Life under capitalism is monotonous/ repetitive to deprive us of time & drive emotional numbness
The value of intentionally stepping off the hamster wheel & reclaiming your time when possible
Capitalism feels like being eternally stuck on a hamster wheel, unable to get off unless there is a major crisis that forces you off- like a health issue, a pandemic, a relationship falling apart, extreme burnout, death of a loved one etc. Then we hop off as we are forced to examine the state of our lives. Except we get back on once we’ve uncovered some band-aid solution to address the symptoms but never the root cause of our pain. “I don’t have the time for this” we all say and more so everyday.
Today I want to get into how capitalism designs the structure of your life to be highly regimented, monotonous, & rigid because it wouldn’t function if workers actually had free time to be able to think about the state of their existence. Understanding how capitalism deprives us of free will by physically, emotionally and psychologically “robotifying” us helps us find interventions to intentionally get off the hamster wheel when possible to reclaim our time. Building towards the goal of a world where we are free of labor is itself liberating.
But first some quick housekeeping…
I am writing you my first newsletter from my empty apartment in Nashville, Tennessee! It only took a 10 hour flight from Chile and a 12 hour drive from Houston to get here but alas, we are Nashvillains! For folks who work with me in 1 on 1 sessions or group consultations, you might have noticed my calendar is restricted to weekends in July. Once I know the cadence of my clinical schedule at Vanderbilt by the 1st week of July- my calendar will open up more, including for August onwards. I will also have an in-person option for folks living in Nashville. Yay!
Thank you to the kind souls that pay to support this newsletter, it exists because of you. A transcontinental move is financially draining, especially when I don’t have any traditional family safety net or intergenerational wealth to fall back on in times of need. Your funds will help sustain me & my political work. To upgrade your plan and become a paid subscriber, follow these simple steps.
Over in Disorderland, we are asking psych survivors to share their stories for us to quote in our next episode. There’s a few questions as prompts, so if you’re interested in adding to the conversation, come on over and tell us about your experiences.
“I don’t have the time or space for this” - We all say, more so everyday
Capitalism designs your daily life to be rigid, highly regimented & monotonous because it is a prison
Time is everything. Time is all that we have to define our existence and agency over our time is freedom. Capitalism colonizes our time, however, where we have no free will to decide how to structure our lives— we are enslaved to the will of the capitalist society. All our waking hours are spent on self-exploitation, maximizing our “productivity” so someone else can accumulate profits & live in luxury. “Free time” is increasingly a vanishing concept as capitalism has commodified every aspect of life— we spend all time outside of work doing mundane chores, often having superficial or transactional social interactions that are reduced to “networking”, preparing for the exhaustion of the following work day or implementing repetitive, band-aid, self-care routines to maximize our productivity. We’re even robbed of restful sleep as many of us lie in bed riddled with anxiety about work or we go to bed drained and exhausted only to drag ourselves out of it at the crack of dawn.
*Brush teeth, shower, get dressed, chug coffee, commute to work or hop on a meeting, spend all day selling our body & mind for labor to earn the right to live, over-deliver/ exceed expectations so overwork ourselves beyond what is supposedly “required”, feel pressured by the lack of time or space to do anything else, hurriedly squeeze moments with our loved ones, feel shame & guilt for not excelling or having a “work-life balance”, squeeze workouts/ meditations/ some superficial self-care routine, end the day drained & lifelessly pass out calculating the hours of sleep you will get before work or just lay awake unable to “turn off” even though you are physically exhausted—— RINSE, REPEAT till we’re 90 and potentially able to retire but who knows?! Because under late-stage capitalism no matter how much work most of us do (especially those of us not born into intergenerational wealth), we will never have guaranteed safety, security and stability.*
P.S. the ideal work-life balance is 0-100 and the fact that we must sacrifice living to be turned into robots who mindlessly work to gain access to basic survival resources like food, water and shelter is the greatest atrocity in our world. We are forced to believe that this is an immovable, unchangeable reality like a law of nature that cannot be broken— but it can. It can on the micro level (personal scale) when we decide to break cycles of violence which includes the extent to which we choose to participate in capitalism (i.e. doing the bare minimum to survive but not endlessly self-exploiting, competing and aspiring to accumulate capital beyond necessity) which eventually creates macro changes like breaking cycles of systemic oppression. Even if you reject the notion that you can reclaim your time, I urge you to read on.
Time as we know it is a capitalist invention monetized by the 1% to deprive the 99% of us with free will & autonomy
Time is the 4th dimension of our universe but time as we perceive it is a social construct— as in the 9-5 workday structure and how we define the amount of time in an hour, a day, a week or a year is a human invention. Time as we know it today revolves entirely around work which takes up the vast majority of our energy- this is a recent phenomenon. Prior to capitalism, not only did many communities follow different calendars like the lunar calendar but time was defined by people’s relationship to their land. For example, seasons defined how the day was structured because people cultivated their land and were directly connected to producing survival essentials like food and shelter. People had direct relationships with care providers, clothes makers, shelter builders, and farmed their own land— this essential connection with our ecosystem has been broken under capitalism as everything is commodified. Most of our jobs are made up or are structured in a way that we are so removed from the people we are serving— ultimately, most jobs under capitalism are about serving the wealthy and capital itself.
Time today is cyclical— we do the same things over and over again even if we do not want to and there is no room for novelty or spontaneity
Capitalism structures our time to consist of endless mundane repetition from the daily bureaucracies of the workplace we have to engage in to paying bills the same time each month, going to the same meetings every week, taxes, and all our daily or weekly “chores” that drain the life out of us even if we’ve found ways to “trick” ourselves into pretending we get some satisfaction out of checking tasks off a list. In a highly regimented day, week, month or year— breaks are also pre-planned and regimented like weekends or vacations. So we end up living weekend to weekend or vacation to vacation, suffering in between and waiting for an iota of relief which is why all of us have various coping mechanisms to “escape” from the burdens of work. This mundane cyclical time is what I call the eternal “hamster wheel” of life.
Do you really have any “free time” if it is all spent recovering from the exhaustion of the work day or doing things to self-optimize, increase your productivity and marketability for the workplace?
“Free time” is almost an illusion under late-stage capitalism because in the face of vanishing security, workers have to spend any time outside of work focused on increasing their value on the job market which includes diets, intensive workout routines to get the “ideal body”, networking strategically, meditating to build mindfulness to “enhance” productivity, etc. Capitalism objectifies and commodifies everything- as in it reduces us all and everything on our planet to objects that can be extracted or exploited for mass production and profits. Because oppression is delivered to us “positively” packaged as freedom- we willingly self-exploit and objectify ourselves by focusing on building our “brand image”. This is what we are doing when we focus on what will increase our value on the job market and ultimately increase our “net worth”. We are reducing our worth on this planet to an arbitrary made up monetary value— a dollar sign.
Even our hobbies, what we read or watch in our “free time” is infected by the burdens of productivity because capitalism traps us in a state of constantly “doing” where “not doing” fills us with shame & self-hate
Majority of your time is spent at work, embedded into oppressive systems- so no wonder you most likely attach your worth to achieving excellence within the system. This is why we overwork ourselves, trying to desperately overdeliver, ignoring all red flags & danger signs raised by our body thru health issues, pain & exhaustion. We’ve been taught to sacrifice, compromise & endure the misery of the present for hypothetical rewards of safety in the future. Except, when we reach any milestone in life like a high school or college graduation or our 1st job- we continue to be plagued by uncertainty, fear, insecurity & instability but think pushing for yet another milestone will get us closer to safety. This cycle continues endlessly.
We also begin to lose joy or stop gaining meaning from our passions the moment they become commodified. I loved science as a kid and wanted to use it as a tool to care for my community’s health but eventually when a dollar sign was assigned to my value as a clinician or researcher & as I was forced to do things monotonously even though I did not care for them— I lost the joy that came with doing science & medicine itself. Once I realized these tools under capitalism were leveraged to MAKE people sick and then profit off of their sickness, I realized I could not find meaning in life by excelling as a scientist or care provider within the confines of the system. I had to choose- was I going to be a cop or an abolitionist? Was I going to be a killer by proxy or a collectivist? Will I overdeliver to climb the ladder with hopes of one day leveraging power dynamics in academia over others or instead be an anarchist trying to dismantle hierarchies as much as possible? Have you pondered this & chosen yet?
Monotony and repetition without free will turns us into robots under capitalism- defined by apathy & fatigue
When we go about our lives doing the same thing over & over again, obsessed with self-optimization— we don’t have time to build self-awareness & self-actualize. We do as we’re told but not as we truly want to because you need time to connect with others, work through difficult emotions, & feel joy in exchange with your ecosystem to wake up from the capitalist matrix. You need time to question everything to dismantle the socialized version of YOU that never consented to the beliefs you were indoctrinated with & build yourself anew with intention from a multitude of building blocks to embody your complexity without reducing yourself to binaries of good/ bad.
We emotionally numb ourselves to get through the perils of the workday
Under capitalism, we are forced to do things that go against our innate wiring. As a collectivist species wired to feel joy thru altruism, mutualism & cooperation— we instead spend majority of our time competing with our peers even though it feels horrible. We cannot physically feel the full spectrum of complex human emotions regularly because of what is required of us to exist in society. As we doomscroll on social media past horrifying news of oppression around the world, we have to desensitize ourselves to consume “fast content”, exposed to stimuli at a rate humans aren’t able to healthily process. The emotional impact of cyclically doing monotonous, repetitive, uninteresting tasks is apathy & consistent disassociation. Mainstream mental health systems pathologize our trauma responses but capitalism traps all of us in a constant fight or flight survival mode where we are always disassociating to some extent to be able to get through the day. With more layers of systemic & interpersonal trauma, this disassociation & depersonalization intensifies. How can we be in our own bodies & grounded in reality when we little control over our own bodies & our reality?
Because we spend majority of our day numbing ourselves- we spend the rest of time chasing “positivity” and running from heavy emotions like shame, grief, disappointment, regret, guilt, etc because facing our emotions means letting “reality” settle in. However, this is the key to liberation. Capitalism deprives us of time to deprive us of a chance to wake up to understand how we’re indentured servants entrenched in a reformed, modern system of slavery. Capitalism leads you to believe that you MUST spend all your time being enslaved to work & productivity even if you have some “free time” that you can dedicate to building community & connecting with your ecosystem. Self-help gurus give you tips & habits to follow to be successful, insidiously victim blaming & implying that individuals are to blame if they are not thriving in a fundamentally brutal society that wasn’t built for the 99% of us.
Part of why it is so difficult for us to live intentionally is we’ve only ever been allowed to be passive, reactionary, oppressed subjects, socialized with learned helplessness- as we live from crisis to crisis or milestone to milestone, unable to really stop & examine how we’re living or why we even want the things we want. We tell ourselves this is a personal failing- that we’re just “chaotic” or “messed up” but really systems of oppressive shape how time is structured & perceived.
Understanding how oppressive systems design our daily “grind” helps us get off the hamster wheel intentionally when possible- to let ourselves feel again
All oppressive systems deploy the same tactics of coercion, manipulation, control to exercise their power & force people’s obedience while suppressing rebellion. Reclaiming your time whenever possible, resting when possible by doing the bare minimum to survive & identifying where you have “over invested” your time/ energy into the system is critical. It wasn’t until 2 years ago during the pandemic I realized how self-exploitative I had been even as an adult with slightly more agency. As a graduate student on a 28k stipend in a system where my work or vacation hours weren’t defined, I worked > 100 hour a week. I woke up at 6, went to work, threw myself into community organizing, spent time with friends with any time leftover, came home, passed out of extreme exhaustion— rise & repeat.
I spent my whole life “doing” something to try to escape the daily oppression I was fighting, from systems to my abusive household- so much so that I attached my worth to a state of “doing” & never resting or doing things just to feel joy for myself. Our day-to-day actions are the arenas for molecular micro changes that culminate to build mass macro revolutions. There are things we can change in our daily lives but this requires us to examine what “everyday life” has looked like for us and how we’ve been socialized under capitalism, colonialism, etc to structure it a certain way.
My main criticism of all mainstream mental health solutions under the umbrella of therapy, psychiatry, and self-help / self-care culture — they’re individualistic & capitalist by design.
They aim to “treat” you in isolation separate from your community, with no sociopolitical context which makes it hard for you to understand the roots of your problems. Their goal isn’t to liberate you or address your pain in context of our collective pain or your community’s struggles under systems of oppression (which are inextricably tied to your distress & loneliness). Their goal is to patch you up so you can get back to work, maximize your productivity & “be your best self” (i.e. be the best worker under capitalism to maximize someone else’s profits).
To what end? How is any of that sustainable? It’s not. This is how therapy or self-care or self-help becomes just another source of shame for us when we don’t “excel”. We spend years trying to stick to workout or diet regimens, psych meds, therapy sessions, “positive thinking”, strict daily meditations, pilates, yoga, or whatever whitewashed spiritual framework that has been co-opted & stolen from Black/ Brown cultures for profit — all things that only give us brief moments of disassociation from life or delusion about our pain which tends to at best return 10X worse intermittently.
Some self-reflection questions I ask folks in 1 on 1 sessions as we build in sustainable interventions to cope with & gradually divest from capitalism as best possible: What has your “normal” day-to-day grind been like?
What is the current state of your relationships? Are they equitable and reciprocal in terms of how much each party puts into them? Is your support system decentralized as in ‘all your eggs aren’t in one basket’ in terms of where you go to for safety & comfort? Is your self-worth & identity decentralized as in not attached to any single thing like success at work or in a relationship, being “right” or “good” in the eyes of society, entirely confined to an identity label etc? What have you attached your worth to or how do you get validation from the system?
What have you told yourself are the things you MUST, should, have to do in life to be considered a worthy or “successful” individual? What are the capitalist ideals and norms you’ve internalized about all the things you CAN potentially achieve and aspire to? How much of your life, daily actions, decisions & choices are intentional versus you just going about your day disassociated, floating by, going along with whatever is “required” or expected of you? Do you know why you believe in the things you believe in? Have you ever really examined your beliefs separately from the people or institutions that told you to do certain things and believe in certain narratives about how the world works? Have you thought critically about how you’ve been raised and the sociopolitical context of the beliefs you’ve been socialized with? We’re socialized to aspire to “normalcy”. “I can’t wait till things are normal again” people said during the pandemic without examining the state of normal itself. How can you build in intentional interventions into your life where you get off the hamster wheel semi-regularly to evaluate what is helping & what is hurting you in your day-to-day? What time do you spend self-optimizing yourself or overdelivering that you can reclaim?
In solidarity always,
Ayesha.