Acceptance Breeds Captivity

You board the train at 6:47. Cold metal under wet shoes. Bodies pressed against you, breathing recycled air into your face. Someone coughs without covering their mouth. You notice. You absorb it. You continue.

This happens because you permit it.

I lived this. 12 years ago, same platform, different faces. Algiers, Madrid, Paris, the geography changed, the mechanics didn't. Wake when it's dark. Move when you're told. Arrive where they've decided you belong. I wore thermal leggings in temperatures that shouldn't require them in a supposedly developed nation. -10 in a city that pretends to function. I remember the exact texture of that compliance, the way you stop questioning why you're doing something when everyone around you is doing it too.

The train breaks down. You wait. You compress yourself into the next one, pushing against strangers who are pushing against you, and nobody apologizes because this is the agreement.

This is the structure you've accepted. When you arrive at the office, those buildings from the early 2010s with their cheap veneer of modernity, their fluorescent lighting designed to eliminate shadow and therefore thought, your manager is already waiting. Annual review. 8:45 in the morning, after you've traveled through cold and machinery failure and human density, and now you sit across from someone who will explain why you don't deserve more money.

I know that room. I sat in it. Different company, same furniture, same facial expression on the person across the desk. They have a budget. They know exactly what they can offer. The entire performance exists to make you grateful for less. You accept no raise. You accept condescension framed as feedback. You accept the implication that your effort wasn't sufficient, even though sufficiency is never defined in advance, only in retrospect, only when it's time to deny you something.

Here's what I did: I stopped accepting. Basically !

Not with anger. Not with resentment. I just said No. Clean refusal. When they said no raise, I said then no continuation. I handed in notice. They panicked. Suddenly there was budget. Suddenly my performance had been acceptable all along. I said no again. Because once you've seen the bluff, once you've watched them scramble to keep you after telling you you weren't worth keeping, you understand the game isn't about your value, it's about your tolerance threshold.

I changed companies five times in seven years as an employee. Each time I left, they called me a capitalist traitor, a mercenary, disloyal. I told them, show me the money or show me the door. They always chose money. Then blamed me for making them choose.

You're eating cake with management. Kings' cake, some tradition nobody actually cares about. You can see it in their eyes, the calculation of how much this gathering costs in collective salary hours. You're a line item. Not an asset, a liability. The accounting structure of employment renders you as cost before you've even opened your mouth. You want to be a revenue center? Leave. Start something you control. Otherwise you're forever sitting in that fluorescent room explaining why you deserve what they already decided not to give you.

I stopped attending those gatherings. The voluntary-mandatory events where everyone pretends. Goodbye drinks for people nobody liked. Birthday cakes for colleagues you've never spoken to outside of work corridors. Collection jars where you fund someone else's departure gift. I said no. They told me I lacked team spirit. I told them I lack interest in theater. They threatened termination. I called the bluff. Never got fired. Because the threat only works if you're afraid of the outcome.

Meanwhile others stayed until ten at night. Competed for visibility, for the appearance of dedication. Then complained when dedication bought them nothing. They expected return on voluntary suffering. The System doesn't work that way. The system accepts whatever you give and asks for more. There's no threshold of effort that triggers reward. There's only the threshold of your resistance.

I left when I was thirty. Slammed the door on that entire region, that gray, regulated, CDI-worshipping territory where every structure assumes you'll stay contained. Mortgage approval requires permanent contract. Rental application requires permanent contract. Insurance, benefits, social credibility, all built on the assumption that employment stability equals life stability. The whole apparatus designed to keep you from noticing you're trading time you won't get back for security that evaporates the moment the company decides you're redundant.

Other countries function differently. Each one believes its system is natural, optimal, the only reasonable way to organize human activity. When you see enough systems, you stop believing any of them. You realize they're just collections of inherited assumptions that hardened into law. At that point you're free to select your own parameters.


I'm not choosing countries anymore. I'm choosing conditions. Where I match, I stay. Where I don't, I move.

Right now it's eighteen degrees at sunrise. I consider that cold. You're standing on a platform in actual cold, minus five, breathing sickness, tolerating mechanical failure and human density, heading toward a person who's already decided you're not worth more money. I'm drinking coffee in weather I find uncomfortably cool. Your life was my life. I'm speaking to my past self through your present complaint.

You sent this message like a bottle into the ocean. It arrived. I don't know why your suffering pleases me. Maybe because it isn't yet sufficient to make you act. You're still performing acceptance. Still boarding the train. Still sitting through the review. Still eating the cake.

If your manager sees this, I congratulate him. He's successfully domesticated his team. Why wouldn't he continue? You've shown him the boundaries of your resistance: complain in YouTube comments, accept everything in person.

Boundaries aren't declared, they're demonstrated. You don't argue for better treatment, you withdraw availability until treatment improves or you find different terms elsewhere. I told clients,  double the rate or I'm gone Monday. They called me a bastard. Paid anyway. Because nobody actually wants to replace functional capacity. They just want to see how little they can pay for it.

I'm writing this from a place where it's currently twenty-nine degrees and I'm wearing a short. Tomorrow I'll be somewhere else. Next week, different location entirely. This mobility costs nothing now. It required everything then, a single "No", spoken clearly, without emotion, without negotiation.

You're still on that train. I don't know if you'll get off.