"I'm so sick of talking about capitalism!"
I have trouble with the word capitalism. I am, as you know, critical of the way we work in America today, but unlike most others who are similarly critical, I hesitate to say that "capitalism" is a sufficient explanation for the problems with our working culture. I'm skeptical even about the usefulness of "capitalism" as a term for analyzing culture. Capitalism is a big, amorphous thing. You can't take someone to see capitalism the way you take them to see Niagara Falls. Yet -- so people claim -- capitalism determines much of our lives.
One problem I have with "capitalism" is that if we're going to use it as a term of critique, I want more precision. Let's break the big, amorphous thing down to smaller, better-defined, and more tangible things. "Capitalism" probably doesn't demand that you work for pay in order to have a voice in society. "Capitalism," being an abstract concept, isn't in a position to demand anything. But people are. And people, in a longstanding American moral tradition that stems from the first English settlers, do demand it. Maybe that isn't a lot more precise. But it at least pins down people and places. If we wanted to argue about it, we could be confident we were talking about the same thing.
I want this precision from myself above all, and I fear that when I use "capitalism" in my writing about work, I descend into unclarity. I have an essay coming out soon in Plough Quarterly, the excellent magazine published by the Bruderhof community, that deals with acedia -- an attention disorder that afflicted fourth century monks and that now afflicts me and possibly you -- and the anxiety we feel as people living under capitalism. I use the word "capitalism" about ten times in the piece, and I think I'm not lazily using it as a substitute for some more specific phenomenon. But maybe I am. When it comes out, you can tell me how I did!
I'm not the only one who's dissatisfied with how we talk about capitalism. In "Treat Yourself: Beyond Millennial Burnout," an essay in the current issue of The Point magazine, Apoorva Tadepalli thinks through the link between burnout (including her own) and capitalism. Tadepalli's starting point is similar to Anne Helen Petersen's self-diagnosis of Millennial burnout at the beginning of this year. Petersen wrote of suffering "errand fatigue." Tadepalli, who I gather is in her 20s, writes, "Fretting about my supposed long-term goals ... takes up so much mental energy that basic jobs—paying bills even if I do have the money, filing taxes, changing the sheets, giving the university some document or other—become herculean tasks."
From there, Tadepalli finds the two major responses to burnout on offer -- self-care and resistance -- unsatisfactory. Affirming your self-worth risks, on the one hand, devolving into consumerism or, on the other, becoming simply reactive. Either way, there is little hope of escaping the all-determining capitalist system. Tadepalli's socially-conscious friends all seem miserable; they even seem to make misery into a principle, as if "To be happy now, with no greater purpose, seems too accidental to be considered political."
Tadepalli's friends see capitalist exploitation everywhere. It makes her feel like she's the victim of capitalism twice over; she has to work within the system, and she has to fight against it in her off hours. She finds herself exclaiming to a friend who is a committed socialist, "'Capitalism!' I say, thinking, ridiculously, of that smallest sliver of the universe where a tramp is contentedly drinking a glass of wine, 'I’m so fucking sick of talking about capitalism!'"
I'm sick of it, too. (But I keep doing it.) Note that this doesn't mean I therefore think capitalism is great, just great. But there's more to life -- even more to criticizing our self-destructive way of work -- than talking about capitalism. I am drawn to Josef Pieper's diagnosis of the post-World War II "total work" society in part because his critique applies so well to both communism and capitalism. Ending capitalism wouldn't end burnout. Labor exploitation long preceded capitalism and exists in modern non-capitalist economies. Again, this is not to say there aren't problems with capitalism. There certainly are. But capitalism alone is not the problem with work.
Some news: My Commonweal essay from early last year, "A Burnt-Out Case," was listed as a Notable Essay of 2018 in the new edition of Best American Essays! I'm a longtime reader of the BAE series, so this is a pretty exciting honor. It means my essay is listed along with a couple hundred other "notables" in the back of the book. Those others include some of my favorite writers: Kathryn Schulz, Patricia Hampl, Kiese Laymon, Leslie Jamison, and Meghan O'Gieblyn, among many more I greatly admire. Even if my name were not listed in the volume, I'd still recommend it. The essays reprinted in it are always well chosen. It's a nice Christmas present for the nonfiction reader in your life.
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Jon