Bubba Gump Shrimp Corporation

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In 1994, when the iconic film Forrest Gump was released, I was being born.

As far back as I can remember, in my house the Forrest Gump VHS tape was constantly being shoved into the player. But even though I watched it countless times, I understood little to nothing of it.

When I was old enough to vaguely grasp the complexity of the world and society, I began to catch its deeper meanings, both obvious and hidden, and I realized that Forrest Gump had done an excellent job of listing the most important historical events and pop culture references up to that point, all in a light, simple, and ironic way, without ever diminishing their importance.

Toward the end of 2025, when I stepped away from the corporate employee world to work as an independent, I started to think that perhaps not many people had noticed that Forrest Gump didn’t just provide a great pop cultural and historical recap, but also contained an unsettling prediction about the future. A bit like The Simpsons did with many events that are now real and current, such as the election of the insane orange-haired, bleach-blonded ass to President of the United States of America, and many other modern tragedies.

More specifically, I’m referring to Bubba Gump Shrimp, the shrimp company that Forrest founded after returning from the Vietnam War, bringing it to success while keeping the promise he made to Bubba, his best friend who died in battle beside him.

The Bubba Gump Shrimp Corporation was, in reality, a forecast of how the modern corporate world would end up. Or worse, a forecast of how we would all end up working in it.

Not in the sense that we sell shrimp, but in the sense that we have become them. The shrimps.

Locked inside cages we call offices, among fake play areas and presumed inspiration, glass meeting rooms meant to convey a sense of the much-vaunted transparency that is actually the opposite of the era we live in, and workstations made up of desks and ergonomic chairs where we are asked to sit down and give birth to ideas and solutions for only 8 hours a day, 5 days a week (at least).

Meanwhile our bodies conform, adapt, and transform to those chairs, taking on the shape of shrimp, with increasingly flatter asses and necks that lean a little further forward every day, pushed by smartphone addiction and competition to generate more revenue for multinationals in exchange for a monthly salary that vaguely resembles the quick pat you give the dog when it asks for attention while you’re watching your favorite TV series in the evening.

They stuff you with words, loading you with a sense of belonging, responsibility, and importance that turns into total replaceability the exact moment you decide to leave or, worse, when they fire you from one day to the next.

The sad truth is that we probably like being treated like little shrimps. And this kind of intensive farming has been going on for so long that the narrative has intoxicated all of us to the point that if you decide to go back to being human, you are immediately judged by the other shrimp and accused of not wanting to work.

In fact, work, just like ourselves and everything around us, has become so standardized that when you get up from the chair, it almost feels like you can’t even walk anymore.Surviving out there on your own, with your own intelligence, creativity, and strategy, is a hard challenge, and after years of bisque-style indoctrination, no one, not even the bravest, is free from the sense of inadequacy, powerlessness, and loneliness that creeps in when you decide to no longer be a shrimp.

And so we get used to a condition of standardized unhappiness, with little real value, pretending not to have understood that we are all average little shrimp who, together, weave the immense network of labor power upon which, at the top, stand the big holding companies, the big funds, and the big investors who, while we work hard for the beloved company that pays us a ridiculous but stable monthly salary, enjoy today’s real wealth: time.

This article is NOT a manifesto against work, but an ode to freedom and to the uniqueness of the individual within one of the most important pillars of society and of the individual themselves: work.

Which, whether you like it or not, has nothing to do with the diabolical, repetitive, standardized, and anesthetizing operation of the very contemporary management of the Bubba Gump Shrimp Corporation.

And while I write this article, savoring the freedom of doing so during an afternoon in which, at Bubba Gump Shrimp, I would have been prevented from taking this space of creative and inspiring freedom, I dream of having dinner with raw shrimp from Mazara by the sea while writing the next article, and I ask myself:could the escape from the bisque perhaps be one of the first real forms of resistance to the standardization and conformity of the modern world?

And, above all, who does our time really belong to?