Amerika

You know the drill for when the teacher comes back into the room. You need to find something or someone to blame for the fact that you did nothing while she was gone. Ideally, you would be able to portray yourself as also a victim of this force, implying you are on her side.

Modern people frequently blame capitalism for their misery. After all, they need money to live, and capitalism is about money, so their lack of money must be due to capitalism. This sort of logic once had us worshiping brightly-colored rocks.

This misses the point that many more forces than capitalism regulate our experience; in fact, government, politics, culture, social conventions, fears, and fads may have more influence on our day-to-day experience.

In fact, we cannot blame capitalism for jobs, because capitalism emphasizes direct trades and contracts. The need for social acceptance creates jobs, or repeated tasks regulated entirely by the approval of layers of management, as a control device to keep people occupied.

Our jobs make us miserable, and this is causing an alarming rise in depression:

Major depression is on the rise among Americans from all age groups, but is rising fastest among teens and young adults, new health insurance data shows.

“Many people are worried about how busy they are,” said Dr. Laurel Williams, chief of psychiatry at Texas Children’s Hospital.

“There’s a lack of community. There’s the amount of time that we spend in front of screens and not in front of other people. If you don’t have a community to reach out to, then your hopelessness doesn’t have any place to go.”

Two issues are identified here: we have no time, and we have no community.

The first arises because of jobs and the related things required to keep them, including all the taxes, paperwork, commuting, preparing, and so forth. As some dude on Twitter put it, jobs eat our lives:

Who could ever have guessed that a system that forces us to spend 80% of our waking hours commuting to/working at jobs that don’t pay enough to provide any stability in life would lead to mass societal depression?

Why do we spend so much time at jobs? We do not wish to be replaced, and the best way to do that is to make an ostentatious display of loyalty. Being there all the time shows that you care.

Why do jobs not pay us enough? High taxes drive down wages and raise prices, and immigration makes workers proportionately worth less because of oversupply.

Capitalism did not do this to us; our bad political choices did. And you guys voted for them. Wonder how we can change that.

Tags: careers, depression, jobs