depending on context. But I don't know if this is healthy adaptation or fragmentation. I don't know if the masks are tools or symptoms. I don't know if seeing all this clearly is a gift or a curse.

What I know is that this morning at the café I understood something I didn't want to understand. And now I'm here writing it, because writing is the only thing I know how to do with what I see. It changes nothing. It solves nothing. But at least it exists outside my head.

Perhaps someone will read this and recognise something. Not a solution - there isn't one. Just knowing that someone else is looking at the same walls.

If you know, you know.

If you don't, lucky you.