We use the language of warranties because modern systems don't talk to humans — they talk to assets.
A warranty is cold. It's technical. It reduces existence to maintenance, performance, and failure. It promises protection while carefully defining the conditions under which protection no longer applies.
This is how institutions speak when they wish to appear responsible without being accountable.
A warranty turns care into legal coverage. It reframes support as a transaction. It removes the body from the experience and replaces it with the unit — the product — the item.
When workplace "wellness," insurance policies, productivity culture, and self-optimization rhetoric talk about us, they use terms closer to engineering than empathy:
- Resilience as shock-absorption
- Burnout as operational overload
- Aging as planned obsolescence
- Therapy and rest as repairs and downtime
The warranty is not a metaphor. It is the vocabulary of how value is assigned and withdrawn.
Using the term "warranty" exposes the language we already live inside — a language that can describe performance decline but not purpose, that measures output but not cost, that acknowledges damage only to deny responsibility for it.
A more human word would soften the truth.
The warranty says the quiet part in writing.