Tag Archives: Precariat

America’s Social Depression Is Accelerating

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By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

We need to value honesty above optimism. Once we can speak honestly, there is a foundation for optimism.

Beneath the rah-rah statistics of “the greatest economy ever,” the social depression is accelerating. The mainstream is reluctantly waking up to the future of the American Dream: downward mobility for all but the top 10% of households. A 2015 Atlantic article fleshed out the zeitgeist with survey data that suggests the Great Middle Class/Nouveau Proletariat is also waking up to a future of downward mobility: The Downsizing of the American Dream: People used to believe they would someday move on up in the world. Now they’re more concerned with just holding on to what they have.

I have been digging into the financial and social realities of what it takes to be middle class in today’s economy for years: Are You Really Middle Class?

The reality is that the middle class has been reduced to the sliver just below the top 5%–if we use the standards of the prosperous 1960s as a baseline.

The downward mobility isn’t just financial–it’s a decline in political power, control of one’s work and income-producing assets. This article reminds us of what the middle class once represented: What Middle Class? How bourgeois America is getting recast as a proletariat.

The costs of trying to maintain a toehold in the upper-middle class are illuminated in these recent articles on health and healthcare–both part of the downward mobility:

Health Care Slavery and Overwork

How a toxic workplace could, literally, destroy your health

We’re afraid our work is killing us, and we are right

This reappraisal of the American Dream is also triggering a reappraisal of the middle class in the decades of widespread prosperity: The Myth of the Middle Class: Have Most Americans Always Been Poor?

Downward mobility excels in creating and distributing what I term social defeat: In my lexicon, social defeat is a spectrum of anxiety, insecurity, chronic stress, powerlessness, and fear of declining social status.

Downward mobility and social defeat lead to social depression. Here are the conditions that characterize social depression:

1. High expectations of endless rising prosperity have been instilled in generations of citizens as a birthright.

2. Part-time and unemployed people are marginalized, not just financially but socially.

3. Widening income/wealth disparity as those in the top 10% pull away from the shrinking middle class.

4. A systemic decline in social/economic mobility as it becomes increasingly difficult to move from dependence on the state (welfare) or one’s parents to financial independence.

5. A widening disconnect between higher education and employment: a college/university degree no longer guarantees a stable, good-paying job.

6. A failure in the Status Quo institutions and mainstream media to recognize social recession as a reality.

7. A systemic failure of imagination within state and private-sector institutions on how to address social recession issues.

8. The abandonment of middle class aspirations by the generations ensnared by the social recession: young people no longer aspire to (or cannot afford) consumerist status symbols such as luxury autos or homeownership.

9. A generational abandonment of marriage, families and independent households as these are no longer affordable to those with part-time or unstable employment, i.e. what I have termed (following Jeremy Rifkin) the end of work.

10. A loss of hope in the young generations as a result of the above conditions.

The rising tide of collective anger arising from social depression is visible in many places: road rage, violent street clashes between groups seething for a fight, the destruction of friendships for holding the “incorrect” ideological views, and so on. I Think We Can Safely Say The American Culture War Has Been Taken As Far As It Can Go.

A coarsening of the entire social order is increasingly visible: The Age of Rudeness.

Depressive thoughts (and the emotions they generate) tend to be self-reinforcing, and this is why it’s so difficult to break out of depression once in its grip.

One part of the healing process is to expose the sources of anger that we are repressing. As psychiatrist Karen Horney explained in her 1950 masterwork, Neurosis and Human Growth: The Struggle Towards Self-Realization, anger at ourselves sometimes arises from our failure to live up to the many “shoulds” we’ve internalized, and the idealized track we’ve laid out for ourselves and our lives.

The recent article, The American Dream Is Killing Us does a good job of explaining how our failure to obtain the expected rewards of “doing all the right things”(getting a college degree, working hard, etc.) breeds resentment and despair.

Since we did the “right things,” the system “should” deliver the financial rewards and security we expected. This systemic failure to deliver the promised rewards is eroding social mobility and the social contract while generating frustration, anger, etc.

We are increasingly angry at the system, but we reserve some anger for ourselves, because the mass-media trumpets how well the economy is doing and how some people are doing extremely well. Naturally, we wonder, why them and not us? The failure is thus internalized.

One response to this sense that the system no longer works as advertised is to seek the relative comfort of echo chambers–places we can go to hear confirmation that this systemic stagnation is the opposing political party’s fault.

We don’t just self-sort ourselves into political “tribes” online– we are congregating in increasingly segregated communities and states:.

Americans are moving to communities that align more with their politics. Liberals are moving to liberal areas, and conservatives are moving to conservative communities. It’s been going on for decades. When Jimmy Carter was elected in 1976, 26.8% of Americans lived in landslide counties; that is counties where the president won or lost by 20% of the vote.

By 2004, 48.3% of the population lived in these counties. This trend continues to worsen. As Americans move to their preferred geographic bubbles, they face less exposure to opposing viewpoints, and their own opinions become more extreme. This trend is at the heart of why politics have become so polarizing in America.

We’re self-sorting at every level. Because of this, Americans are only going to grow more extreme in their beliefs, and see people on the other side of the political spectrum as more alien.”

Part of the American Exceptionalism we hear so much about is a can-do optimism: set your mind to it and everything is possible.

The failure to prosper as anticipated is generating a range of negative emotions that are “un-American”: complaining that you didn’t get a high-paying secure job despite having a college degree (or advanced degree) sounds like sour-grapes: the message is you didn’t work hard enough, you didn’t get the right diploma, etc.

It can’t be the system that’s failed, right? I discuss this in my book Why Our Status Quo Failed and Is Beyond Reform: the top 10% who are benefiting mightily dominate politics and the media, and their assumption is: the system is working great for me, so it must be working for everyone. That’s the implicit narrative parroted by status quo mouthpieces.

The inability to express our despair and anger generates depression. Some people will redouble their efforts, others will seek to lay the blame on “the other” (some external group) and others will give up. What few people will do is look at the sources of systemic injustice.

Perhaps we need a national dialog about declining expectations, rising inequality and the failure of the status quo that avoids the blame-game and the internalization trap (i.e. it’s your own fault you’re not well-off).

We need ways to express our resentment, anger, despair, etc. that are directed at the source, the complex system we inhabit, not “the other.” We need to value honesty above optimism. Once we can speak honestly, there is a foundation for optimism.

Reimagining the Middle Class

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In her new book, Alissa Quart chronicles what happens when capitalism and families collide

By Ann Neumann

Source: The Baffler

AS THE ECONOMIC STATUS OF MANY in the United States has declined over the past several decades, journalists have often focused on the challenges faced by the working poor. In her new book, Squeezed: Why Our Families Can’t Afford America, Alissa Quart writes about how economic inequality has also drastically changed the middle class, destabilizing what was once considered a secure class and sending families into the tailspin of debt, overwork, underemployment, and precarious financial states. Squeezed demonstrates that inequality is not just a problem of those left behind in the lowest financial brackets, but a feature of our current economic system characterized by working professionals who are unable to pay for child care, declining job salaries, shifting work hours, and unaffordable housing. Families too often wrestle with “penalizing” factors, like women’s depressed salaries and unaffordable health care, making success unattainable for a formerly comfortable, educated, and skilled demographic of society.

The book challenges us to reimagine our prior understanding of what it means to be middle class, even as legislators champion “traditional values” that contradict the needs and responsibilities of families—and erode a safety net that once supported U.S. workers. Some of the factors that have upended the middle class are obvious—declining salaries, for instance—but others remain masked by corporate and social portrayal of them as a benefit to today’s workers. The gig economy, which, we’re told, gives workers young and old more flexibility and independence, turns out to be a contributor to what Quart calls the forever clock, a twenty-four-hour schedule that has usurped family and free time by keeping workers on constant call. Squeezed recounts the lives of the teachers who work second jobs, the professional mothers who struggle to pay for day care, the paralegals and adjuncts who have to moonlight to pay the rent, the well educated who never found a job in their intended profession that provides a livable salary. And the book causes us to ask why so many suffer in isolation, too ashamed to acknowledge their economic plight and too belabored to politically address it.

Quart is executive editor of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, a nonprofit organization founded by Barbara Ehrenreich (a contributing editor for The Baffler) that supports journalism examining economic inequality, its causes and solutions (EHRP has funded my own work and that of others published at The Baffler). Quart is the author of four previous books: Branded, Republic of Outsiders, Hothouse Kids, and the poetry book Monetized. She also co-writes, with Maia Szalavitz, a column for The Guardian titled “Outclassed.”

This month, Quart stopped by The Baffler office to talk to me about Squeezed. We’ve known each other for several years and I read the book in manuscript, so our conversation was casual, touching on individuals in the book, our own squeezed lives, how we can counter economic decline, and a necessary new definition of self-help.

Ann Neumann: Squeezed straddles the Trump election and very often people on the left—and the right, to be honest—are using this as a clear demarcation. I think one of the things the book does really well is point out that the mechanisms in place that harm working class families have been long in coming.

Alissa Quart: The reason Sanders and Trump could tap into anger are the numbers of those economically squeezed; it’s what I was seeing anecdotally. And you can feel that. You can feel when you go sit in people’s living rooms, when you talk to them on the phone. I went to a conference called iRelaunch that was all about helping people to start their careers over and the room just rippled with shame and fear. And acidic humor.

AN: How did the election change this book project?

AQ: I think it gave it new urgency for me. Just as it gave urgency to the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, the organization I run. I think everyone in journalism felt like we have to tell these stories. The Trump effect has made me feel like I have to keep a laser focus on the things people are ignoring and try to find a way for readers to pay attention to them. We’re all focusing on Ivanka and whether she’s the c-word or not, which is fine, there are all kinds of things happening around us and in our own lives politically that have nothing directly to do with what Trump is tweeting, but the effects of his administration and long-term trends are real and we just need to keep looking.

We just published an article at EHRP about a journalist who lives in a $17 a night Airbnb, places below what you usually scroll to. But this person was a working journalist who was getting six-figure advances fifteen or twenty years ago. There are all these human examples that constantly show this decline. Fine, maybe the job numbers are up, but how many jobs are people working and are they jobs in the professions? Are they jobs that pay enough for people to live in cities? Or they’re working three different jobs which leads us to things like, as in this book, twenty-four-hour day care.

AN: Day care centers that are open twenty-four hours to accommodate parents with nontraditional work hours or multiple jobs.

AQ: And they are growing in number. I wrote a piece on this; I called it the dystopian social net. I feel like that’s part of my life’s work. I love dystopian fiction and science fiction, probably because it seems a few clicks away from the life we’re leading. It’s a markedly different life and childhood than the one you and I had. It may be horrible, or maybe not, but we’re seeing a palpable transformation in what childhood can be in the course of twenty years.

AN: And that’s really just the decline of income?

AQ: It’s people working different hours, it’s corporations using algorithms to find out what times of day are most profitable—when they’ll have the most foot traffic in retail, for instance—and demanding that employees work those times. It’s increasing nightwork. Nontraditional could mean 11 to 3 or it could mean working in the evening, or working in different jobs, hither and thither. That alone points to a huge transformation in things like time. A lot of the issues I address in the book are really about time, how we spend it. In the twenty-four-hour day care section I use the term the forever clock. But that’s true of the upper middle class too, they feel squeezed because they’re also on a forever clock. They’re working in IT, for instance, and they’re working unusual hours and they have the expectation that they should be better paid for it. 

AN: Your work has been focused on economic inequality for a long time.

AQ: Every single one of my books is in some way about economic inequality. I used to teach at Columbia J-school and I always told my students that every writer has a central question they spend their career trying to answer and your job is to find out what your question is. It’s like a parlor game. So I think mine is: what happens when the family—or childhood—hits capitalism? What are the deformations and the formations? I read so many nineteenth-century novels as a kid that I’m fascinated by that intersection. Naturalism is ascetically but also politically and intellectually appealing to me. I think I just like the texture of family, love, money, and how they all meet.

AN: That comes out in the writing of the book because, I’ll tell you, there are economics books that I have no interest in reading because they’re a slog, a data dump. You also coin terms that give us a way to think about worker’s plights. You just mentioned the forever clock but there’s also the middle precariat.

AQ: I was trying to explain the shift in the middle class as an imaginative category. The middle class used to equal solid, fixed, stable. Temporally it was about gratification later, but your life wasn’t miserable while you were waiting for it. It wasn’t like OK, total slog, but you’re going to get that pension. We have to now think of it as a shaken category, an unstable category, and that’s a big shift. When we visualize the middle class, we’re visualizing the white picket fence, like the blue sky on the cover of the book. But it’s really this truck being squeezed between two houses.

It’s an unsettled identity, and you can fall out of it, you can barely get into it, you certainly can’t rise above it very easily. Guy Standing coined the term precariat in 2011 to describe the proletariat, which is a Marxist way of understanding the working class, crossed with precariousness. And people get that. Every time they ride an Uber or they have a gig economy Task Rabbit person come to their house they’re like, OK, that’s the precariat. But I was seeing the same thing among paralegals or those who have law degrees but were still doing temporary work.

AN: Getting a law degree can be like selling your soul to the banks.

AQ: All these people are in debt. Some of it is because they went to for-profit colleges and those colleges were really expensive and they didn’t have a good rate of placement. Which can be traced to for-profit colleges and grad schools that have very little oversight—and are sometimes indeed federally funded. It can also be traced to fewer law jobs overall and too many people imagining that law is a secure profession. This is about reimagining. Once you can reimagine a profession, even if you choose to do it—you choose to be a journalist, you choose be a lawyer—we should understand that we’re choosing something unstable. Awareness is a huge part of survival and I guess part of what I want with this book is to increase awareness. This is your self-help: Don’t blame yourself. We have to come alive to this recognition. You can still do what you love, so long as you know what it can mean.

This is a personal journey for me too. When I was younger, as a freelancer, I had some recognition that journalism was starting to fragment. It was around 2006 or 2007—but it was before that too, the’90s. The word rates used to be consistent and for freelance writers those rates became lower or stayed the same while inflation rose. I remember talking to someone and they said, “just think about us as post modern.” Now you do lots of things, it’s a hustle here and a hustle there. That person was a boomer who had a steady job, who would get social security. I remember feeling an incredible resentment.

AN: So precarious employment has been described to us as a beautiful thing. We’re not chained to a factory job, we get to think and move around, but it doesn’t pan out.

AQ: I personally came from a middle class background. As I describe in the book, my parents were college professors, originally community college professors, and they could afford to send me to a private school. They didn’t have any inheritance or anything. That’s the sort of the world I thought I’d be living in. All of us, our generation, Generation X, had an idea of the world we thought we’d be living in. The generation after us has come to understand some of these things.

AN: That they’re fucked? So do you think this is a moment in capitalism, as we watch continued market decline over the next years, when we either do something about it or devolve into a disordered society?

AQ: Yes, I think so. But this book isn’t depressing because it points to some solutions—not in a pat way, but things that will work. It’s a way to think about what kind of family safety net, federal and local, we need to make sure people aren’t falling through. For instance, a few of the people I write about in the book are on food stamps and other kinds of support, but many of them are a little above that in terms of earning power and they can’t get help. There’s a labor organizer I spoke with who tries to lower her salary to be able to get some sort of subsidized day care, some sort of health insurance program. It’s that edge: people who are middle class in terms of education, but working class in terms of earning. They’re on the edge of being working poor and not being able to access any of those services. That’s most of the people in this book. Once we understand that they’re precarious we need to find a safety net for them.

AN: What this book does is lay out the many ways that people are hurting at the moment and it kind of gives a blueprint as to how precariousness could be addressed. Subsidized day care, for instance. I had no idea about how expensive child care is.

AQ: Child care can be 30 percent of many salaries. Or more. I think for us it was 30 percent of our take-home pay.

AN: How do people do it? In the book you show us. We spend a lot of time with individuals, we get a look at their lives and there’s a revelation for a reader to think, Oh, it’s not just me. There are things that I go without, there are resources that I don’t have access to, there are crises that I lose sleep over or pray will never come my way. There’s something about this book that brings this issue to light and I wonder if that was what you thought you’d get out of the stories? Is that why you used a storytelling approach?

AQ: That’s the chick lit, soap operatic part of me. And there is something of that in these stories. You think, What’s going to happen next? Sometimes I was surprised because they did have the messy amplitude of ordinary life. The people I write about aren’t just symbolic though. Some of them I followed for years.

AN: I think of the co-parenting section where you spend time with families who are trying to come up with creative solutions. In some cases, over time, things were better; in some cases they were worse. But readers still get the sense that nothing is fixed, no one really knows what’s working.

AQ: Or like the nanny who was separated from her son when I first met her and it was one kind of story. It became a story about them reunited, but then it became a story about school choice, and then it became a story about a mixed outcome at the end. She was actually happy, but I think the reader would want her to have a more middle class life given how hard she’s worked and all the effort she’s made to make the right choices.

AN: The anxiety of her life stayed with me. There are so many things that thwart her from getting ahead. She just needs the smallest break, trying to bring her son here, trying to find an affordable place to live. She’s doing everything right and she doesn’t deserve to go through this. That’s what comes out in the story. So when you were doing this reporting, did you get a sense of relief that we’re all going through this at the same time?

AQ: I definitely did. I felt relief. I say that this book is self-help because it makes you realize that it’s not your fault. And that’s how I see self-help. I see it as awareness, really granularly understanding all the ways that systems have made it impossible for you personally to overcome financial challenges—so that you’re no longer blaming yourself.

AN: Thank God someone’s redefining self-help.

AQ: [Laughs] But that’s it. How do you not feel stigmatized, how do you not feel isolated? So many of my friends feel ashamed that they can’t figure out the school system, can’t figure out how to own their home.

AN: The various penalties—for being a woman, for having children, for having debt—stack up. Shaming has abetted this erosion of rights and financial stability.

AQ: Time, day care scheduling, and other demands mean people can’t organize. They’re ashamed of where they are and so that becomes another debilitating factor. The adjunct in one chapter feels ashamed even though she knows politically she shouldn’t. There are people like the teachers who drive for Uber, who feel ashamed even though they know they shouldn’t. And it goes on and on. I don’t want to put it back on individuals, but the personal thing that people can do is start talking openly about their monetary situation. People are startled when you do that. It can erode social norms in a weird way, but I also think it’s important that people stop fronting with one another.

I write in one chapter about the 1 percent media, about the social media where people pretend to live in more expensive places than they do. I call them wealthies, not selfies. So it’s not your imagination when you’re in any of these circumstances and you see people in a sun dappled villa. People are representing themselves in this inflated way and then you feel terrible and isolated. There are so many ways in which the stigma, the isolation, around your class position gets underlined.

AN: Has it always been shameful to be poor?

AQ: Probably.

AN: It’s not a fair question!

AQ: But let’s be clear. A lot of these people are not poor. Most of the people in this book are earning between $45,000 and $125,000. Working class is $35,000. They’re not at the poverty level.

AN: So the shame then comes from not being able to make ends meet.

AQ: The shame comes from having debt for the education that you got in order to be middle class. The shame comes from not doing as well as your peers. The shame comes from not living up to your potential. The shame comes from not owning your home, defaulting on your mortgage. Not giving your kids as good a life as you had. I’m not writing about the working poor. I’m writing about the middle poor.

AN: We still operate under the myth that as a society we can continue to lift people into middle class and lift middle class into other class brackets. We no longer have any of that upward mobility. We cannot anticipate that our children will be better off.

AQ: No, we cannot anticipate that.

AN: But that’s still the American dream, isn’t it? And that American dream has been tied to, say, home ownership or a vehicle or not having debt.

AQ: In New York it’s like what school your kid goes to. What college your kid goes to.

AN: You use the word reimagining; it’s a word that I don’t hear often enough in politics, particularly not applied to class.

AQ: I mean reimagining what it means to be successful, reimagining what it means to be middle class. In a dream scape kind of way, like, This is what we would like to see in this country. But also reimagining middle class in its truth, what it actually means now? Let’s tear the veil and not just say, Oh, it means stability or security. It doesn’t.

This Viral ‘Feel-Good’ Story Is Actually an Indictment of American Labor Hell

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By Luke O’Neil

Source: Observer

In what’s quickly become the feel-good story of the week, a young Alabama man named Walter Carr is being lauded across the country for his perseverance and indomitable spirit. It’s the type of story that can instill hope in a divided nation when it’s sorely needed and serve as inspiration for the rest of us that if you work hard enough and keep a positive attitude, good things will come to you. It also happens to be disgusting horse shit and an utter indictment of the brutal, indifferent hell of the nightmare capitalist wasteland we all suffer in. So, a bit of a mixed bag here. 

Carr, a 20-year-old college student, as nearly every news outlet has pointed out in sepia-tinted coverage—from CBS News and USA Today to the BBC—was set to start a new job on Saturday morning with the moving company Bellhops. At the last minute, his car broke down, and he was unable to find a ride from friends to get there. Instead, he decided to walk. He began the trek, which was roughly 20 miles from his home, at midnight, hoping to get there by 8 a.m. the next day to meet the rest of the movers. 

“I didn’t want to defeat myself,” Carr later told ABC News.

Along the way, around 4 a.m. in the morning, Carr, a young person of color, was stopped by local police officers, who, out of the kindness of their hearts, no doubt, asked him where he was headed. When he explained the situation—and after his story checked out—they decided to give him a ride the rest of the way, even going so far as to take him to breakfast.

“He was very polite. It was ‘yes sir’ and ‘no sir,”’ one of the officers later said. I bet he was!

When he arrived at the moving job a few hours later, complete with police escort, they explained the situation to Jenny Lamey, the woman who had hired the movers. Inspired by Carr’s work ethic and apparent decency, she shared the story on Facebook, where it soon went viral. 

The story eventually came to the attention of Bellhops CEO Luke Marklin, who arranged to meet Carr a few days later for a big surprise. 

“This is how you pay it forward… treat your employees with respect and incentivize them and bet you’ll get a much better worker for it,” wrote one commenter on Twitter. “It is awesome to see a young man not make an excuse like it’s too far to go to work, and then see him rewarded for it. Wish the young man and the company all the best in the future,” added another. 

It’s enough to drive you to tears. What kind of tears those are will probably depend on how susceptible you are to the lie at the heart of American capitalism and Horatio Alger nonsense.

Carr who set out the night before with a kitchen knife to protect against stray dogs on the walk, as he explained to The Washington Post, nonetheless floored everyone he encountered along the way. 

“He’s such a humble, kindhearted person,” Lamey said. “He’s really incredible. He said it was the way he was raised.”

“We set a really high bar for heart and grit and… you just blew it away,” Marklin told him, after gifting Carr his 2014 Ford Escape (barely-driven! as alabama.com reported). 

A GoFundMe set up by Lamey to help Carr with his car troubles has since raised almost $40,000. 

“Nothing is impossible unless you say it’s impossible,” she told the Post. 

Nothing except for paying workers an actual salary with benefits, which, you may not be surprised to hear, Bellhops does not do. Essentially Uber for movers, (Marklin came to the company from Uber), Bellhops relies on the labor of young college students, like Carr, who take jobs on a gig-by-gig basis. The company, which operates in dozens of cities around the country, and has raised tens of millions of dollars in rounds of funding since it was founded in 2011, pays movers between $13-16 an hour. 

“It’s a transitional job,” CEO Cameron Doody told BuzzFeed News in a story from 2015. “It’s not a career.”

Alabama, incidentally, is also only one of five states that has traditionally never spent any state money on public transportation. 

Naturally, Bellhops are very proud of themselves, and have been reveling in the attention. You probably didn’t know the company existed before yesterday, and may be thinking about contracting their services in the future now. Win win. 

“I want people to know this—no matter what the challenge is, you can break through the challenge,” Carr, who also wants to become a Marine some day, said of his story. 

“Nothing is impossible unless you make it impossible,” he added. “You can do anything you set your mind to. I’ve got God by my side. I’m really emotional right now trying to hold back the tears.”

It’s a heartwarming reminder that, much like with getting sick or injured in America, which needs to be done in a tragic but endearing enough way to go viral so people will pay your medical bills, all you have to do to make it in this beautiful country is have your life fall apart in such a way that the news wants to write about it, then hope the benign feudal lords will see fit to offer you as an aspirational example to the rest of us so we remain compliant.

Saturday Matinee: American Nomads

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Synopsis from Top Documentary Films

Beneath the America we think we know lies a nation hidden from view – a nomadic nation, living on the roads, the rails and in the wild open spaces.

In its deserts, forests, mountain ranges and on the plains, a huge population of modern nomads pursues its version of the American dream – to live free from the world of careers, mortgages and the white picket fence.

When British writer Richard Grant moved to the USA more than 20 years ago it wasn’t just a change of country. He soon found himself in a world of travelers and the culture of roadside America – existing alongside, but separate from, conventional society. In this film he takes to the road again, on a journey without destination.

In a series of encounters and unplanned meetings, Richard is guided by his own instincts and experiences – and the serendipity of the road. Traveling with loners and groups, he encounters the different ‘tribes’ of nomads as he journeys across the deserts of America’s south west.

Why America is the World’s First Poor Rich Country

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Or, How American Collapse is Made of a New Kind of Poverty

By Umair Haque

Source: Eudaimonia

Consider the following statistics. The average American can’t scrape together $500 for an emergency. A third of Americans can’t afford food, shelter, and healthcare. Healthcare for a family now costs $28k — about half of median income, which is $60k.

By themselves, of course, statistics say little. But together these facts speak volumes. The story they are beginning to tell is this.

America, it seems, is becoming something like the world’s first poor rich country. And that is the elephant in the room we aren’t quite grasping. After all, authoritarianism and extremism don’t arise in prosperous societies — but in troubled ones, which are growing impoverished, like America is today. What do I mean by all that?

Let’s begin with what I don’t mean. I don’t mean absolute poverty. Americans are not living on a few dollars a day, by and large, like people in, for example, Somalia or Bangladesh. America’s median income is still that of a rich country, around $50k, depending on how it’s counted. Nor do I really mean relative poverty — people living below median income. While that’s a growing problem in America, because the middle class is imploding, that is not really the true problem these numbers hint at, either.

America appears to be pioneering a new kind of poverty altogether. One for which we do not yet have a name. It is something like living at the knife’s edge, constantly being on the brink of ruin, one small step away from catastrophe and disaster, ever at the risk of falling through the cracks. It has two components — massive inflation for the basics of life, coupled with crushing, asymmetrical risk. I’ll come to what those mean shortly.

The average American has a relatively high income, that of a person in a nominally rich country. Only his income does not go very far. Most of it is eaten up by attempting to afford the basics of life. We’ve already seen how steep healthcare costs are. But then there is education. There is transport. There is interest and rent. There is media and communications. There is childcare and elderly care. All these things reduce the average American to constantly living right at the edge of ruin — one paycheck away from penury, one emergency away from losing it all.

But this isn’t true for America’s peers. In Europe, Canada, and even Australia, society invests in all these things — and the costs of basic necessities societies don’t provide are regulated. For example, I pay $50 dollars for broadband and TV in London — but $200 for the same thing in New York — yet in London, I get vastly more and better media for my money (even including, yes, American junk like Ancient Aliens). That’s regulation at work. And when basic goods like healthcare or elderly care or education are provided and managed at a social scale, that is when they are cheapest, and often of the best quality, too. Hence, healthcare costs far less in London, Paris, or Geneva — and life expectancy is longer, too.

So if you are earning $50k in America, it is a very different thing than earning $50k in France, Germany, or Sweden — in America, you must pay steeply for the basics of life, for basic necessities. Thus, incomes stretch much further in other countries, which enjoy a vastly higher quality of life, even though people there earn roughly the same amount, because they pay vastly less for basic necessities. Americans are rich, but only nominally — their money doesn’t buy nearly as much as their peers does, where it matters and counts most, for the basics of life.

What happens when societies don’t understand all the above? Well, a strange thing has happened to the American economy. While it’s true that things like TVs and Playstations have gotten cheaper, the costs of the basics of life have skyrocketed. All the things that really elevate people’s quality of life — healthcare, finance, education, transport, housing, and so on — have come to consume such a large share of the average household’s income that they have little left to save, invest, or spend on anything else. And what’s worse, while the basics of life have seen massive inflation, wages and incomes (not to mention savings and benefits and safety nets and opportunities) for most have stagnated. The result is an economy — and a society — that’s collapsing.

Yet all that is the straightforward effect of giving, for example, hedge funds control over drugs, or speculators control over housing, healthcare, and education — they will of course maximize profits, whereas investing in these things socially, or at least regulating them, minimizes real costs, and maximizes accessibility, affordability, and quality.

So the average American, who is left high and dry, must borrow, borrow, borrow, just to maintain a decent quality of life — because handing capitalism control of the basics of life has caused massive, skyrocketing inflation in necessities, while flatlining his income. Healthcare didn’t used to cost half of median income even a decade ago, after all — but now it does. So what happens when, in a decade or two, healthcare costs all of median income? How can an economy — let alone a society — function that way?

Well, what happens if the average American steps over the line? Misses a mortgage payment, gets ill and is unable to pay a few bills on time, can’t pay the costs of healthcare? Then they are punished severely and mercilessly. Their “credit rating” (note how banks and hedge funds don’t have them) is ruined. They can easily find themselves out on the street, without finance, without a second chance, without access to any kind of redress or support . And then they are rejected, shunned, and ostracized. They might not have an address anymore — so who will hire them? They are no longer a part of society — they have fallen through the cracks, and finding one’s way back is often next to impossible. Asymmetrical risk — corporations and lobbies and banks bear no risk at all, precisely because the average American bears them all now.

So Americans aren’t just absolutely or relatively poor, but poor in a new way entirely. First, the basics of life exploded in price, to the point that they are now unaffordable for many, maybe most, households. Second, Americans bear the risks of paying those unaffordable costs to an extreme degree, bearing the risks that institutions should, and so those risks are now ruinously high. A bank or hedge fund or corporation might go bankrupt, and liquidate its assets, and its owners stay rich — but if an American’s credit rating is ruined, loses his job, cannot pay his bills, or even if he declares bankruptcy, he falls through the cracks, hounded, embattled, institutionally black-marked. He finds himself outside society, with little way to get back in. Little wonder then that Americans work so much harder than anywhere else — they are always one step away from losing it all, from genuine ruin, but their peers in truly rich countries aren’t.

Marx probably would have called this immiseration. Neo-Marxist theorists call it precarity. And while there’s truth in both those ideas and perspectives, I think they miss three vital points.

We don’t see America as a poor country, but we should begin to. Americans live fairly abysmal lives — short, lonely, unhappy, full of work and stress and despair, compared to their peers. That is because they cannot afford better ones — predatory capitalism coupled with total economic mismanagement of social investments has made the basics of life ruinously unaffordable. In this way, it’s effectively a poor country — yes, there’s a tiny number of ultra-rich, but they are outliers now, off the map of the normal. Because it’s not just any kind of poverty, yesterday’s poverty, or even poverty as we are used to thinking about it.

America is pioneering a new kind of poverty. The kind of poverty that’s developed in America isn’t just bizarre and gruesome — it’s novel and unseen. It isn’t something that we understand well, economists, intellectuals, thinkers, because we have no good framework to think about it. It’s not absolute poverty like Somalia, and it’s not just relative poverty, like in gilded banana republics. It’s a uniquely American creation. It’s extreme capitalism meets Social Darwinism by way of rugged self-reliance crossed with puritanical cruelty.

The kind of poverty America’s pioneering today isn’t absolute, or even relative , but something more like perfectly tuned poverty, strategic poverty, basic poverty— nominally well-off people whose money doesn’t go far enough to make them actually live well, constantly living at the edge of ruin, and thus forced to choke down their bitter anger and serve the very systems which oppress and subjugate with more and more indignity and fear and servility by the year.

America’s still an innovator today. Unfortunately, what it’s innovating now is a new kind of poverty. Yet poverty is poverty. What happens in societies where poverty is growing? Authoritarianism rises, as people lose faith in democracy, which can’t seem to offer them working social contracts. Authoritarian soon enough becomes fascism — “this country, this land, its harvest — it is only for the true volk!”, the cry goes up, when there is not enough to go around. And the rest of the dark and grim story of the fall into the abyss you should know well enough by now. It ends in words we do not say.

Still, history, laughing, has told this tale to us many times. And it is telling it to tomorrow, again, in the tale of American collapse.

America’s Rich Are Completely Losing Touch With Reality — and That’s a Really Bad Sign

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By Shaun Bradley

Source: AntiMedia

The divide between wealthy and working class has grown wider each year since the last financial crisis, but this disconnect is about much more than just money or politics. The super-rich, in particular, have become completely detached from the everyday problems facing millions of their fellow citizens. Instead of recognizing the urgency of the current situation and contributing to solutions that help empower all members of society, the focus for many has shifted toward simply indulging in the present moment and increasing luxury. This kind of self-centered worldview has emerged throughout history and typically thrives most when decadent empires start to crumble.

Right now, the average person is forced to worry about central banks devaluing their currencies, corrupt bureaucrats eroding their civil liberties, and an economy on life support. Meanwhile, a faction of affluent individuals has committed themselves to avoiding the turmoil around them, instead choosing to obsess over life extension, genetic manipulation, and creating luxurious doomsday plans. Those people who have the crucial intellect, resources, and influence needed to implement real change are consumed with self-interest to the point of total apathy towards the future.

One of the more disturbing trends has been a rise in interest regarding something called parabiosis. This practice involves blood transfusions between the young and old in an attempt to slow the aging process. The procedure has been studied in the past but has always been met with moral and scientific criticism. Recently, however, a California start-up called Ambrosia began offering clients the opportunity to purchase the blood of someone under the age of 25 for a mere $8,000.

The process gained attention after Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel came out in support of further research during an interview:

“I’m looking into parabiosis stuff, which I think is really interesting. This is where they did the young blood into older mice and they found that had a massive rejuvenating effect. And so that’s … that is one that … again, it’s one of these very odd things where people had done these studies in the 1950s and then it got dropped altogether. I think there are a lot of these things that have been strangely underexplored.”

The blood used for these transfusions is often purchased from blood banks without informing the original donors. Popular high-school blood drives could soon have a whole new incentive to encourage students to participate. Any possible medical advancements that can help improve the lives of sick people should be explored, but for a private business to benefit directly from the generosity of others without their consent is a bit unnerving.

The question of whether this treatment is effective or not is almost a secondary issue to the ethical one. What does it show about our society when the priority of so many is not building a better world for the next generation but, rather, appeasing their egos by desperately clinging to their youth? The similarity to vampirism can’t be overlooked and may be another sign that, in the end, the truth is stranger than fiction.

The super-wealthy who can see the dangers facing the world are also fine with hitting the eject button to their own private bunkers in a worst-case scenario. The prepping community that was once isolated to ‘conspiracy theorists’ and survivalist groups has now been adopted by the 1%. Several billionaires have even gone so far as to buy entire islands to guarantee they won’t be swept up in the panic of the masses.

Tim Chang, the managing director at a financial firm called the Mayfield Fund, spoke to a reporter at the New Yorker about some of the conversations going on in these circles:

“There’s a bunch of us in the Valley. We meet up and have these financial-hacking dinners and talk about backup plans people are doing. It runs the gamut from a lot of people stocking up on Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, to figuring out how to get second passports if they need it, to having vacation homes in other countries that could be escape havens…I’ll be candid: I’m stockpiling now on real estate to generate passive income but also to have havens to go to….I kind of have this terror scenario: ‘Oh, my God, if there is a civil war or a giant earthquake that cleaves off part of California, we want to be ready.’ ”

While the ideas of democratic socialism have spread throughout the country, it’s clear that extreme individualism has developed on the other side. The majority of those with the means to care for themselves and their families have abandoned any connection to the rest of society. As long as the impact of the coming upheaval doesn’t affect them directly, it appears the fate of the rest is irrelevant.

The mentality of the nation has transitioned from proactive to reactive, with a sense of inevitability about the ultimate outcome we’re all facing. There is almost no effort to openly discuss the growing prospect of a civil war or severe economic breakdown, even as it grows more plausible in the minds of those paying attention. This obsession on the part of the super-rich for god-like control over their destinies only shows the fear that overwhelmingly dictates their choices. Maybe the modern day peasants of society should simply heed the advice of Marie Antoinette and eat cake while the world burns.

It Is Bettter to Light One Candle than to Curse the Darkness

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By Harvey Lothian

Source: Dissident Voice

The world is in bad shape. Every reasonably intelligent, aware, objective person in the world knows, if only intuitively, that something is very, very wrong. There should not be this many armed conflicts, this much anger, this much violence, this much unemployment and underemployment, this much debt, this much homelessness, hunger, poverty, this ever widening gap between the income and wealth of the super rich and everyone else, and this much distrust in government and politicians. The future does not look good; a financial crisis and a socioeconomic collapse are just around the corner. Another World War or innumerable smaller wars seem almost certain.

Things are dark everywhere in the world, except in the offices and homes of the wealthy and highly connected people of the world. They control the world. There are no genuine democracies in the world, only oligarchies and dictatorships. The wealthy classes have never had it better. Never in recorded history has this class had higher income and wealth compared to the average working family. Oxfam reported that the richest 50% of the people own over 99% of the world’s wealth, the richest 1% of the world’s population hold over 50% of the world’s wealth, and the richest 62 people in the world has as much wealth as the poorest half of the global population, about 3.6 billion people.

Rich people’s insatiable greed has brought the world to this lamentable state. Make no mistake about it, the greed of the wealthy classes and their flunkies are responsible for the wretched state of the world today. We, the masses of the world, believed their lies because we are decent trusting people. We did not believe anyone would tell us such monstrous lies. The wealthy classes did, then they had us go to war against other innocent trusting people around the world while they looted the assets of our countries and stole our future. They have left us nothing but our confusion as to why our lives are going down the drain when we believed and tried our best to be patriotic citizens of our country. Our confusion is rapidly turning to anger as we learn more details about how the wealthy classes and leaders have deceived us, betrayed us, and ruined our lives. They have used us in the most despicable of ways; they used our trust, and naivety to rob and violate us to our very core, by destroying our lives and our hope and dreams for a better future for ourselves and our children.

To put this insanity in clear perspective, consider the following. Reliable U.N. agencies estimate that 32,000 children die around the world every day from hunger and hunger related diseases. They die because their parents do not have enough money to feed them a nourishing diet. Billions of people around the world live on one to three dollars a day, so we can safely say that if these 32,000 children’s parents earned $3 a day these children would not die. A tiny $96,000 a day given to these children’s parents, in wages for work performed, would save these children from what is apparently a painful death. That is $35,040,000 per year to save 32,000 innocent children, or, $1,095 per year to save one child. According to Forbes magazine there are 1,810 billionaires in the world worth a total of $6.5 trillion. Why do 32,000 children die every day from hunger and hunger related diseases, 224,000 every week, 11,648,000 every year when there is enough food to feed them and enough money to buy that food? Because we live in a totally insane world where accumulating wealth is more important to some that feeding hungry children.

There is no way out of the insane economic house of cards the rich have built except total collapse. The rich made that inevitable when they relentlessly incurred ever increasing amounts of federal debt, in our name, as they continually sent our well paying jobs to low wage countries making it impossible for us to reduce that debt through our taxes. They got super rich, we lost our good jobs and had enormous amounts of new debt piled on to us. This is not sustainable, the house of cards must eventually collapse. Or, our insane leaders will try to turn the world into one huge war zone.

We, the decent, sane people of the world now have an important decision to make; we can continue to curse the darkness the insane wealthy people of the world have created with their insane endless pursuit of more wealth, or, we can begin lighting candles by seeking and employing methods of solidly uniting us so we can defeat our common enemy and move us to a better way of living together. If we do not have a clear picture in our minds of how we want to live together in peace and harmony chaos will occur when the socio economic system collapses. We have to know where we are going, or we are lost.

Where do we want to go? The answer is obvious; we are all human beings, we all sprang from the same source, we are all brothers and sisters and all have exactly the same innate needs for food, water, shelter, warmth, sleep, social order, safety, security, stability, employment, a sense of belonging and love, and the opportunity to develop to our fullest potential. Simply put. we want and need to live in a world where countries are at peace with each other while we live in peace and harmony with each other in our country and we have the opportunity to lead decent normal lives while developing to our fullest potential.

The only way out of the horrendous mess of the collapsing house cards the greedy people have erected is if a vast majority of people around the world solidly unite as brothers and sisters under the motto, “All for one, one for all.” After the collapse occurs no one must be left without the necessities of life. Brothers and sisters take care of each other.

No kind of violence can be tolerated after the house of cards collapses. Violence breeds violence and solves no important long term problems. Brothers and sisters are not violent with each other.

Can we, the people of the world, do this? Can we solidly unite, watch out for each other, protect each other and help those in need? The alternative is too awful to think about. So, we must try. If we try we may succeed. It would be a wonderful world if we cared about others as much as we cared about ourselves; if we were all brothers and sisters. It is time to start lighting candles and stop cursing the darkness. Love thy neighbour as thyself. Or, at least try to do it.

 

Harvey Lothian is a 79-year-old and living on the Sunshine Coast of BC, Canada. His passions since a teenager have been history, politics, economics, sociology, social psychology, learning, traveling and reading. In recent years he has come to understand what Plato meant when he said all dogs have the soul of a philosopher.

Life-Hacks of the Poor and Aimless

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On negotiating the false idols of neoliberal self-care

By Laurie Penny

Source: The Baffler

Late capitalism is like your love life: it looks a lot less bleak through an Instagram filter. The slow collapse of the social contract is the backdrop for a modern mania for clean eating, healthy living, personal productivity, and “radical self-love”—the insistence that, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, we can achieve a meaningful existence by maintaining a positive outlook, following our bliss, and doing a few hamstring stretches as the planet burns. The more frightening the economic outlook and the more floodwaters rise, the more the public conversation is turning toward individual fulfillment as if in a desperate attempt to make us feel like we still have some control over our lives.

Coca-Cola encourages us to “choose happiness.” Politicians take time out from building careers in the debris of democracy to remind us of the importance of regular exercise. Lifestyle bloggers insist to hundreds of thousands of followers that freedom looks like a white woman practicing yoga alone on a beach. One such image (on the @selflovemantras Instagram) informs us that “the deeper the self love, the richer you are.” That’s a charming sentiment, but landlords are not currently collecting rent in self-love.

Can all this positive thinking be actively harmful? Carl Cederström and André Spicer, authors of The Wellness Syndrome, certainly think so, arguing that obsessive ritualization of self-care comes at the expense of collective engagement, collapsing every social problem into a personal quest for the good life. “Wellness,” they declare, “has become an ideology.”

There is an obvious political dimension to the claim that wellbeing, with the right attitude, can be produced spontaneously. Months after being elected leader of the most right-wing government in recent British history, yogurt-featured erstwhile PR man David Cameron launched an ill-fated “happiness agenda.” The scheme may have been better received if the former prime minister were not simultaneously engaged in decimating health care, welfare, and higher education—the very social structures that make life manageable for ordinary British people. As part of Cameron’s changes to the welfare system, unemployment was rebranded as a psychological disorder. According to a study in the Medical Humanities journal, in the teeth of the longest and deepest recession in living memory, the jobless were encouraged to treat their “psychological resistance” to work by way of obligatory courses that encouraged them to adopt a jollier attitude toward their own immiseration. They were harangued with motivational text messages telling them to “smile at life” and that “success is the only option.”

This mode of coercion has been adopted by employers, too, as Cederström and Spicer note. Zero-hour-contract laborers in an Amazon warehouse, “although they are in a precarious situation . . . are required to hide these feelings and project a confident, upbeat, employable self.” All of which begs the question: Who exactly are we being well for?

The well-being ideology is a symptom of a broader political disease. The rigors of both work and worklessness, the colonization of every public space by private money, the precarity of daily living, and the growing impossibility of building any sort of community maroon each of us in our lonely struggle to survive. We are supposed to believe that we can only work to improve our lives on that same individual level. Chris Maisano concludes that while “the appeal of individualistic and therapeutic approaches to the problems of our time is not difficult to apprehend . . . it is only through the creation of solidarities that rebuild confidence in our collective capacity to change the world that their grip can be broken.”

The isolating ideology of wellness works against this sort of social change in two important ways. First, it persuades all us that if we are sick, sad, and exhausted, the problem isn’t one of economics. There is no structural imbalance, according to this view—there is only individual maladaption, requiring an individual response. The lexis of abuse and gas-lighting is appropriate here: if you are miserable or angry because your life is a constant struggle against privation or prejudice, the problem is always and only with you. Society is not mad, or messed up: you are.

Secondly, it prevents us from even considering a broader, more collective reaction to the crises of work, poverty, and injustice. That’s the logic exposed by personal productivity gurus like Mark Fritz, who tells us, in The Truth About Getting Things Done, that:

The biggest barrier to achieving the success you have defined for your life is never anyone else or the circumstances you encounter. Your biggest barrier is almost always you. . . . Dr Maxwell Maltz, author of Psycho-Cybernetics [ETA: sounds legit to me!], put it best when he said, “Within you right now is the power to do things you never dreamed possible. This power becomes available to you as soon as you can change your beliefs.

This, of course, is a cyclopean lie—but it’s a seductive one nonetheless. It would be nice to believe that all it takes to change your life is to repeat some affirmations and buy a planner, just as it was once comforting for many of us to trust that the hardships of this plane of existence would be rewarded by an eternity of bliss in heaven. There is a reason that the rituals of well-being and self-care are followed with the precision of a cult (do this and you will be saved; do this and you will be safe): It is a practice of faith. It’s worth remembering that Marx’s description of religion as the opiate of the masses is often misinterpreted—opium, at the time when Marx was writing, was not just known as an addictive drug, but as a painkiller, a solace when the work of survival became unbearable.

With the language of self-care and well-being almost entirely colonized by the political right, it is not surprising that progressives, liberals, and left-wing groups have begun to fetishize a species of abject hopelessness. Positive thinking has become deeply unfashionable. The American punk kids I know describe it, disparagingly, as “posi.” The British ones, of course, describe it as “American.” Whatever you call it, it feels a lot like giving in.

In a scintillating essay at Open Democracy, activist Chloe King writes that

changing your attitude is not going to change or help to dismantle structural injustice and a failed and unsustainable economic model which serves only the elite rich of this world, and exploits the rest of us, particularly the working class and those living in poverty. As far as I am concerned positive thinking will fucking ruin your life. “Just think positive” is a precursor to “it gets better,” and the hard reality is it is only going to get much, much worse for our most vulnerable.

There is truth here. What is also true, however, is that the young people I know who are, in general, the very worst at taking basic care of themselves as individuals—the people whose problem is not that they don’t drink enough asparagus water, but that they don’t drink enough of anything that isn’t day-old wine from a foil bag—are those who went through the student and Occupy uprisings of 2010–2012 and experienced, briefly, what it meant to live a different sort of life. What it meant to be part of a community with common goals of which mutual aid and support were not the least. What it meant to experience that sudden, brief respite from individual striving and build a prefigurative society together. The lonely work of taking basic care of yourself as you wait for the world to change is a poor substitute. When you’re washed up and burned out from putting your body on the line to fight the state, it’s especially galling to be told to share a smile and eat more whole grains.

When modernity teaches us to loathe ourselves and then sells us quick fixes for despair, we can be forgiven for balking at the cash register. Anxious millennials now seem to have a choice between desperate narcissism and crushing misery. Which is better? The question is not rhetorical. On the one hand, Instagram happiness gurus make me want to drown myself in a kale smoothie. On the other, I’m sick and tired of seeing the most brilliant people I know, the fighters and artists and mad radical thinkers whose lives’ work might actually improve the world, treat themselves and each other in ludicrously awful ways with the excuse, implicit or explicit, that any other approach to life is counterrevolutionary.

Some of the left critique of self-care as a neoliberal conspiracy has to do with dismissing the work that women and queer people do to survive. “I have heard feminism be dismissed as a form of self-indulgence,” writes Professor Sara Ahmed of Goldsmiths, University of London. So have I. I’ve heard men on the left write off anti-sexist, anti-racist politics as hopelessly individualistic, whilst also refusing to do the basic work of self-care and mutual care that keeps hope alive and health possible, because that work is women’s work, undignified in comparison to watching your life fall apart while you wait for the revolution or for some girl to pick up the pieces, whichever comes first.

The left has a special talent for counterproductive, theory-enabled wallowing. “Neoliberalism sweeps up too much when all forms of self-care become symptoms of neo-liberalism,” writes Ahmed. “When feminist, queer, and anti-racist work that involves sharing our feelings, our hurt and grief, recognizing that power gets right to the bone, is called neo-liberalism, we have to hear what is not being heard. . . . A world against you can be experienced as your body turning against you. You might be worn down, worn out, by what you are required to take in.”

It is at this point that I confess to you that I’ve been doing yoga for two years and it’s changed my life to an extent that I almost resent. I have trained myself, through dedicated practice on and off the mat, to find enough inner strength not to burst out laughing when the instructor ends the class by declaring “let the light in me honor the light in you.” The instructor is a very nice person who smiles all the time like a drunk kindergarten teacher and could probably kill me with her abs alone, so I have refrained from informing her that the light in me is sometimes a government building on fire.

Downward-facing dog is not a radical position. Nonetheless, that particular asana is among a few small concessions I make to self-care while I wait for the end of patriarchy and the destruction of the money system. Overpriced charcoal health drinks aren’t good for liberating anything except your wallet and your colon in short succession, but walks in the park are free, so I occasionally go out in the sunshine and try to soak up a bit of Vitamin D without worrying about skin cancer, melting ice-caps, and millions of people drowning in Bangladesh. I no longer subsist entirely on chicken nuggets, cigarettes, and spite. I sometimes take a day off, because it became apparent that the revolution was not being driven any faster by my being sick and sad all the time. Late Capitalism is as good an excuse of any for not getting out of bed, but huddling under the covers worrying about Donald Trump is a very inefficient way of sticking it to the man.

The problem with self-love as we currently understand it is in our view of love itself, defined, too simply and too often, as an extraordinary feeling that we respond to with hearts and flowers and fantasy, ritual consumption and affectless passion. Modernity would have us mooning after ourselves like heartsick, slightly creepy teenagers, taking selfies and telling ourselves how special and perfect we are. This is not real self-love, no more than a catcaller loves the woman whose backside he’s loudly admiring in the street.

The harder, duller work of self-care is about the everyday, impossible effort of getting up and getting through your life in a world that would prefer you cowed and compliant. A world whose abusive logic wants you to see no structural problems, but only problems with yourself, or with those more marginalized and vulnerable than you are. Real love, the kind that soothes and lasts, is not a feeling, but a verb, an action. It’s about what you do for another person over the course of days and weeks and years, the work put in to care and cathexis. That’s the kind of love we’re terribly bad at giving ourselves, especially on the left.

The broader left could learn a great deal from the queer community, which has long taken the attitude that caring for oneself and one’s friends in a world of prejudice is not an optional part of the struggle—in many ways, it is the struggle. Writer and trans icon Kate Bornstein’s rule number one is “Do whatever it takes to make your life more worth living. Just don’t be mean.” It’s more than likely that one of the reasons that the trans and queer communities continue to make such gains in culture, despite a violent backlash, is the broad recognition that self-care, mutual aid, and gentle support can be tools of resistance, too. After the Orlando massacre, LGBTQ people across the world started posting selfies under the hashtag #queerselflove. In the midst of the horror, the public mourning, and the fear, queer people of all ages and backgrounds across the world engaged in some light-hearted celebration of ourselves, of one another.

The ideology of wellbeing may be exploitative, and the tendency of the left to fetishize despair is understandable, but it is not acceptable—and if we waste energy hating ourselves, nothing’s ever going to change. If hope is too hard to manage, the least we can do is take basic care of ourselves. On my greyest days, I remind myself of the words of the poet and activist Audre Lorde, who knew a thing or two about survival in an inhuman world, and wrote that self care “is not self-indulgence—it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”