Failure to Cope "Under Capitalism"

When living “under capitalism” becomes a catch-all explanation for what you can’t manage — whether that’s getting on the metaphorical treadmill or stepping off it — it assumes the nature of a complaint to an adjudicating authority.

This is your life. You do not have time to wait for the revolution to begin living it. You will always be able to find someone to give you permission not to live it. But no one is coming along to live it for you.

Capitalism, in this rhetorical strain, is not so much the object of analysis or a concrete historical phenomenon as an all-purpose gesture. “Capitalism” is useful everywhere: as the punchline of self-deprecating jokes about the way we live now, as a perennial-but-distant bogeyman that explains chronic frustrations without ever causing enough pain t... See more

What binds these pleas together is an application of “the personal is political” so expanded in scope that, for a certain kind of person, personal problems, anxieties, and dissatisfactions are illegible or illegitimate unless described as political problems. This can be a compromise with a guilty, self-punishing instinct of the self-consciously pri... See more

If you think seriously about the good life and pursue it, you will probably fail in ways large and small. But an imperfect struggle to live well and love a world badly in need of repair is better than staying still because things are terrible, because you might look like a loser in the meritocratic game, because it’s easier.

I can respect an inability to cope. A nervous breakdown once in a while does wonders for your overall perspective.

I think it’s possible that for many, considering the shape of your life and then living it with vigor is so difficult because it cannot be externally validated. Unlike education and work, it offers no socially obvious meritocratic path.

Did all these people really experience “trauma?” in a recognizably similar way?

Having laid out at length the political problems with delegating the responsibility for coping with your own life to a political program, I must confess that my primary concern is personal, not political. I do not hate the knowledge workers at whom this type of essay is directed (I am one of them). I believe that large swathes of them are experienc... See more