Internal Settlers

Anatomy of modern servitude .

At three in the morning, a bank executive wakes up with an idea to streamline the loan approval process. He jots down the details on his phone, calculates the potential savings, and outlines the implementation proposal. In the morning, he sends the document to his supervisor with a note, "For your consideration." Six months later, he sees his own idea implemented under someone else's name. He says nothing. He's been trained to say nothing.

This is the most refined mechanism of institutional domestication: turning creativity into voluntary servitude. The employee produces intellectual value, but has relinquished any claim to that value. They have not only sold their time, but also their capacity to surprise themselves. It is a form of cognitive prostitution so normalized that it has a respectable name: "teamwork . "

Job dependency operates like an emotional credit system that's permanently in the red. Your self-esteem runs on the algorithm of a debit card; every decision requires prior authorization from a balance managed by someone else. You need permission to feel competent. You need external validation to trust your own judgment. You've mortgaged your ego to an entity that can foreclose at any time.

Look at the language. “Human resources.” Not employees, not workers, not collaborators. Resources. Like oil or coal, raw materials that are extracted, processed, and consumed. The terminology reveals the true nature of the relationship. You don’t work for the company; the company drains you. It extracts your energy, your time, your creativity, and returns a fraction of it in the form of a salary.

There is a specific pathology among veteran employees that industrial psychology manuals fail to recognize: the inability to calculate their own market value. After fifteen years of earning a fixed salary, they completely lose track of the relationship between effort and compensation. It's like a pianist who has always played at a fixed volume and suddenly has to face a piano with pedals. They don't know how to modulate their own sound.

The great deception of professional development lies in promising you that climbing the corporate ladder equates to increased autonomy. It's precisely the opposite. Each promotion makes you a manager of others' dependencies, but exponentially increases your own. A manager doesn't just depend on their immediate supervisor; they depend on the results of their subordinates, the decisions of other departments, and macroeconomic variables beyond their control. Simple dependency has been replaced by complex dependency.

The modern job market has perfected a conceptual trap: it sells specialization as a competitive advantage when, in reality, it's a sophisticated form of planned obsolescence. The more specific your expertise, the more vulnerable you are to technological changes, corporate restructurings, and industry crises. You become an expert in processes that can disappear with a software update.

But there is an even more insidious phenomenon: addiction to institutional complexity. Some employees develop a neurotic dependence on complex bureaucratic systems. They need forms, protocols, approval levels, and validation committees. Not because these systems are efficient, but because they structure their anxiety. Bureaucracy functions as a security blanket for adults who have lost the ability to navigate ambiguity.

I've seen executives earning six-figure salaries who can't open a bank account without consulting their company's finance department. Sales directors who sell millions but are incapable of negotiating the price of a car for personal use. Skill transfer is unidirectional; everything you learn at the company stays at the company. Your knowledge is a license to use, not ownership.

The cruel paradox is that the corporate system needs employees who think like entrepreneurs, but it cannot tolerate employees who act like entrepreneurs. It needs your creativity, your initiative, your problem-solving skills, but encapsulated within structures of dependency that ensure that creativity is never directed against the system itself.

Economic freedom isn't about the amount of money; it's about the diversity of sources. An entrepreneur with irregular income from multiple clients is freer than an employee with a high salary from a single source. The concentration of risk is inversely proportional to real autonomy. Your entire economic stability depends on the decisions of a single entity you don't control.

The question that reveals the true level of mental colonization is this: if your company went bankrupt tomorrow, how much of what you know how to do is transferable to other contexts? If the answer is less than fifty percent, you're not a professional; you're a specialized organ of an organism that doesn't belong to you. And organs don't survive outside the body that houses them.

There's a precise moment when job dependency becomes your personal identity, when you start introducing yourself socially by your title instead of your name. "I'm the marketing director , " "I'm a financial analyst , " "I'm the quality manager ." Your role has consumed you. You are what you do for others, not what you could do for yourself.

Your boss calls you on a Sunday morning. This time, for the first time in years, you don't answer. Not because you have something more important to do, but because you've rediscovered the notion that your time is yours until you decide otherwise.