They don’t ask you if you’re passionate about the fruits.

They don’t care how your values align with the grapes or whether the apples speak to your long-term ambitions. No résumé required, no smiles rehearsed. Just an exchange: currency for sustenance, need for fulfillment. A transaction stripped bare of performance.

Walk through the fluorescent corridors of a grocery store and you encounter something rare in modern life—honest capitalism. The carrots don’t pretend to be your “family.” The yoghurt doesn’t inquire about your five-year plan. And the self-checkout doesn’t judge the solitude in your eyes. It simply scans and moves on. Efficient. Indifferent. Free from the theater of ego.

Contrast that with a job interview. Suddenly, you're a contortionist in a three-piece suit. Your words are props, your smile a product. You are not being evaluated for competence alone, but for chemistry, culture, charisma—code for compliance, conformity, and comfort. They ask if you’re a team player, not because collaboration is noble, but because autonomy is dangerous.

There’s something disturbingly performative in being forced to feign enthusiasm for systems that view you as a cost center. The fruit never lies about its shelf life. The corporation never tells the truth about yours.

And what is the job interview if not a ritual of allegiance? You kneel, metaphorically, before strangers and promise fidelity—to mission statements you didn’t write, to goals that aren’t yours, to metrics that commodify your hours. You learn the language of ambition, but forget the sound of your own voice.

The grocery store doesn’t ask for your story. It offers a choice. You can leave the tomatoes on the shelf and no one takes it personally.

Perhaps the simplicity of that exchange is what makes it sacred. In a world addicted to optics and narratives, the quiet honesty of buying raw food is a kind of rebellion. There is no pretense. Just hunger. And choice.

So which is more real—the transaction born of survival, or the one born of submission masked as opportunity?

Maybe the job interview is not a gateway but a mask-fitting ceremony.

And maybe those vegetables, indifferent and silent, are more honest than any recruiter you'll ever meet.