Life & Wisdom Quote by Jack Vance

A Jack Vance line like this lands with the casual sting of an aside you realize, a beat later, is a worldview. "In fact" frames the claim as hard-earned knowledge, not theory. Then he undercuts any romance of labor with "almost every": the qualifier is doing sly work. He isn't arguing that surveillance is absolute; he's arguing that it is default. Your autonomy is the exception clause, not the premise.

The bluntness of "somebody watching you" matters. Vance doesn't dress it up as "accountability" or "oversight". He chooses the primal verb, watching, which drags the workplace back toward the oldest social technology there is: being observed, judged, corrected. It's Panopticon without the Latin. The grammar makes it impersonal, too. Not your manager, not the state, not a villain with a name. Just "somebody", interchangeable and therefore inevitable.

Contextually, Vance wrote across decades when work was getting more bureaucratic, more measured, and more institutional - from postwar corporate hierarchies to the early creep of computerized monitoring. His science fiction often treats civilizations as systems of control disguised as normal life; this sentence compresses that sensibility into a single shrug. The subtext isn't paranoia so much as a dry acceptance: most jobs are arrangements where you trade time for wages and privacy for permission. The irony is that the watcher can be both safety net and leash, and Vance leaves you to notice how often those are the same thing.