Pattern Maintenance: What Squid Game Reveals About How Capitalism Really Works

When Squid Game burst onto Netflix in 2021, it captured something we all felt but couldn't quite name. On the surface, it's a brutal story about desperate people playing children's games for money. But beneath the violence lies something more unsettling: a mirror of how modern capitalism actually works. Not the capitalism of factory floors and stock exchanges, but something more subtle - a system we can't quite see until, like the show's protagonist Gi-hun, we're forced to look.

The return-to-office push makes this visible. Jamie Dimon talks about hustle and culture, Amazon demands full-time office presence, Goldman Sachs requires everyone back at their desks. But what they're really doing is simpler: they're admitting that work never needed to happen in an office. They just need us there to keep the wheels turning. Remote work wasn't a failure - it just let too many people step off the treadmill at once.

As Squid Game comes back for Season 2, look at the financial district's empty towers at night. They stand there lit up like the Front Man's facility, waiting for workers to return not because they need to, but because the system needs them to. Inside, everything's negotiable except showing up.

You feel it most on the morning commute. Squeezed into a subway car, watching Squid Game on your phone, screen glowing on your face like one of those VIP masks. The doors snap shut and you're heading to an office that wants your body in a chair for no real reason. In that moment, you're playing every game at once: making Netflix's numbers tick up, filling the subway's quota, occupying office space, buying lunch where you're told. Just like the VIPs didn't care who lived or died in their games, these systems don't care who you are - only that you keep playing.

That's what capitalism has become. We're all replaceable parts now, our individual qualities matter less than our reliability in keeping the machine running. Different faces tap through the turnstiles, different hands swipe different cards, different bodies fill different chairs - but the rhythm stays the same.

Just as Gi-hun turned back when he saw the truth, we're all at that point now, glancing at our phones between meetings about mandatory office presence. The bosses will keep demanding we return - you can hear their speeches about "culture" echoing through empty halls. But maybe, crushed in that subway car, watching a show about people trapped in deadly games while heading to our own daily performance, we'll see what Gi-hun saw. Season 2 is coming, the office towers are waiting, but like him, we might finally recognize the game we're in - and decide to stop playing.