We let the week pass through us.

Who are we during the week, for those 50 to 60 odd hours and the meals and the dreams in between them?
Machines, oiled, but just broken enough for miracles to slide through. Just enough humanity thrown in. Maybe it is by design, of our masters. Maybe their materials aren’t as resilient as they expected. The crack of humanity, through the block of the week is where vines of intellectual property come forth, wrapping around the aforementioned block. Green, waify, frail, it belongs to the block. As much as their nature oppose, vines be not much without those blocks. When the smog rises all around us, only way to sunlight are these skyscraping blocks.

Are those cracks by design? I am not sure, but give credit where it’s due, our bosses know when to capitalize on what. A bit of cracks make these blocks look lived in.

So I ask. How much is the least amount of humanity required for each job? There must be the efficiency formula. How much of a human do we need to be for this?
Or perhaps, it’s the image of humanity, playing on screen, that’s needed. Needed to be studied.
Humanity is perhaps to be studied, in a version that can be encapsulated, so each department of our company wears the skin of that dimension, that aspect. I design, I will concern myself and my humanity with the aesthetics of people, of ergonomics, or eye flow.
The finance guy will look at how people shop, when they need to shop, what to shop etc.
Ofcourse adding all of these up one may have a near perfect image of human. Not ideal, I think, not ideal, but near perfect.

But what of us, who use only a part of our humanity to create these dimensions, who focus our days and the dreams in between to emulate, simulate, the bit of humanity.
You may retort that this is just what is called specialization, that this is how societies and work places have been for millennia. That people achieve pinnacle by focusing on certain aspects of human life with precision. And yes I agree, but every specialist has glaring blindspots. The connective tissue are torn apart. If we make an image, it’s a collage; if it’s a mannequin, it’s not double jointed where it’s supposed to be.

The wasted hour of humanity is uncounted for. The thought lost when you suddenly get a call, the imaginary conversation you have in the metro which ends when it’s your stop, never to be recovered. The useless, the unmonetizable.
Image of humanity is not humanity. The image that is added up by us specialists, is in the uncanny valley of life. The monetised is always bereft of the folly of humanity. Obviously by design.
We are in our downfall as much as in our ascension. We are in our foolery, our unkemptness.

I intend to not produce a theory, the amount of rigour required is not for me.
But I do mean to note this, closest to my self. I am every person, with enough caveats.
I feel between a human and a machine. Between a fallen and risen. Noble in shared goals, but coded with IDs.
I think of more than myself. Of my colleagues. But also of my spreadsheets.
I am always more or less than a human, never them, at work.

The quantification of humanity is the loss of it. How human am I during the weekday then? I am human, quantified.
It’s not that I am a shred of my humanity, but I am the image of it.