I’ve not been doing very well over the last year. Despite managing to keep making the work, I can’t locate a source of inner-well being.
The atmosphere feels different since the initial optimism (what I’d say felt like a pause to capitalist-realist life) of those early months of 2020, when enough of the population were liberated from work drudgery, where the motorways cleared to once again reveal how impressive they and the bridges over them are. All that ebbed, under the fractured reflection of reality through a prism of ‘back to normalism’.
I don’t even feel like I live my own in life. I think it occurred when I hit 24 in the 2008 recession, or at least that’s the coincidental point in my life where life kind of went one way, and I went the other – like a ghost watching other people live. I don’t think I changed subjectively around this point, except that I hit an age where piers began to create their own adult lives and a century defining crash occurred. The inner monologue shit that began to define the next part of my life broke my identity into conflicted pieces.
I worked from 2017 to 2019 to sort this out. And whether it would have worked, I did have plans, pre-covid, to put together a life plan, with or without the parts that have both given it purpose, a crutch, but equally have either been destructive to my life, or proven to be reflections of an undeveloped and fractured sense of self.
But since the pandemic, I have kept finding myself in my ‘coping state’ of trying to get somewhere where I may just feel like an embodied self. This admittedly is like watching the fly trying to escape through the window, but keeps hitting the glass. But like the fly, without any other option, you just keep flying into the glass, each time more frenzied and exhausted.
I should have options. It’s kind of on me to sort them out. I just don’t know how – many aspects of reality make me compulsively try to the same formula in a state of panic, for lack of other options. After ten years of austerity, and increasing inequality, we are more materialistic and judging of those aspects of others than ever. I find it very hard to take a deep breath and remind myself that ‘it doesn’t matter if other people think I’m a fuck up”; it does matter; it matters, I guess, because it wouldn’t matter if I had found myself, a place, an interior that I can exist in, but I haven’t
As I said in the last post, as much as we can try, we live in a society where political decisions can have huge impacts on our circumstances, which are more likely to weigh heavier if you don’t have the material, social, wealth resources, but also resources in your own character, to deal with. We are a society that talks about self-actualisation but we are also one with increasing numbers of homeless on our streets.
Some of us struggle to adapt to the upgrades capitalism goes through (almost like an AI-type self-upgrading macro operating system) every time it encounters (or engenders) a crisis moment. It’s not simply about us, the human agents of our own embodied capital, adapting our sense of what kind of work we are prepared to do, but that we must, if we want to keep up, upgrade our character, our interior, in order to be in key with new ways of operating. Think of social media influencers, for example, how that logic isn’t just a few super narcissistic people with 60M followers, talking about the best beauty products, it’s kind of trickled into the logic of how all of us use social media now, even if we are ultimately unable to adjust effectively to this kind of self-promotion. In the space of 10 years social media has created a cyberspace grave yard of the ‘left behind’.
These types blogs that mix self-confessionary writing with trying identify the nature of capitalist life right now, have caused me a bit of stress in the past. I think people are usually ok hearing about the ‘I’m struggling’ bits as long as it doesn’t try to zoom out too far too fast. But even if this is part of my illness (and I’m sure you’ll tell me if it is!) is conflicted with the ideas of the kind of work effective self care must take, there is a certain line I won’t cross, which is the line that tells me to stop thinking about these things – because I believe I’m right.
John B Ledger 