It was a grey morning, one of those mornings when light mingles with dust and seems to hesitate before reaching the ground. The wind blew old papers down the street, as if reminding us that everything — people, words, promises — would be swept away sooner or later. Sitting on the edge of the narrow bed, he looked at his hands. He no longer saw the firmness he once had in them, but rather something mechanical; his fingers moved like small, obedient cogs, ready to press buttons, fill out forms and type numbers that belonged to no one, yet somehow governed everyone.
‘Curious,’ he thought. ‘How my whole life has become a succession of repeated gestures rather than my own thoughts. When did I cease to be a man and become just part of a larger machine?’ The kettle whistled on the stove. At other times, this sound might have seemed domestic and welcoming, but now it sounded like a factory signal, a call to duty. Even the steam seemed hurried. No gesture was free from the productive cadence anymore.
On the street, men and women hurried by without inner haste — a haste without destination that leads nowhere real and only keeps the body moving. None of them looked at each other. When they did, it was with a quick, almost imperceptible calculation, as if they were assessing the value and cost of that other person’s existence in seconds. He remembered a time when one could stop and talk to strangers without arousing suspicion. Uselessness was permitted. Today, being useless had become a moral crime. Stopping to watch the sunset was tantamount to admitting unproductivity. ‘Capitalism,’ he thought, ‘does not only rob us of time; it robs us of the possibility of time that is not for sale.’
The cruelest thing was that the poor no longer recognised each other. Each one guarded their mistrust as if it were their birthright. The perfect mechanism was made not only of iron and oil, but also of resentment. But he realised that there was something even deeper: the replacement of contingency with predictability. Life had become an algorithm, and even variations were predicted in advance. Even error had been incorporated as data. This made him uneasy because genuine rupture — the kind that cannot be calculated — had almost disappeared completely.
He didn’t see a face belonging to an enemy. There was no ‘someone’ to fight. The system was not sustained by decree, but by habit. It was a kind of social inertia that renewed itself. The most frightening thing was realising that even criticism of this state of affairs could be absorbed by it. Revolt could become fashionable; rebellion could be sold; and even the idea of freedom could become a packaged product.
As he walked, he reflected that robotisation was not just about being replaced by machines, but about thinking like them — processing inputs and outputs, eliminating pauses and reducing all experience to calculation. A teacher he had had in his youth had said: ‘The problem is not mechanical work; it is mechanical perception. When you only see functions, nothing else can be loved.’ At the time, he did not understand. Now, that phrase repeated itself in his mind like a silent refrain.
The streets were all alike. The shop windows displayed different merchandise, but the structure was the same. The faces varied little, moulded by the same tensions: bills to pay, deadlines to meet, goals to achieve. There was no room for chance. Chance was a waste. He wondered if the absence of chance actually meant the absence of life. After all, to live is to deal with the unexpected; if everything is anticipated, all that remains is repetition. Time loses its depth and days become mere numbers in an uninterrupted sequence.
Capitalism did not present itself as an explicit tyrant, but rather as a climate in which breathing was only possible within certain parameters. Anyone who tried to breathe outside of these parameters would suffocate. Not because it was forbidden — explicit prohibitions generate resistance — but because there was no air. Gradually, he began to notice that he could no longer think slowly. Ideas came rushing in, interrupting each other as if they were afraid of missing an invisible deadline. Even thought had been timed.
And yet, in some rare moments, the opposite happened: a meaningless phrase would pop into his head, a useless memory, a pointless thought that didn’t fit anywhere. These moments made him uneasy, but they also brought him an almost forgotten feeling: that perhaps there was still a piece of his mind that hadn’t been colonised. He then thought that perhaps the ultimate freedom was not to overthrow the system, but to preserve an internal space where nothing had any use. A mental place where value was not measured.
The idea stayed with him for days. He began to observe it as one observes a fragile flame, knowing that any breath could extinguish it. But the world does not like voids. Soon, work, bills, and routine took over everything again. And he realised that the effort to maintain this space was immense, almost as great as the effort to fulfil all his obligations. He knew that the system did not need to break his resistance — it was enough to tire him out until he gave up on his own. And yet there was a strange hope in this fatigue: if everything in the world was calculated for efficiency, perhaps the simple act of tiring himself out trying to preserve a useless thought was, in itself, a kind of sabotage.
On a particularly quiet night, he realised that this useless thought had grown. It had no definite content, but it had form. It was like a bubble of air rising in a murky lake: unlikely, but inevitable. And for the first time in a long time, he fell asleep with the feeling that he did not belong entirely to the machine. The next day, the city was the same. The faces, the same. The tasks, the same. But something, invisibly, was no longer the same. For although she still walked within the gears, she carried with her a particle that she could not process. A particle without function, without price, without goal. And, however small it was, she knew that it was there that she still existed.
The following days passed by at the same pace, but he began to notice small cracks appearing. A meaningless conversation on the tram, a memory that popped up for no reason, or a moment spent admiring a falling leaf. Each of these small interruptions was proof that, however corrupt human life might be, it still had dimensions that could not be translated into productivity. This realisation brought him a mixture of despair and consolation: mental disorder was still possible.
He remembered children playing in a square and realised that even these games were not entirely free from external logic. There was a sense of urgency in their movements, an implicit calculation and an unconscious awareness that time was limited and that even fun had to have some kind of impact, whether social or educational. Capitalism dominated not only the lives of adults, but also the imaginations of children.
He then began to observe people’s microgestures: the way a worker adjusted his watch; the calculated care with which a saleswoman stacked goods; and the quick glances of people trying not to waste time in queues. Every detail seemed designed so that no thought went unapplied and no emotion escaped unrecorded. Thus, humanity became functionality.
And yet, even in this state, some perceptions escaped control. A moment of silence on the street, an unexpected word or an old smell were small setbacks that could not be incorporated into the machinery. He began to value these moments as invisible treasures, remembering that, however structured and calculated the world seemed, it still contained indomitable elements.
At the end of the week, he sat in the same grey room reflecting on everything he had observed. He concluded that the most dangerous machine was not made of metal or electricity, but operated within each human consciousness as an internal logic of efficiency, calculation and self-demand that transformed humans into automatons. However, he also realised that, however small, there was an essential core that could not be replaced: the space for useless contemplation, for thought that produces nothing and perception that serves no purpose.
The following night, before going to sleep, he looked out of the window. The city moved at its usual, predictable pace, but he felt different: he felt a sense of belonging not to the system, but to himself. The invisible inner core persisted. He could not dominate it, nor could the system imprison it. It was a fragment of freedom that could not be quantified. For the first time, he felt that he had survived not despite, but within capitalism, preserving the part of his humanity that external logic could never reach.
