The Castrated Worker: Of the Illusion and of the Real

The Illusion of the Ordinary Worker

Picture yourself as an ordinary worker, living in a country that seems to be slowly unraveling. As prices climb higher every week while your wages remain stagnant, it’s as if time itself has conspired to trap you in the same exhausting routine. Buying a house? Forget it, property values have skyrocketed. Meanwhile, The government seems more concerned with maintaining power than addressing the crushing weight of society’s daily work life. Their promises of “stability” ring hollow, as though spoken from a world far removed from ours.

At work, the signs are everywhere. Your colleague, once full of energy, now spends his breaks complaining—not about the job itself–but the sheer futility of it. He works overtime yet his paycheck doesn’t accommodate it. Two of your coworkers were laid off recently yet their tasks didn’t disappear with them. Instead, their tasks were quietly handed to you, as if your time had magically tripled. But of course, your salary remained the same. Outside, university students and activists pour into the streets, shouting for accountability, demanding that the government answers for this mess. You watch them from a distance, their chants echoing in the back of your mind. Clearly, something isn’t right.

Jacques Lacan (1901-1981), the French Psychoanalyst. Taken in 1967.

Right?

But then, there’s that voice—the one that’s been with you since childhood. Your parents, your elders, your bosses, and now the endless parade of influencer-motivators on TikTok and Instagram all say the same thing: Don’t complain. Don’t be negative. Work hard, and you’ll climb the ladder. Good things come to those who endure. So you keep your head down, working, waiting, hoping. After all, speaking up feels dangerous—like admitting you’re losing. But here’s the question: What happens when someone refuses to act in the face of crisis? What if doing nothing isn’t the safe choice you were led to believe? What if, by staying silent, you’re slowly disappearing?

In moments of crisis, when the ground beneath daily life begins to shift, it’s easy to think that doing nothing—keeping your head down and waiting for the storm to pass—is a form of survival. But in psychoanalysis, particularly the theories of Jacques Lacan, offers a far more unsettling perspective: passivity is not neutral. It’s an active refusal to confront reality, a slow dissolution of the self. To understand how this happens, we can turn to Lacan’s framework of the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic—three intertwined orders that shape how we experience the world and ourselves within it.

The Illusion of Stability

Your life, like most people’s, is structured by what Lacan calls the Symbolic Order—the vast web of language, laws, and social expectations that give the world its shape and logic. From childhood, you were taught a script: work hard, stay out of trouble, and you’ll build a stable life. The Imaginary supports this belief, creating a comforting fantasy where the economy is fair, the government—however flawed—ensures order, and social mobility is achievable if you just keep your head down and persevere. This is the foundation of your desire: to succeed within this system, to earn your place, to eventually “make it.”

For years, this belief holds. You wake up, go to work, collect your paycheck, and plan—however vaguely—for a future where things will be better. This is how the Symbolic functions: it organizes your reality, telling you that the discomfort of today is temporary, and that the system, though slow, ultimately rewards effort. Even when small cracks appear—when wages stagnate or housing prices rise—you rationalize them, believing this is just a rough patch, not a structural failure.

But then the cracks widen. The economy takes a nosedive. Prices soar while your salary stays the same. You watch the news, and the truth becomes impossible to ignore: the government isn’t just inefficient; it’s corrupt, focused more on self-preservation than solving the crisis. You hear friends complain, see coworkers laid off, and realize you’re working harder for the same pay, carrying the weight of their absence without recognition or reward. Meanwhile, protests erupt—students demand accountability, voices rise, and for a brief moment, you feel that same rage, that same sense of injustice.

This is the moment the Real breaks through: the raw, chaotic truth that the Symbolic Order was never as stable as it seemed. The fantasy of fairness shatters. You see the system for what it is—indifferent, perhaps even hostile—and in that moment, you could act. But you don’t. Instead, you retreat, telling yourself, as you always have, that things will get better, that complaining changes nothing, that working harder is the only path forward. Yet, deep down, the illusion is cracked, and the Real, once glimpsed, never fully disappears. It lingers, like a shadow, reminding you that the life you’re holding onto might already be gone.

The Loss of Meaning and Authority

As an ordinary worker, you live primarily within the Symbolic Order—the social and economic structures that give life a sense of coherence. You believe, or perhaps once believed, that working hard leads to stability, that the system, though imperfect, functions well enough to reward perseverance. This belief, however, starts to unravel when the recession hits, the government’s corruption becomes undeniable, and your labor is devalued in plain sight. This is the beginning of castration in Lacanian terms—not literal, but the realization that the system you trusted has no true authority, that its promises were always an illusion.

This moment of castration presents a choice: to reconstruct your desire in a new way—by resisting, adapting, or reinventing yourself—or to retreat. And retreat, for many, feels safer. But this is where passivity takes root, drawing you back into the Imaginary Order—a place of fantasy and denial. You tell yourself it will get better, that complaining or acting out is dangerous or ungrateful. Yet the longer you wait, the more disconnected from reality you become, until your own desires are no longer your own. Lacanian psychoanalysis reveals that this descent into passivity is not just a loss of action but a loss of subjectivity—a slow disappearance into the margins of a world that no longer acknowledges you. And that is the real danger: not that the crisis will consume you, but that you will vanish before it ever does.

The Retreat into the Imaginary

Instead of confronting this rupture, you retreat—not into action, but into inaction, which Lacan would call a return to the Imaginary Order. It’s easier, after all. So, you keep going to work, even as your wages shrink in real value, quietly accepting that the same paycheck buys less every month. You watch the government’s incompetence unfold in plain sight—news of corruption scandals, public funds disappearing, promises broken—and though you feel the anger rising, you tell yourself, “It’ll get better. It always does.”

This is the dangerous comfort of the Imaginary: a place of fantasy where the crisis is temporary, where if you just endure, the old stability will return. You imagine the government fixing things, your company recognizing your hard work, the economy bouncing back—but you take no steps toward making any of this happen. You don’t join the protests, don’t demand a raise, don’t even speak openly about your frustration. You just wait.

But Lacanian psychoanalysis reveals a hard truth: passivity is not neutral. It’s not a harmless decision to “stay out of it.” It’s an active refusal to confront reality, a deliberate turning away from the Real, which demands action and change. In this refusal, you participate in your own erasure. By staying silent, by pretending the cracks in the system aren’t as deep as they are, you give your consent to the very forces that are diminishing you. Over time, this passive stance transforms into something darker—a loss of agency, a shrinking of your own sense of self. The more you avoid the Real, the more you cease to exist within it. What began as survival becomes surrender, and the longer you wait, the harder it becomes to remember that you ever had a choice.

Which Way, Ordinary Worker?

If you remain passive, the world will decide for you. This is the quiet, unsettling conclusion Lacanian psychoanalysis offers—not salvation, not a promise that things will work out in the end, but a stark recognition of how desire and subjectivity function. Desire, in Lacan’s view, is what drives action, what keeps you connected to life, to others, to the future. But passivity? That’s not just waiting—it’s the gradual loss of desire itself. The longer you retreat into the Imaginary, convincing yourself that things will “get better” without your involvement, the more your connection to reality frays.

At first, this loss feels like relief. You tell yourself you’re being pragmatic, that fighting is pointless, that surviving is enough. But over time, the world moves on without you. The layoffs continue, prices rise, the government grows bolder in its corruption—and still, you wait. The protests you once watched from a distance fade, the people who demanded change grow quieter, and what once felt like a temporary crisis starts to seem like the new normal.

Yet even in this late stage, you can still act. Lacan would say that as long as desire exists, so does the potential for rupture—for breaking free from the passive repetition that the Symbolic Order imposes. The question, though, is not can you act, but will you? Because if you refuse, the outcome is clear: history will erase you. Not in a dramatic, catastrophic way, but in the quiet dissolution of your subjectivity, your voice, your place in the world. The system does not need your consent to continue; it only needs your silence. And if you give it that, it will take everything else.

The Tragedy of Passivity

To do nothing is still a choice. That’s the unsettling truth beneath all of this. Passivity, despite how it feels, is not a form of protection. It’s surrender—slow, quiet, and absolute. Your fate remains unresolved, suspended in that delicate space between recognition and action. The system does not force them to comply; it simply waits for them to step aside, to let time and fear erode their will.

But in the end, does it even matter if you never choose? That’s the haunting question. Perhaps the world won’t notice your absence. Perhaps history doesn’t record those who quietly disappear. And maybe that’s the real tragedy—not death, not collapse, but the gradual vanishing of those who refused to act.

“When the world collapses, those who refuse to act do not survive—they disappear.”