The Water Carrier

The Water Carrier

Written by Phillip Berg

If you’ve walked ten kilometers every day for twenty years to fetch water, you might believe that walking is your life’s worth. That the hardship itself is noble. But if one day someone lays a pipe to your door, does that erase the value of your steps? 

No. It simply means the world no longer needs those steps.

The tragedy isn’t the pipe. The tragedy is that you built your entire identity around being the one who carried water. And so you fight the pipe, you denounce it, you invent philosophies about the holiness of walking. 

Not because walking is holy, but because it was the only thing that made you necessary.

Progress is the pipe. It doesn’t erase the meaning of what came before. 

But it will expose how many of us confused our usefulness with our identity. Those who adapt will drink. 

Those who cannot will mourn their steps.

People confuse effort with permanence. 

They think if you’ve poured twenty years into something, the world owes you a guarantee it will stay relevant. 

But history doesn’t pay in guarantees.

History shows this is not new. Under communism, it wasn’t honesty that thrived, but cunning. The liar, the schemer, the one who could read the system and twist it, they rose while the straight-spoken and moral withered. 

That wasn’t justice. It wasn’t virtue. It was simply what the structure rewarded.

So too with any new inventions. The ones who will thrive are not always the best, but the most adaptable. Those who can see patterns sideways, who bend the game rather than follow its rules. 

That doesn’t mean the rest are worthless. Success is not proof of greater value, and failure is not proof of stupidity. 

The violinist who loses her stage, the craftsman who loses his workshop, the water carrier who loses his road, each carries a worth beyond what the economy now asks of them.

The question is not whether some will be left behind. They will. The question is whether we, the so-called survivors, will remember that worth. 

Whether we can build a world that honors what is lost, even as we drink from the new pipes.
The carriers stand stunned. Some mourn and call the channels evil, claiming the walking itself was sacred. But what they mourn is not holiness. They mourn the loss of their name. 

They had become the carriers, and when the water no longer required their steps, they did not know who they were. I don’t mock them. 

I understand them. I have been them.

And yet, what choice does a society have? Do you keep your world dependent on the carriers, because it honors their effort, or do you adapt, even though adaptation feels like betrayal? Do you perish with those who refuse to change, or do you build something new from the stream?
In Denmark, we still drive on roads built by Germans during the war. 

They laid them so their tanks could roll. Should we have torn them up when they left? Out of principle? 

Or do we walk them now, because they carry us where we need to go?

The Romans, too, came with iron and fire. They broke tribes and took what was not theirs. Yet their roads, their aqueducts, their very laws became the bones of nations that followed. Brutality left behind infrastructure. Inheritance wrapped in blood.

The tragedy is not that these structures exist. The tragedy is when we reduce ourselves to nothing but the roles they replaced, when we define our entire worth as water carriers, road builders, craftsmen whose only identity is in the act of surviving the old way.

I stand, for a time, in the silence of mourning. But eventually we must step forward. The pipe is already dug. The road is already laid. The aqueduct already flows. 

The question is no longer whether I approve of their birth, but whether I will walk them, and what kind of person I will be when I do.