It’s hard to make things better; not just to dream of a better world but figure out the steps to take that will make the word better and then take them.
It’s far easier to destroy, to blast, to strip others of their humanity and take no responsibility for the damage we do with our words and deeds. And we are increasingly taking the easy route. Social media doomscrolling, AI text and images, videos instead of written words, we are choosing the path of least resistance so often that it is becoming harder and harder to do the hard thing.
And that’s understandable, considering just how overwhelmed we are. Living under capitalism is exhausting.
Let’s be clear, life has always been exhausting. Survival has never been guaranteed, and from our earliest days as hunter gatherers we have had to push our limits in order to build shelters and find food. We don’t gain skills by not using them, so pushing our limits is how we get stronger, faster, more skilled. But capitalism is different. Rather than building our broad spectrum survival skills, and getting better at being alive, capitalism has us repeat a limited range of tasks and optimizing our skills within that limited range. We become specialists and experts in things that only matter within the economic paradigm, and the economic paradigm solely exists to build wealth for those who already have it.
I’m not here to discuss the mechanisms of capitalism, but I do want to suggest that its effects are what we are seeing today. Meme culture, uncritical thinking, echo chambers, and simplistic clout chasing are all symptoms of the malaise of capitalism. They are all signs that we are mentally dull, and choose the path of least resistance, whether because we are exhausted, distracted, or overwhelmed.
Whether it’s an intended consequence or not, our existence within a capitalist system has robbed us of the mental acuity to find and apply solutions to overthrowing it. We need to resist:
- Read and write words,
- Have face-to-face conversations without a screen as a third-party,
- Draw and paint images from our mind’s eye,
- Solder and build a circuit,
- Learn to dance to a rhythm our bodies are unfamiliar with,
- Work a mortice-and-tenon joint out of wood,
- Repair a hole as skilfully as possible,
- Noodle on a new musical instrument,
- Cook something without following a recipe,
- Clean and polish a pair of shoes,
Do we actually want to live in a world where only algorithms can create new works of art, and all humans can do is scroll AI-generated memes? Do we want to invest in a future that can come tumbling down the moment that a potential despot stands for election on a meme-able campaign of soundbites and platitudes? Is that the reality we want to bestow our children?
There’s a phrase in bodybuilding: use it or lose it. If we don’t use our mind muscles we will lose them, and there won’t be anyone to teach us how to find our way back to them. We have already lost the skills to speak many languages and read and write many scripts – even besides the secrets that were buried and the wisdom that was lost, what will be the next gift of humankind to be forgotten on our watch? Now the biggest governments on earth are falling one after the other to low-rent candidates who offer everyone the easiest path to everything they’ve ever wanted, only to seize it all for themselves whilst setting the people against each other. We are being distracted into extinction.
So, do something painstaking, slow, and most of all, hard. Do it because doing hard things makes us better at doing hard things, but also because hard things are worth doing. Yes, life is overwhelming and exhausting, our brains are mush and our circuits are fried, but our ancestors fought too hard to live, to read, to be counted, for us to lay down this easily.
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