The Floor

Four years on the service side.

I started working at seventeen. For four years — convenience stores, day labor, hotel restaurants, kitchens in Tokyo, Osaka, and London — I did the work a society quietly codes as low. I was always passing through. In September I leave for university in North America. But the four years were not wasted, and what I learned in them deserves to be written down. The people who write about labor rarely do it. The people who do it rarely write.

What Respect Tracks

We say all work deserves respect. We do not behave as if we mean it.

I felt the difference every day. The same person — me — was visible or invisible depending on what he was wearing. Thanked or instructed. Met or looked through. Respect in the room was not distributed according to how well anyone did their job. It was distributed according to where the job sat in an unspoken hierarchy.

My first reaction was resentment, and the resentment took a specific shape: this is unfair because I am capable of more than this. I was passing through. I knew where I was going. So the contempt felt aimed at someone it didn't apply to.

It took me too long to see the problem with that thought.

If the disrespect was unjust because I happened to be capable of more, then I was conceding it would be just for someone who wasn't — someone whose ceiling really was the floor I was standing on. I was not objecting to the hierarchy. I was objecting to my place in it.

Michael Sandel calls this the tyranny of merit: the belief that people get what they deserve, that position reflects worth. I had read him. I had agreed with him. And the first time the system put me on the wrong side, my instinct was not to reject the logic but to plead an exception. Not me. I'm different.

That is the most honest thing I can say about myself from those four years. The meritocratic reflex is not something other people have. Under pressure, it was the first thing out of me.

Respect is owed to persons. Not to positions. The moment you make it conditional — respect for the capable, contempt for the rest — you have rebuilt the hierarchy you were criticizing.

Respect Is Not Pride

Respect is owed to persons. Universally. Without condition.

Pride has to be earned. By craft. By difficulty. By skill that took years to build and that not everyone can build.

The dangerous move is to take pride from the position itself — as if the title did the work. I watched many managers in hospitality do exactly this. Imperious to subordinates. Indignant when questioned. Proud in a way the role itself never authorized.

Restaurant manager is not, structurally, a hard thing to become. The path is short, the barriers are low, the skills can be learned in months. None of which makes the work worthless. It makes pride from the title alone — separate from any actual mastery — a category error.

The analogy that made it clear to me: speaking English in London. The skill is universal there. If a Londoner boasted of it, he would be laughed at. Pride should be calibrated to the environment's baseline. What everyone around you can do is not what distinguishes you.

This does not undo respect for the work. A great waiter who has mastered attention, anticipation, and grace under pressure has earned pride — fully, and on the same terms as a great surgeon. Mastery is universal as a ground for pride. Position is not. The error is reading the position as if it were the mastery.

I say this carefully because I am about to enter finance — a field with its own version of this confusion. Investment bankers, too, mistake titles for accomplishments. If I do it later, this critique should come back at me.

Same Age, Different Stakes

The inequality I could see most clearly was not about talent. It was about starting points.

I worked beside people my exact age. One was earning tuition. Every shift was the difference between continuing his education and stopping. Another was earning pocket money. Same shift, same wage, but it changed nothing about his life either way.

Same task. Same hourly rate. Completely different meaning.

You cannot understand this from outside. You have to stand at the same sink and watch what the money means to the person beside you. I am glad I learned, in my body, exactly how hard it is to earn.

Language and Hierarchy

I worked in two countries. The sharpest difference was not the food or the hours. It was how far you were allowed to speak upward.

In London, a manager could be argued with. You could disagree to his face, push back, say the thing directly. The relationship survived it. In Japan, that conversation is almost structurally impossible. The hierarchy is steeper, and it is built into the language itself. The grammar of deference does half the work of keeping you in your place before anyone decides anything.

I am not going to tell you which is better. I will say: until I worked in two languages, I did not understand how much of a culture's hierarchy is carried inside its grammar.

The Structural Alibi

Foucault taught us to see industries like the one I was working in as machines that produce a certain kind of worker. Uniforms. Time-clocks. Bodies arranged under managerial gaze. Subjects who know where to stand and what to call whom. The hospitality industry, like any disciplinary system, produces a subject. The shape of that subject is structural, not personal. This is the correct first move. I have made it in everything else I have written about work.

But the structural reading has a limit, and the limit matters.

People work in hospitality for many reasons. A student earning tuition. A migrant building a base in a new country. A craftsman who chose the work and loves it. A parent between things. A young person finding their feet. All of these are valid. None of them require explanation. Respect is owed to all of them. I have nothing to add about their choices.

There is one case I do want to speak to. The case of someone who has a dream, and who uses the structural conditions of the work — the lack of prospects, the short horizon — as the reason to abandon that dream.

To them I want to say: I understand. And no.

I want to say no for three reasons. They come from three different thinkers.

Sartre called this mauvaise foi — bad faith. The move of hiding behind your conditions as if your conditions were your essence. The role I am playing is not who I am. The industry I am in is not the limit of what I can become. To say "the work has no future, so my dream has no future" is to let the structure name you. L'existence précède l'essence — existence precedes essence. The structure has no authority to write your essence in advance. Giving it that authority is the most ordinary form of self-betrayal there is.

Nietzsche called the person who has surrendered aspiration der letzte Mensch — the last man. The one who invented happiness without striving. The one who shrinks his horizon until comfort and aspiration cannot conflict. The structural conditions of low-prospect work make this shrinking easy. The horizon is short, the comfort is real, the reasons not to try are always available. Nietzsche's warning: this is a way of going extinct without noticing.

Camus answered the same problem differently. Sisyphus rolls the rock up the hill knowing it will fall. The conditions are absolute. The rock is real. There is no exit. And yet Camus says we must imagine Sisyphus happy — not because the absurd is overcome, but because Sisyphus chooses, again and again, to push. The lucid acceptance of the conditions is itself the rebellion. The opposite of Sisyphus is not the person who fails. It is the person who stopped pushing because the conditions said he should.

Three thinkers, one position. The structure is real (Foucault). The conditions do not write your essence (Sartre). Letting them is how you become small (Nietzsche). The right answer to real constraint is conscious continuation, not surrender (Camus).

I respect every reason a person has for being in this work. I do not respect — and will not pretend to respect — using the work's conditions as an alibi for letting a dream die. That is the one place the structural reading goes wrong. It is true as analysis. It becomes false the moment it is used as permission.

What I Keep

Two things survive the four years.

One is a distinction. Respect is owed to persons, universally, without condition. Pride is earned by craft, not by position. Most of what I saw confused them in both directions. Respect withheld from people whose positions were low. Pride claimed by people whose positions were undemanding. The day I confuse them again, I will have learned nothing.

The other is a sharper question. Not who works hard — almost everyone on that floor worked harder than the people who looked down on them. The question is: who designed the room so that the same effort means tuition for one person and pocket money for another? And the question after that: what within that room is mine to refuse, even when refusal costs? The first question is why I am leaving to study. The second I will be answering for the rest of my life.