Executive Functioning: Relativity at the Kitchen Table
Capital, Gravity, and the Disappearing Table
Capital’s gravity steals the kitchen table—two wages, ghost jobs, algorithm bread—leaving little room for kairos, love, or special interests. Relativity becomes survival under chronos.
Opening — Relativity at the Kitchen Table
This piece sits at the kitchen table—if such a table still exists. When I was young, the phrase stay-at-home mum belonged to the ordinary furniture of life, not the talking points of a frightened far right. One income could hold a modest house the way a bowl holds light; a car, an annual holiday, enough margin for boredom and board games. I do not romanticise those years—their exclusions were real—but there was at least a commons of time where love could loiter without asking permission.
Now most households require two wages simply to keep the roof from filing complaints. Many couples postpone children not from lack of desire but from arithmetic. Work has become a constellation of gigs, side hustles, and “opportunities” that turn out to be data-harvesting schemes wearing friendly fonts. The family has become a site of endless extraction—algorithmic pricing for bread and milk, subscriptions for heat, for light, for the right to listen to our own music. I find myself asking, only half in jest: do we even have a kitchen table anymore?
Relativity feels different in this landscape. Energy equals the mass of industrial capitalism multiplied by chronos squared—the speed of the clock amplified until it bends our spines. To break free of that ever-expanding accretion disc requires more thrust than three jobs can provide. People I love move from pay packet to pay packet like astronauts rationing oxygen, grateful for each employer as though thanking the tide for not drowning them today.
Inside such gravity the ordinary miracles shrink. Where is the time for special interests, for the slow intelligence of play, for a conversation that does not check its watch? Family schedules begin to feel like borders; visits require visas signed by spreadsheets that never learned to hug. This is not merely economic hardship but a rearrangement of intimacy, a narrowing of the space where kairos might sit down with its coat.
The poem that follows is unapologetically anti-capitalist because the timer we live under is an economic invention before it is a psychological one. I wanted to look at relativity from the domestic angle—the way equations leak into kettles and calendars, the way love waits in hallways whilst invoices hold the sofa. If there is any hope, it lives in small acts of physics: two cups set out, a hand passing bread, the stubborn memory that the universe began in a kitchen older than money.
Relativity at the Kitchen Table
Once there was a table wide enough
for elbows, arguments, and peaches—
a small republic of crumbs
where time arrived in its slippers.
My grandmother’s kettle knew our names.
The clock on the wall was a neighbour,
not a bailiff counting breaths
for the landlord of minutes.
A single wage could hold a house
the way a bowl holds light—
car in the drive, holiday by the sea,
love with pockets for mistakes.
Now the table has been auctioned
to an app that rents our appetite.
Bread wears an algorithm price tag,
milk checks the stock market at dawn.
Couples work like twin moons
orbiting a debt that grows its own weather,
children postponed like novels
waiting for a better currency.
LinkedIn hums with ghost orchards—
jobs that harvest résumés as pollen,
schemes dressed as opportunities,
scams learning our first names.
The family becomes a quarry
where corporations mine the evenings—
subscriptions for light, for heat,
for the right to listen to our own music.
Do we even have a kitchen table
or only a charging station
for bodies too tired to notice
their hearts sold by the slice?
Relativity has new letters now—
E equals M of industrial muscle
times C of chronos squared,
energy swallowed by the accretion disc.
Capital spins like a black sun
pulling hours into its mouth,
workers stretched into spaghetti
by the gravity of invoices.
To break free requires thrust
greater than three jobs can carry—
escape velocity measured
in childcare and bus fares.
Love waits in the hallway
with its coat growing dust,
special interests packed like suitcases
no one has time to open.
I watch friends thank their employers
as if thanking the tide
for not drowning them today—
gratitude trained like a dog.
The kitchen, once an observatory,
now schedules its miracles:
fifteen minutes for supper,
ten for the child’s story,
zero for the story of the self.
Family schedules feel like borders—
passports checked by calendars,
visits approved by spreadsheets
that never learned to hug.
Yet still the body remembers
how to sit without purchase—
two people leaning over tea
as if the universe were listening.
Kairos hides under the table
braiding shoelaces of possibility,
waiting for a crack in the tariff
to climb back onto the plate.
I want to redraw the equation—
let C be the speed of care,
let M be the mass of mornings
not yet mortgaged to profit.
Imagine energy released
not by splitting the worker
but by fusing neighbour to neighbour
like stars sharing soup.
There would be tables again—
round as planets, patient as dough,
where a child could arrive
without a business plan.
Until then we live in orbit
around a bell that sells tickets,
pay packet to pay packet,
moon to exhausted moon.
Still I set two cups out
as a small act of physics—
refusing to let gravity
decide who I become.
The universe began with a kitchen
older than money,
and somewhere it continues
each time a hand passes bread.