We’re constantly told to hustle, to grind, to find our passion, build our personal brand, and make every moment count. Productivity is a virtue, distraction a sin. But what if the system that urges us to give it our all is, in fact, designed to take everything from us—our time, our spirit, our very humanity?

Long before hashtags like #burnout or #quietquitting entered the modern lexicon, French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil saw it all coming. Nearly a century ago, she diagnosed a spiritual affliction tied not just to how we work, but to how we live. And she did it not from the safety of an ivory tower, but on the ground—on the factory floor.

Weil, an intellectual and activist, deliberately worked in factories to understand industrial labor from the inside. Not for a weekend or a research paper, but for extended, grueling stretches. She wasn’t just studying work; she was immersing herself in it. And what she found was a system designed not just to exhaust the body, but to crush the soul.

The assembly line—perhaps the defining image of industrial capitalism—turns workers into machines. Mind-numbing repetition, no room for thought, creativity, or autonomy. You do one tiny task, endlessly. Your mind dulls. Your sense of self erodes. To Weil, this wasn’t just economic exploitation—it was “spiritual violence.”

The tragedy is, this system was no accident. It was crafted that way. Frederick Winslow Taylor, the father of “scientific management,” believed in breaking down tasks to their smallest parts, removing every trace of inefficiency. But what counted as inefficiency? Humanity. Personality. Individual thought. In this view, humans became obstacles to productivity unless they behaved like robots.

Fast forward to the present. Most of us aren’t on assembly lines, but the core logic remains. Open-plan offices. Slack pings. Back-to-back meetings. Multitasking. Constant surveillance. The need to always be “on.” Our attention is fragmented; our inner life, invaded. We may not clock in with punch cards, but our minds are just as colonized.

And it’s not just burnout. It’s a deeper affliction—a spiritual starvation. Weil called it malheur, a French word that roughly translates as “affliction,” but goes further. It’s a suffering that uproots you. That strips you of identity, meaning, connection. Like the Roman slaves she studied—stripped of name, culture, and past—the modern worker, Weil argued, experiences a form of spiritual slavery. Not owned by a master, but owned by the machine of productivity.

She saw this kind of suffering as leading to despair, addiction, even nihilism. And we see it too—in rising rates of depression, anxiety, and loneliness. In the numbing scroll of social media feeds that promise connection but deliver disconnection. We reach for dopamine hits while starving for meaning.

Weil believed the antidote was attention. Not the kind of fleeting attention we give to tweets or TikToks, but deep, disciplined, receptive attention. She called it “the rarest and purest form of generosity.” To truly pay attention to someone is to acknowledge their existence, to affirm their worth. It’s not just focus—it’s love. It’s prayer.

This kind of attention isn’t easy. It’s a spiritual practice. It must be cultivated—through mindfulness, difficult reading, solitude, meaningful conversation. Weil even saw education’s true purpose not as information transfer, but as attention training. Wrestling with hard problems trains the soul to stay present. And staying present, she believed, was how we stay human.

This leads us to one of Weil’s most unsettling insights—the idea of the Great Beast. Borrowed from Plato, it represented the force of the unthinking collective: the mob, the corporation, the political party, the media—all of which thrive on suppressing individuality and independent thought. The Great Beast is seductive. It offers purpose and belonging—but at the price of your soul.

In Weil’s time, it took the form of fascist regimes. But today, it could be the algorithmic feed that manipulates your desires. The company that asks you to “bring your whole self to work,” while monitoring your every keystroke. The pressure to conform to ideological tribes or brand identities. The Great Beast survives because we are inattentive—because we let others think for us.

So how do we fight it? By reclaiming our attention. By resisting the forces that would numb us. By daring to be awake. Weil’s call is not cozy or easy. It’s a fierce, often lonely act of resistance. But she believed that in paying attention—to truth, to others, to our own depths—we might just find our way back to our souls.

Simone Weil didn’t offer easy hope. What she offered was harder: the truth, and a path. In an age that treats humans as means to an end, she reminds us that we are ends in ourselves. That our attention—our deepest, most generous gift—is the seed of all connection, all meaning, all resistance.

Credit: This post is adapted from a video essay that eloquently explores Simone Weil’s work and relevance to our modern condition.