Workers… two words, ten thousand contracts, a million dreams, zero certainties. Welcome to the grand circus of precarious employment: where fixed-term contracts turn into magicians every three months, and the promise to renew is the one trick that never works. Do you know what a worker is? Someone who pays 600 euros net for a tiny studio, smiles at the landlord and wonders if next month’s gas bill will be another blow. Someone who goes to the supermarket with twenty euros and returns with a cart empty of hope. Someone who builds bridges that crumble at the first rain, pools numbers from phantom budgets, and signs “collaboration” papers that are a flickering chain. Someone who types emails at three in the morning to earn one more hour, works for free in the morning to prove they “are worth more,” and in the evening finds they count less than a like on a corporate post. Do you see the “gig workers”? Digital nomads with a smartphone as a wristlet, one click per order, one click per starvation wage. Welcome to the era where your own effort is the currency. And then there are the “brain drain” graduates: cap-and-gown ready to fly abroad, because here the future is sold in installments, but they charge all the installments at once. The worker is an acrobat: has lost balance between personal life and emergency calls, bounces in a ping-pong of deadlines, wakes up nauseous having to prove every day they are an investment, not a cost. Social contributions? You pay them, with a pension that never comes, with a mortgage on a home you’ll never live in, with sleepless nights counting hours between interviews. Have they ever told you “invest in yourself”? The same mantra sold when they seat you in a dingy co-working space, among fake cacti and wobbling Wi-Fi. But the real investment they demand is unpaid overtime, stolen weekends, every sacred freedom sacrificed at the altar of “productivity at any cost.” Meanwhile the cost of living soars: eco-bonuses become distant echoes, heating bills read like war bulletins, and the grocery cart total never adds up. Here’s the paradox: they tell us this is the age of “flexibility,” a kind word for “modular slavery.” The more you bend to the market, the more they praise you. But applause doesn’t pay rent. So, workers, shall we make a deal? Let’s not go home happy just because we’ve beaten the bare-minimum wage. Let’s not hit like on our own exhaustion. Let’s not turn off the TV thinking “we’ll make it,” when every morning they keep exploiting us without mercy. We need a market that doesn’t promise the impossible, a wage that isn’t a joke, a workplace that isn’t a ring where the one with the lowest blows wins. And if this monologue hits too close to your life, don’t applaud: shout. Don’t like it: change the rules of the game. Because the true precarious one isn’t the fixed-term contract holder, but the one who lost the dignity to say “enough.” And as long as we don’t raise our voices, we remain merely extras in the final act of a crumbling theater. Good night, workers… see you back on stage tomorrow.