Spiritual Insights from the Service Industry

March 2, 2026 Newsletter

Dearest Prattlers,

I hope I am finding you well amidst a troubling time in foreign policy and a rather chaotic midterm season. Now is a good time to keep our eyes on Gaza, Iran, Lebanon, and all others affected by Trump’s neo-US Imperialism. Now is also a good time to give ourselves and our communities some additional care in whatever form feels right. I’m opting for movie nights with friends and a heavy Zadie Smith reading rotation.

Here’s some reading about Iran if you’re interested:

“About Iran, from an Iranian Woman”

Before we get into the newsletter, here are a couple reminders for our XOXO issue. First drafts were due last Friday. If you haven’t gotten yours in, please do. We would love to feature your work! Second drafts are due this Friday.

Also, if you haven’t submitted a secret to us… what are you doing? Do it here.

And one last thing—we are hiring! We are hiring on Engage for all of our positions. Forms close March 22. This is truly a great opportunity to work for the ONLY PAID MAGAZINE ON CAMPUS!! 

The week’s newsletter author is Ana Trevino, a sophomore writing major who enjoys writing poetry and prose about spirituality, the creative process, and psychology. She aims to tackle the depletion machine of capitalism and how service work can be equal parts exhausting and inspiring. As someone who has worked in the service industry since age fourteen, this piece resonated with me deeply, and I was drawing on moments wherein my jobs made me feel like an automaton. 

In continuing the theme of labor and depletion, I wanted to share an excerpt of some of my thoughts about minimum wage labor, as my thesis vastly concerns pink collar labor and its tethering to the state.

Transaction is always an exploit, because it is impossible to adequately know how much our labor is worth, and it is impossible to use an object as a stand-in for a person’s labor force. Marx already said this in Das Kapital, but he did not go as far as detailing the embarrassment that comes with the act of the transaction, or rather its fetishization, wherein the worker is equated with the object that their labor produced, and the act of giving away this labor is as dehumanizing as giving away a part of our bodies. I’m sure you’ve heard “all work is sex work” which I think is a gross oversimplification and an uninformed dig at actual sex work, which is much more extreme, taxing, and physically intrusive than other forms of service work. All sex workers deserve their flowers. But what I am articulating, and noting as a partial truth of that statement, is not that all work is sex work, but that all work comes at a hidden cost of personhood, wherein the laborforce in all of us feels like a body part or assemblage of body parts because we are indoctrinated into believing our labor makes us valuable and thus human, so of course we tether it to our physical bodies, and in participating in a transaction involving our labor, we will always feel cheated, misjudged, and disfigured. Like something has been taken from us, because it has.

Especially in the context of childcare, my labor keeps children from hurting themselves or going hungry. My labor requires deep attention to their needs and circumstances. And, at the end of the day, they are gone and I feel a weird sort of sadness that really feels like loss. My labor power has left me, but so have all of the subjects of my labor power. It’s truly a weird feeling.

Without further ado, here is Ana Trevino’s

Spiritual Insights from the Service Industry

As a writing major at Pratt, my hands get little use. In class, my body sits still while my mind does the labor. Besides the tapping of a keyboard or the repetitive rotation of a wrist, my hands dance a familiar choreography. My fingers get restless, impatient, needing to touch more than the metallic surface of a pen and the soft skin of paper. And I get that chance on weekends, where I take a train into Manhattan to work at an Italian restaurant in the West Village, where you can find me making cocktails and espresso drinks.

Academia often underrates the knowledge that comes from traveling, intuition-based decision-making, and exposure to diversity. Academic environments are curated and contained, but in restaurants, nothing is contained. Energy is unregulated and chaotic. And that’s what I love about working in restaurants. The service industry was my airplane, my bus, my train, my boat, my two feet; it was my journey into humanity’s darkest crevices and highest peaks. There, I use my body and my senses as ways of connecting to myself and others. It can be hard for me to make art while stretching my presence thinly across varying laborious demands, but I believe that choosing to make art while remaining engaged with the world around me, while being mentally, emotionally, physically, and spiritually depleted, becomes spiritual transcendence.

The service industry was my informal entrance into adulthood, a headfirst dive into human systems and the roles, routines, hierarchies, and how we ourselves fit into those spaces. I was forced to become an adult in an environment where age is not a limit to how many plates you can carry in one hand and how many 4-tops you can simultaneously take food orders from. I was disconnected from the adult world yet fully enveloped in it. It was interesting at times how they viewed me as an equal, only for them to later remember I had six years before I could join them at the bar. What was once an after-school responsibility quickly became the lens through which I see the world, where I was seeking answers about what it means to exist amongst adult chaos.

My afternoons were spent doing jumping jacks in PE, and my nights were spent hearing details of my coworkers’ convoluted lives—alcoholism, divorce, custody battles, eviction, etc. But being fifteen, I had distance from the faults of the system. I was too naive to know that my coworkers were disappearing to do coke in the bathroom, or getting drunk after closing shifts and intertwining tongues, only to keep cordial faces the following day. 

And yet still no one questions the fifteen-year-old working. Not the system, not my education. Blindly adhering to the fact that they probably look down on fifteen-year-olds, choosing to be in a constant fake state of recognition, even though I’m clearly able to perform tasks most people who have never worked in the service industry have nightmares about without complaints. Having to clean cups that customers vomit in after drinking too much, picking wet gum off of tables, submerging my hands in a sink clogged with poorly chewed food, and walking into my manager having a seizure.

When that happened, I was eighteen and working at a café. It was about six in the morning, and I was half-awake, measuring coffee beans for the drip machine, when my coworker, who had recently been diagnosed with a seizure condition, casually mentioned, “ I think I’m gonna have a seizure today, but I’ll make sure to stay out of your way.” We laughed it off and went about our day. The entire shift passed, and no seizure. I was looking forward to leaving. We’d been on our feet since dawn. 

I closed out the register and went to put the cash in the office, where I saw my manager on the floor convulsing. Her face was tomato red, and I could hear her large head smacking the ground with a rhythmic thump. She was convulsing with her mouth open, eyes rolled so far back in her head that I could only see the whites. Foam was accumulating in her mouth and spilling onto the floor. 

I set the cash bag on the desk and ran out to inform my coworker, who, without hesitation, ran towards the office to help, when suddenly, she woke up completely disoriented, experiencing post-seizure confusion and trying to push her way through the double swing kitchen doors. Efforts were made to hold her back, but the doors kept swinging open, allowing customers to slightly catch a glimpse of what was happening.

So there we were, my manager, on the floor, pushing her entire body weight against the doors, screaming, “Who are you? Get off me! Help, help!” While my coworkers and I stood at the register waiting for the paramedics faking normalcy, telling our customers, “Everything’s fine! What can I get for you? Yes, we’re still open. And yes, that’s my manager screaming. She’s fine, she just had a seizure! Yes, that’s my favorite cheesecake! It's amazing. Anything else for you? Oh, don't mind the paramedics. “ And all I could think was, can someone please get this woman off the floor and behind the register so I can clock out? Everyone had something more important to be doing than wallowing in whatever emotions were brought by the situation at hand. But what could we do? There were no backup workers, no protections, no laws saying we could go home. My manager’s sudden poor health was an inconvenience to us. Ten seconds ago, I was watching her convulse on the floor– thinking she was half-dead; now I'm plating cheesecake slices and asking, “Would you like that for here or to go?” 

Which brings me to my next point: How service industry jobs are seen by most as entry-level, providing on-site “training” and not requiring prior experience, yet when hired, one is expected to be able to immediately problem-solve with resourcefulness, speed, and a good attitude. There is no rule book stating what to do when a customer grabs your ass, when your manager has a seizure, or what to do after someone vomits all over the bathroom. There are invisible prerequisites to be successful in the service industry (and by success, I mean putting the psychology of perception to good use, one that leaves workers with the most amount of money and the least amount of self given). Not limited to being able-bodied, there is, of course, the basic understanding of human psychology, a decent social awareness, and charisma. Not to mention the advantage of good looks, a useful quirk that can excuse a bad attitude.

It’s a game of endurance and performance– crowdwork, babysitting, and emotional support at times. One has to be prepared for all reflections of humanity. And this could be said for any place, anywhere. But the difference lies in the cordiality that is expected in the service industry, where the bare minimum required from these jobs entails enduring disrespect, performing physically demanding tasks, and interacting with people in varying emotional states. Be more friendly, maybe throw in a cheeky smile here and there, maintain eye contact, make people feel seen, without expecting the same. Bringing guests food, wine, and other delicacies while starving behind the counter, a selfish sacrifice–which has a price, and not even a set one! With laws and wages varying state by state, it seems politics are in control of your spirit again, a fact which penetrates your being more often than not. I shouldn't have life force after working 12-hour shifts on my feet, without a single moment to have a thought for myself, to question what my own needs are, and only adhere to the needs of those around me, but I pull it out of my deepest crevices, scraping the insides of my being to get every last drop. Learning to regenerate in an environment that takes more than it gives. 

Humans recharge themselves, and this system knows it. Yet we are also expected to be able to recharge with limited resources, as Martha Polk mentions in her article discussing suicide in the service industry, “failing to get food, water, rest, daylight– basically, the essentials needed for any plant to grow– is just the tip of the iceberg for this.” Capitalism monopolizes consciousness, and the service industry is a perfect example of that. Presence and introspection require mental and emotional space, but when our consciousness is being seized by economic pressures, labour, and survival, reflection becomes a luxury. 

Time moves differently in restaurants. Hours are lost in movement. Days blend. People come and go. You have to learn not to get attached. How to move freely within a space of deregulated, capricious energy. Restaurants are nearly always a temporary landing on the tongue of a flytrap. Until the leaves collapse above you, your senses disappear, and the establishment swallows you whole without you even realizing it. Slowly, you morph into the restaurant, its habits and routines. Becoming memorable to customers, as inherent as the decor. You have nightmares of forgotten orders and angry tables. But what about all you have sacrificed? Of the depletion you feel after a shift, and how that must mean something from you was taken. Giving so much of your conscious energy to the system, which disregards your humanity. The illusion of sacrifice persists. Let go, or it’ll eat you alive.

Yet while many people in society define themselves by their employment, service workers seldom do. That is spiritual to me. Rather than defining ourselves by our labor, whether emotional, mental, physical, etc., why not just define ourselves by how we show up in the world? 

My hope for the future is for service industry workers to be seen and appreciated for their embodied sacrifice. Service jobs are where the real impact is, where the real community lies. Restaurants are enclosed portals, a four-walled wildflower garden filled with magic in every corner. As exhausted as it makes me, there is no other enclosed space like it. 

The richness and complexity of my experiences in the service industry inspires my creative work. I love the ability to turn a bad day around by being the constant in someone’s schedule. I am drawn to the connections beyond the counter and the evolution of human relationships, which, more often than not, are purely by circumstance. We all find our own little ways to contribute to the world, and as I do in writing, can change lives with the wave of a hand.

Thank you for reading.

Stay safe, stay sexy, stay well-read.

XOXO,

Ella Ferrero

Managing Editor

The Prattler