Weil worked in a car factory in 1934–35, not as a political act (though she was deeply political) but as a deliberate experience of what poverty and degrading labor actually do to a human being. What she found transformed her philosophy. The factory destroyed something in her: the sense of personal dignity, of being someone who mattered, of having a future. She came out of it, she said, permanently marked, carrying something of the condition of a slave.
This experience gave her the concept of affliction (malheur), which is important to distinguish from ordinary suffering or misfortune. Ordinary suffering hurts; affliction annihilates. Affliction, in its full form, is the convergence of physical pain, social degradation, and the psychological destruction of the sense of self. It reduces a person to something barely human: a state of utter exposed destitution, where even the ability to will one's own recovery has been stripped away. Weil's paradigm cases are slavery, extreme poverty, and the experiences of the dying, but she was quite clear that affliction can occur in any life.
Here is Weil's most philosophically demanding move: she says that affliction is not a punishment or an anomaly. It is the place where the human being comes into most direct contact with the void, the absence of God, the complete absence of consolation, the place where the ego's strategies of self-preservation have all failed. And she says, against almost every religious tradition, that this void is not to be filled. It is to be waited in.
The analogy that may help: imagine carrying a bucket full of murky water, your ego, your self-projects, your emotional defenses, your habitual ways of avoiding reality. Affliction breaks the bucket. The murky water spills. You are left with nothing. Now, there are two responses: you can frantically try to collect the water and find a new bucket (restore the ego, get back to normal, distract yourself). Or you can simply stand there, empty, open, waiting. For Weil, the second response is the spiritual one. The void left by the loss of the false self is, paradoxically, the condition for receiving something real.
This leads to her concept of decreation, one of her most original and difficult ideas. Decreation is not destruction. Destruction reduces something created to nothing. Decreation, as she defines it, is "to make something created pass into the uncreated", a kind of voluntary self-transcendence in which the ego is not destroyed but surrendered, returned to God, unmade. She writes:
I must withdraw so that God can communicate himself to me without any interruption. [...] We participate in the creation of the world by decreating ourselves.
— Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace; quoted in fleurmach.com 'Simone Weil, Decreation' (2016)
Decreation is not a philosophical technique you can apply deliberately. It happens through affliction, or through the voluntary acceptance of affliction's quality of self-emptying. This is why Weil's ethics circles obsessively around the question of how to respond to suffering: your own and others'. The attention that empties the self to receive the other is the same movement as decreation, the ego stepping aside so that the reality of the other can truly arrive.