🧱 Work is just one department of the global market

It is not enough to work well. Today you must know how to exist in the market. Even if you only sell labor.

“Ten years behind a counter taught me one thing:
that real work and what they make you sell never coincide.”
— Sales Diary

We live immersed in a great market.
A total market, which is not limited to exchanging goods, but encompasses relationships, expectations, identities.

Work, in this scenario, is just one department.
A section of the global market.
A showcase, often deceptive, where your operational skills do not matter, but how well you can make yourself compatible with the context.

👤 You are the product, not your skills

In the current system, the real value of skills is marginal.
What matters more is how you present yourself, how you promote yourself, how aligned you are with the dominant narrative.

Are you a bricklayer? You must be “serious and available”.
Are you a barista? You must be “sunny and social”.
Are you a shop assistant? You must sell with your soul, but without seeming too motivated (you could scare your team leader).
Are you an artisan? If you don't have Instagram, you don't exist to the market.

Even the entrepreneur — especially the small one — is inside this logic.
They must sell their business, but in the end they sell low-margin labor, disguised as services.
And they often work more than their employees.

🧱 Everything is a market: even self-employment

They call it "doing business", but in reality it is just a way of selling yourself without protections.

Today even the freelancer, the artisan, the small shopkeeper:

• must become a “brand”

• must be easily accessible

• must sell the image of a product, more than the product itself

But the truth is that the majority of micro-enterprises in Italy never grow.
Not because they lack ideas, but because the system traps them in executive services, without the possibility of scaling.

They do not sell goods, they sell hours.
And hours have a natural ceiling: 24.

🧱 The paradox of the system: everyone against everyone

The bitterest truth is that the worker and the micro-entrepreneur are on the same side, but they do not realize it.

• The employee believes that the employer earns too much.

• The owner believes that the employees do not want to.

• The artisan believes that the market is saturated.

• The freelancer believes that others are better at advertising themselves.

Everyone is right.
And everyone is wrong.

In Sardinia we say: Chentu concas, chentu berrittas.
A hundred heads, a hundred hats.
A hundred different ways of seeing things.
And if everyone defends their hat, no one builds a roof.

🧱 No one truly scales. Not even those who “do business”

Whoever has a workshop, a shop, a VAT number, knows what I am talking about:

• Fixed costs that rise

• Margins that fall

• Clients who pay late

• Compliance that grows

• Collaborators who come and go

• No time to train, explain, plan

In the end you are just one who works more.
But the State calls you an “entrepreneur”.
Without ever giving you the tools to truly become one.

🔁 You work to survive, but you survive to work

Everyone inside the same wheel.
The worker, the cook, the freelance photographer, the carpenter, the Airbnb host, the social media manager, the hairdresser.
Everyone must constantly sell their time, their presence, their face.

And if you don't present yourself well, you are out.
Even if you work better.
Even if you are serious.
Even if you are useful.

📊 Data that speaks clearly

• In Italy, 80% of micro-enterprises have fewer than 1.5 full-time employees. (ISTAT)

• 92% of individual VAT numbers do not exceed €20,000 net annually. (MEF)

• Youth unemployment is at 22.4%, but those who work are often still poor (ISTAT 2024).

• The real average wage has been stagnant for 30 years (OECD).

• The companies that grow beyond 5 employees are only 2.7% of the total.

These numbers do not speak of incompetence.
They speak of a sick structure, of broken supply chains, of useless products, of bureaucracy that strangles.

🔒 The war is between the poor. Because that is what the system wants

The system works like this:
it divides, because only divided are we docile.

• Worker against employer

• Freelancer against employee

• Operational against creative

• Young against old

• South against North

• Man against woman

• Precarious against guaranteed

And while we fight among ourselves,
the social ladder has been withdrawn.

🧭 We need alliance, and trust with those who have the same interest as you, not competition!

If we do not come together, we all remain below because to all intents and purposes, everyone, today, has been selling something since they were little: 

• our time

• our energy

• our body

• our omnipresence, both physical and digital

• our competence

• or just our “know-how”

But none of us can make it alone.
To get out of this nightmare we need:

• local alliances

• hybrid networks

• cooperation between trades

• valuation of real experience

• less storytelling, more tangible and shared reality.

Our problem is not work.
It is the way we do it that they make us live it because especially of themandatory identity they ask us to wear to survive.

✍️ This article is part of the SRDN Backstage Society blog

A space for those who work, for those who observe, for those who resist.