Why does what I make never feel like mine?

Because it isn't, and you knew that when you signed.

What is strange is not the ownership — it is how quickly the thing you made becomes indifferent to you. Marx describes the product standing over against its maker as something alien, even hostile: the better you work, the more powerful the thing you have no claim on becomes. Every improvement you contribute makes the operation stronger and your position no stronger at all.

You feel this most sharply in work that leaves no trace. A slide deck that shaped a decision you never hear the outcome of. Code absorbed into a system with your name nowhere in it. The commodity you helped produce goes out into the world and does not carry you with it.

Marx's sharper claim is that this is not a side effect of scale or bad management. It follows from labour itself being something you sell by the hour. Once your working day is a thing you rent out, what happens inside it belongs to whoever bought it — including, eventually, the part of you that cared about doing it well.

The compensations offered are real but they are compensations: recognition, a title, being told the work matters. None of them change who the work belongs to.