Work isn’t freedom. Work is just slavery with a fresh coat of paint and some HR paperwork stapled on top. You don’t “choose” to work — you’re forced into it, because the alternative is starvation, homelessness, or dying without healthcare. That’s not choice, that’s coercion. That’s a gun to your head with a smiley face sticker.

Slavery never ended, it just got cleverer. Back then, they gave you a master. Now, they give you a manager. Back then, you worked for scraps of food to stay alive. Now, you work for scraps of money that barely cover rent, groceries, and maybe enough gas to crawl back to work tomorrow. That paycheck isn’t freedom — it’s rations. It’s the modern equivalent of tossing hay to a mule so it can keep pulling the cart.

Indentured servants signed contracts that trapped them for years. Today, people sign loan papers, mortgages, credit card agreements — debt chains that keep you shackled for decades. You’re still working to pay off the cost of existing, same as they did.

The myth is that you’re “free” because you can quit your job. But quit to do what? Live in the street? Beg for scraps? Real freedom means having the option to say “no” without facing ruin. And almost no worker has that option. That’s not freedom. That’s the leash being just long enough so you don’t see the collar.

This system thrives on the same principle as slavery always has: squeeze the labor out of human beings, give them the bare minimum to survive, and convince them it’s all normal. The whip has been replaced by rent. The auction block has been replaced by job applications. The plantation has been replaced by the office cubicle.

Call it whatever you want — a career, a livelihood, “putting in the hours” — but at its core, it’s still the same machine grinding people down for profit. Wage slavery isn’t a metaphor. It’s the reality we’re all living in.

@nihilvt
Good post but i have two further questions:
- How do we break out of it?
- Could you give historical examples where the solutions to the first worked?

>- How do we break out of it?
Natural disasters or anthropological happenings, e.g. disease outbreaks, extreme severe weather events, solar weather events, geological disturbances, etc. and things such as war, widespread violence unrelated to war, total financial collapse, total social disarry, etc. respectively.
>- Could you give historical examples where the solutions to the first worked?
Clarify?

@Owl @nihilvt
I agree violence and war are the answer. Bringing back widespread rape to put fear back in women amd pillaging as a way for men to thrive will be the best for young men.
But those actions that require the masses to move, it's not something we can cause by ourselves.
My second question is how we can cause this change in our life, acting by ourselves locally to break from this wage slavery.

>My second question is how we can cause this change in our life, acting by ourselves locally to break from this wage slavery.
We wait. Literally. That is it. There are so many moving parts now that something is bound to fail eventually. This system cannot actually last.