The script has been written

Just play your role.

No way out. No clear horizon. Just the wheel turning: commute, inbox, deadline, repeat. We enrich those who adapted early and wrote the rules, while most of us cling to the edges. We drift apart, strangers in the same neighborhood, starved of purpose and given a stream of ads to swallow instead. “This is happiness,” they say. “Work, then consume. Repeat until you die.”

Meanwhile, the Global South is told to “develop” while living inside supply chains built on extraction. Whole economies bent around our appetites, debt dressed up as “aid,” apologies for yesterday wrapped around new harms today. Smiles for the cameras. Handshakes in conference halls. The gap between what we say and what we do widens until it cracks our sense of self. Billions of lives reduced to metrics and line items.

At home, a generation sits with that low, persistent ache—the feeling that something essential is missing. We can’t name it because we’ve never seen it. We scroll, we buy, we upgrade, and the emptiness persists. The world feels wrong because a lot of it is.

So we look for villains. Governments. Corporations. Banks. Billionaires. The rage is real. But here’s the cruel part: the system doesn’t need masterminds. It runs on incentives, defaults, and dashboards. As Mark Fisher called it: capitalist realism—the idea that capitalism is not only the only system we have, but the only one we can even imagine. “It’s easier to picture the end of the world than the end of this.”

We ask governments to fix it, but they are locked inside the same logic: eternal growth, quarterly numbers, “market confidence.” These aren’t laws on paper; they’re habits of thought. They show up in budgets, in central bank statements, in the way a politician’s future depends on a graph pointing up and to the right. Not a conspiracy. A culture.

We blame governments because they are visible. But they are both perps and hostages. Even when they want to do better, they hit the walls of what the market will tolerate. And the market tolerates what pays.

“How do you fight a system?” people ask. “How does one cog resist the machine it’s designed to fit?” A fair question. The web of causes is too complex to hold in your head. That impotence you feel? It’s a feature, not a bug.

Corporations are symptoms, too. They perform exactly as we trained them: maximize shareholder value, externalize costs, optimize the metric. You can smash a brand in your mind—it changes nothing about the spreadsheet. Replace Amazon with another hydra head and the warehouse schedules, the algorithmic quotas, the next-day delivery promises all snap back into place. The shape remains even if you swap the actors.

Billionaires? Same deal. If one disappears, the role survives. The structure keeps minting replacements. And many of us live with the story that we’re “temporarily embarrassed millionaires,” as the saying goes. We hate the board—right until we imagine sitting at it.

---

---

Worse than stealing our time, the system steals our sense of agency. It gives us proxies: like buttons, curated outrage, “ethical” shopping carts, performative boycotts that disappear into marketing decks. We’re fed catharsis in place of change. As Max Weber warned, we’re trapped in an iron cage of rationalization—targets, KPIs, dashboards—until the map replaces the territory. And as Marx described, we’re alienated: from our work, from one another, from ourselves. We don’t see our reflection in what we make. We see a performance review.

Even our desires are coached. René Girard called it mimetic desire: we want what we see others wanting. So the feed trains us in longing—smoother skin, cleaner desks, smarter gadgets, a lifestyle that always sits one purchase away. The algorithm doesn’t need to be evil; it just needs to keep you there. Attention is the commodity; your mood is raw material.

And because most harm is procedural rather than spectacular, there are no clear villains to topple. Hannah Arendt, who fled Nazi Germany, wrote about the banality of evil—ordinary people following ordinary rules, producing extraordinary damage. The oil burned wasn’t poured by a cartoon bad guy; it was authorized by a hundred meetings, hedged by a hundred contracts, blessed by a thousand pensions.

So when people say, “Why don’t you rage against the machine?”—understand the machine feeds on rage. It can sell rebellion back to you by Tuesday. Anti-capitalism becomes an aesthetic, activism becomes content, radicalism dissolves into a brand guide. The system metabolizes its critics and grows stronger on the calories.

This is capitalist realism: not just rules, but horizons of imagination. It tells us: “This is forever.” It sounds like common sense. It feels like the weather.

But common sense is just a story that won the last round.

So what do we do—other than wait for the tower of cards to fall and hope it doesn’t land on us?

First, let’s be precise. Grand gestures help morale; structures change outcomes. Smashing a window is theater. Changing incentives is politics. A protest can open the door; institutions walking through it is what locks change in place.

Second, rebuild agency where the machine is thinnest. Workplaces aren’t just buildings; they’re agreements. Unions, worker councils, co-ops—these aren’t romantic ideas; they’re mechanisms for shifting power at the point where value is made. If you can’t change your company, you can still change your category: independent media, open-source projects, local food networks, credit unions. Parallel structures don’t overthrow empires; they outlast them.

Third, fight metrics with meaning. Goodhart’s law says: when a measure becomes a target, it stops being a good measure. So stop letting targets define your soul. Refuse to make your worth a dashboard. Do the unmeasurable things that make communities resilient: watch a neighbor’s kid, visit the old guy down the hall, share skills, share tools. Mutual aid doesn’t produce headlines, but it works.

Fourth, take aim at the rulebook, not just the players. Push for public goods that shrink the market’s grip: housing policy that treats shelter as a right; transportation that doesn’t demand a car; health care that isn’t a spreadsheet; a shorter workweek so life can exist between shifts. These aren’t utopian fantasies. They are choices—ones some countries have already made, imperfectly, but made.

Fifth, protect your attention like you protect your data. Turn off infinite scroll when you can. Read long. Sit with silence. The engine runs on your nervous system; you can starve it of fuel. That is not “the” solution. It’s a boundary that buys you time to act elsewhere.

And yes, beware the liberal center when it confuses performance for progress. A brand-safe protest with a hashtag is not the ceiling of political imagination. But don’t let cynicism trick you into apathy either. Apathy is just capitalism’s gravity working on your spirit.

None of this is the silver bullet. There isn’t one. Systems this large shift like continents: slowly, then all at once. But meaning lives in the small, stubborn refusals and the boring, persistent builds. In the insistence that “forever” is marketing copy, not destiny.

Maybe the end of the world is easier to imagine than the end of capitalism. So practice imagining anyway. Not as an aesthetic, but as a plan: fewer hours, thicker bonds, real public goods, work that reflects a human face. Not tomorrow’s revolution—today’s revisions, stacked.

The machine wants your despair because despair is predictable. Don’t give it that. Give it friction, at least.

Thanks for reading,

Antonio Melonio

---

Consider supporting my work

More and more writers worldwide are being replaced by corporate AI slop. If you still value independent, free, critical, and personal writing, please consider supporting writers such as me financially. It’s the only way to make sure the world doesn’t drown in curated bullshit.

You can support me with a monthly subscription here on Substack:

Or on Patreon. A monthly subscription ensures writers receive a predictable, constant income. It’s how one makes a living.

I know, I know. Everyone hates subscriptions. I understand. That’s why you can also support my work with a one-time donation. No commitments, just a little tip. Some coffee money.

Thank you.