There's a monstera in the break room that's been dying for six months. Its leaves have gone from glossy emerald to the color of old newspapers, curling inward like arthritic fingers. Everyone sees it. Everyone walks past it daily, sometimes multiple times, on their way to microwave sad lunches or refill coffee that tastes like burnt resignation. No one waters it.
This isn't neglect in the traditional sense. It's something more precise, more telling. The plant was purchased by facilities management three years ago as part of a workplace wellness initiative that also included standing desks no one uses and a meditation app subscription that expired after the free trial. Someone was paid to select it, transport it, position it just so near the window. Someone else approved the invoice. The plant arrived as a symbol of care, of investment in employee wellbeing, of a workplace that values life and growth.
Now it's dying in slow motion, and the death means something different.
The unspoken agreement is this: watering the plant is someone else's job. Not yours, not mine, not anyone's in particular, which means no one's at all. Facilities might have done it initially, but facilities laid off two people last quarter and the survivors are underwater. HR won't touch it because plants aren't in their mandate. The office manager quit six months ago and hasn't been replaced. So the monstera withers, a perfect little mortality play performed daily for an audience of people who understand exactly what they're watching.
What makes it unbearable isn't the death itself but the collective choice to let it happen. Any individual could fill a cup with water and pour it into the soil. The act would take thirty seconds. The plant might recover, might push out new leaves, might transform back into the symbol of vitality it was purchased to be. But doing so would be a kind of confession, an admission that you noticed, that you cared, that you were willing to perform labor that falls outside your job description without compensation or recognition.
It would make you a sucker.
This is what work has become in the age of endless optimization: a series of ruthlessly defined boundaries enforced through strategic blindness. Everyone has learned to see only what they're paid to see. The dying plant exists in a gap between job descriptions, and gaps are where things go to die. To water it would be to volunteer for unrewarded emotional labor, to suggest you might do other things that aren't strictly required, to mark yourself as someone who can be exploited.
So we've all agreed, silently, to let it die. We've agreed that letting it die is the rational choice, the choice that protects us from being taken advantage of in a system that already takes everything it can. We've agreed that caring about anything beyond our defined responsibilities is a vulnerability we can't afford.
The plant dies as a lesson. It dies as proof that we've learned the lesson. It dies as a test we're all passing by failing.
Sometimes I wonder what would happen if someone finally threw it away. If facilities sent someone to remove the desiccated corpse and replace it with a new plant, alive and green and full of the same doomed vitality. Would we kill that one too? Of course we would. We'd kill a hundred plants this way, a thousand, each one arriving optimistic and dying neglected, because the problem isn't the plant.
The problem is that we've built a world where watering a dying plant in your workplace feels like crossing a picket line against yourself. Where the basic human impulse to prevent needless death must be suppressed because expressing it makes you vulnerable to a system that measures you only by your exploitability. Where everyone knows something beautiful is dying and everyone agrees that saving it would cost more than we can afford to pay.
The monstera is still there, brown and crispy, leaves crumbling when anyone brushes past. Sometimes I think about watering it. I think about it every single day. I never do. None of us do. We just keep walking past, knowing exactly what we're watching, knowing exactly what it means that we keep walking. The plant dies slower than you'd think. Plants are resilient. They want to live. But wanting isn't enough when everyone who could help has learned that help is a trap.
One day it'll be gone, thrown out with the other trash. We'll barely notice. And whatever comes next, we'll kill that too.