Choosing to be a person when the system wants you to be a component.
Terminology:
I. The Space Between
The machine cannot be quit. It pays rent, feeds families, constitutes professional identity. The systems we find morally bankrupt issue the same paychecks that keep us alive. Pure resistance remains a luxury for those with trust funds or nothing left to lose.
Complete compliance proves equally impossible. Something recoils when asked to implement the dark pattern, to optimize the addiction loop, to process a human being as a number. Total surrender would require becoming something other than oneself. The soul has friction, however worn down.
A nurse sees a hundred patients. She charts one wrong - not the diagnosis, that stays accurate. The billing code. The one that means bankruptcy versus manageable debt. She cannot fix American healthcare. She cannot refuse to participate in a system that prices insulin like jewelry. But this one, today, with the kid in the bed and the mother doing math in her head, she can misremember which box to check.
Tomorrow the system will audit it or it won't. Either way, she returns to her shift. She will see a hundred more. Most codes she will enter correctly.
The heroes get fired, arrested, deported. What remains are the people who found the narrow space and learned to breathe there.
II. The Absurdity of Kindness
A caseworker reviews a file at 4:47 PM on a Friday. The application is incomplete - a signature on page three, a checkbox on page seven. Procedure dictates rejection. The family restarts the process, loses months, maybe everything in the gap.
She reads the file again. The signature on page three is there - just outside the designated line. The checkbox on page seven is empty, but the same information appears in the written section below it. Technically compliant, arguably.
She marks it complete. Moves to the next file.
The family receives approval. They credit God, luck, a system that works. They will never know how close they came, or that someone chose to read the rules generously instead of precisely. Her name never enters their minds.
Every cruel system contains evidence of small sabotage dressed as error. The deadline extended. The warning that arrived in time. The rule unenforced. These register as glitches, luck, bureaucratic incompetence. But they are none of these things.
The student never learns which teacher bent which rule. The patient never discovers the argument waged on their behalf behind closed doors. The refugee never knows their application was expedited by a stranger's choice. Kindness extended toward people as indifferent to us as the cosmos itself.
No gratitude returns. No reputation builds. The system cannot measure what happened because what happened produced no data.
The caseworker goes home, pours a drink, watches something funny on television. Tomorrow she will process more files. Some she will reject, but the ones she saves will never know they were saved.
III. The Core Practice
A guard escorts prisoners through a facility. Protocol requires silence. He talks anyway - weather, sports, nothing important. The conversation changes nothing about where they're going. It changes everything about how they arrive. A voice that addressed them as people before processing them as numbers.
He does not think of himself as resisting. He thinks of himself as someone who talks too much. His supervisors agree.
A programmer writes an error message. She could write "ERROR 404." She could write "Page not found." Instead she writes: "The page you're looking for isn't here. This might be because the link is old, the page moved, or there was a typo. Try searching, or start over from the homepage."
The system functions identically in all three cases. Only the third acknowledges a human on the other side, confused and needing help.
Her manager will never notice. No metric captures it. She does it anyway, for every error state, knowing most users will curse the error regardless of how gently it's phrased. Some won't. For those, she writes.
A teacher grades forty essays. One is failing - not by much, but enough to matter. The student is struggling, working two jobs, barely present. The grade could be a 58 or a 62 depending on how the rubric gets interpreted. Both readings are defensible.
She writes 62. Adds a note: "Come to office hours. We can fix this."
The student may never come. The teacher knows this. The door stays open regardless.
This is Humanist Absurdism in action - not grand resistance but the quiet insistence on remaining human within systems designed to process humans.
IV. The Paradox
Everything described here will be optimized away.
The billing codes will be audited. The error messages will be standardized. The rubric will be tightened. The talking guard will be reassigned. Every gap that allows humanity will be identified as inefficiency and closed.
This is certain. The machine learns. It watches for friction and eliminates it. Each small mercy teaches the system where its vulnerabilities lie.
And yet.
The nurse returns tomorrow. The caseworker processes more files. The programmer writes more error messages. The teacher grades more essays. Each knowing the system will eventually close the gaps they exploit. Each exploiting them anyway.
Not because it will change the system. It won't.
Because the alternative is becoming the system. And some part of them - smaller each year, perhaps, ground down by repetition - refuses.
The system still functions. Somewhere in its machinery, a gear slips. A passage takes longer than it should. A human being passes through who was meant to be stopped.
Tomorrow the gap will close. Tonight, someone made it through.
V. The Sustainable Practice
Burnout is real. Compassion fatigue is real. The weight of maintaining humanity within inhuman systems grinds people down. The nurse who cared too much becomes the nurse who can't care at all. The teacher who bent every rule becomes the teacher who enforces them rigidly, because flexibility requires energy she no longer has.
The practice must be sustainable or it means nothing. You cannot save everyone. You cannot fix everything. The attempt will break you, and then you save no one.
Some days the kindest thing is to survive within the system without becoming it. Some days you can do more. The philosophy doesn't demand heroism, just persistence. Not perfection but presence. Not revolution but the quiet refusal to become the machine you serve.
The nurse marks the wrong code, goes home to sleep, and then returns. Does it again when she can, doesn't when she can't, forgives herself either way. Sometimes she catches the eye of another nurse who knows. Nothing is said. Nothing needs to be.
The system still functions. She still functions within it.
This isn't a victory, but it's not a surrender; it's a conscious choice, repeated until it becomes habit, to remain human in contexts designed to make humanity inefficient.
Tomorrow the labyrinth will need rebuilding. Tomorrow the passages will need adjusting. Tomorrow new people will need new mercies.
References
This essay draws on:
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Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1947)
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Simone Weil, The Need for Roots (1949)
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Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity (1961)
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Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being (1974)
Weil's concept of "attention" as ethical practice and "gravity" as systemic force provides the framework for understanding how kindness operates within crushing systems.
Levinas's ethics of the "face" and infinite responsibility explains why we remain obligated to others regardless of outcome or recognition.