You will be a cog.
Not metaphorically. Not tragically. Simply, inescapably: existentially.
We arrive in the world already entangled—ensouled by history, enmeshed in meanings we did not spin. The cog is not a symbol of servitude but a confession of structure: the human being is always born into systems, each charged with memory, duty, and invisible demands. What the Greeks called fate, the Qur’an divine order, the Confucians ritual placement, the Gita dharma—this positioning is not diminishment, but the primal truth from which any moral life must begin.
Our becoming does not commence in preference, but in orientation. Ask not, What do I want?, but Within what whole have I been placed, and what is my office in its unfolding? True justice, for Plato, is right alignment: the soul attuned to the polis, each part ordered to the Good. For Aristotle, flourishing is not self-assertion but perfected relation of form to function, part to whole. Augustine’s ordo amoris draws the heart not inward, but upward—to love what must be loved, in an order that transcends. Significance is never individual, but found in the cosmos we reflect.
Modernity tore this map. The world fell silent, and conscience collapsed into taste. The buffered self denies cosmic connection. Institutions no longer form the soul—they monetise it. Vocation becomes branding; ESG displaces ethics. As Arendt saw, the horror of our age is not that evil erupts—but that we become banal cogs in Kafka's maze—adapting, complying, managing.
The betrayal is structural. But the decision is personal. Freedom is not the right to define our own good - it is the invitation to discover the Good that defines us. The tragic heroes—from Athens to Benares, Jerusalem to Johannesburg—do not escape structure; they bear it with fidelity. Antigone defies the city to obey a law she did not write. Weil drags herself through field and factory to learn what solidarity demands. Bonhoeffer rejects safety to preserve the soul of the church. Fanon names injustice and offers himself to the struggle against alienation. Bashō, Rumi, the mystics of every tradition do not invent the Good—they receive it as a horizon. Each lives not to express a self, but to inhabit a truth.
This is the dignity of the cog: not obedience, but participation. To live a good life is not to “find meaning,” but to become part of a meaningful whole. To take up our place in a moral cosmos is not to diminish the self, but to ground it—to become worthy of the weight it is given.
Our final judgment will not measure the impact we had, but the form of society we helped shape; not whether we turned the wheel, but whether we embodied truth, justice, love, peace at every turn. We become ourselves—with restless heart—by the constancy with which we answer the terribly beautiful question our life sets before us each day:
Not, What did I achieve? but:
In what light did I turn?
To what was I faithful?
What Good did I serve?
#leadership