What happens when you establish a financial institution fueled by infinite exponential growth on a planet with finite resources?
Well… *vaguely gestures to world* you’re looking at it.
Speaking from my experience as a white American woman from the Appalachian South, my perspectives of reality were heavily warped and skewed until I actively unlearned them. I was told how “the world” worked, that everyone else was wrong, and that it was my responsibility to pull myself out of poverty by being the first in my family to attend college. Pair that with being an undiscovered neurodivergent person, and you get a recipe for inevitable burnout (three years and counting!) that forced me to reassess my entire existence.
I have trouble connecting my past selves to my current self. For 20-some odd years, I played the game — jumped through all the hoops, graduated college in four years and attended grad school, all for it to come to a screeching halt as soon as I left that structured environment. Unbeknownst to me, I was navigating the world with different hardware. I studied what I was good at so that I wouldn’t have to struggle too hard. I didn’t know it yet, but I was chasing the dopamine. (Boy, that worked out well, didn’t it?)
It’s difficult to articulate the magnitude of shame that I still feel around being unable to work. American culture enmeshes our human value with our levels of productivity. It’s the reason we chide ourselves for taking a break and call ourselves lazy for resting, selfish for speaking up for ourselves, and ungrateful when we ask for a living wage. We’re conditioned from school-age to get used to 40-hour weeks, brash fluorescent lighting, and doing what we’re told without question. And when we inevitably struggle along the way, we’re blamed instead of shown compassion.
Capitalism and empathy are like oil and water.
Rise-and-Grind Culture is still alive and well, but its message is neither noble nor wise. It celebrates and endorses a complete lack of boundaries. Work yourself to the bone and you’ll be rewarded. Make sacrifices by being the first one to arrive at work and the last one to leave, and you’ll be rewarded. If you’re having trouble achieving something, it’s your own fault. The system rewards hard work and you’re just not doing enough. You can’t be as tired as I am; I work more hours than you. A 50-hour work week is something to be proud of.
It’s almost laughable, now that we’re starting to collectively pull back the curtain — a welcome movement from someone like me who’s been outspoken against capitalism for most of my adult life. I was born in poverty, lived through poverty, and am still in poverty. I am unable to work a traditional public job due to my late-discovered disability. The amount of times I’ve had to explain to people why I can’t work, only for them to meet me with disdain and incredulity, is soul-crushingly exhausting.
It’s difficult to want to participate in a society that isn’t built for me (or any of us, really — some people are just really good at pretending.) I’m time-blind and prone to sensory overload. I am often immobilized by executive dysfunction and my working memory objectively sucks. I’m at the mercy of my hyperactive mind and I struggle with inconsequential interactions. The surface-level humanness that we’re expected to skate atop was always entirely too shallow for me — not because of any delusions of self — but because I’ve been blessed with the curse of seeing past the surface from a perspective that is unwelcome in a capitalistic setting.
Capitalism values profit over lives. Once our bodies are unable to sell our labor to drive up profits for disgustingly wealthy corporations, we’re as good as dead. Disability services in the US are the unfunniest joke ever written. They’re run by random financiers who don’t know or understand how disability works. Whether it be physical, mental, intellectual, neurodevelopmental, or otherwise, the fact that these people get to determine if we’re “disabled enough” to receive assistance is nauseatingly evil.
Anyone who’s ever tried applying for disability in the US has likely heard this pro tip: “It’s normal for them to deny your disability claim on your first try.” I’m sorry, what? Why is that? To dissuade people from trying again? To deflate already-exhausted disabled people who were forced into squalor due to uncontrollable circumstances? They say it’s to combat resource abuse, but frankly, they can save it for someone who believes it. There are far more people desperately in need than there are grifters and scammers. Arbitrarily building a financial assistance program on Ultra-Hard Mode only perpetuates the notion that being disabled is an inconvenience for everyone. I know I’m not a burden, but this country does a fantastic job of making me feel like one.
Why is disability a poverty sentence in this country?
In my home state of Virginia, an average monthly payment from Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) is $1,371.15. Rent prices in Virginia average at over $1,400 a month, and I’m sure you see where I’m going with this. With these financial disparities, thriving as a disabled person is simply out of the question. Most of us take our days a minute at a time. Uncertainty and foreboding looms over us at all times. What’re we expected to do?
Scarier yet, covid still runs rampant and the American people are all playing along with a Fake Normal that simply doesn’t exist. Public spaces are no longer requiring mitigations, including healthcare, leaving disabled people with the impossible choice of either attempting to treat an injury or illness at home, or visit a doctor and risk catching a disabling airborne virus that affects every system of the body. As a high-risk immunocompromised person in poverty, I literally cannot afford to play roulette with my health. As more Americans are starting to find out, long covid has disabled 10–15% of us already. That’s five million people who are being introduced to the hellish world of disability services. We’re being forced to participate in our own disablement, all for the sake of capitalism. We’re cutting off our nose to spite our face. What will these numbers look like in five years?
According to the CDC, 61 million American adults are disabled. In my personal opinion — ongoing pandemic aside — that is a low estimate. The hurdles we’re made to face as disabled people causes a lot of us to live in shame, to live with an unknown or undiagnosed disability because we’re dissuaded from seeking help, and struggle to exist in society at all. From 1867 to 1974, several US cities implemented “unsightly beggar ordinances”, also known as Ugly Laws. An example from a San Francisco law written in 1867 states:
“Any person, who is diseased, maimed, mutilated or deformed in any way, so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object, to expose himself or herself to public view.”
My parents were almost full-grown adults when the last remaining ugly law was repealed in 1974. These laws were implemented for over a century. Now, in lieu of ugly laws, we have rampant accessibility issues, intrinsic ableism, mass delusion amidst an ongoing pandemic, and systemic devaluation of disabled people. These are Ugly Laws in disguise — lurking just beneath the surface, only visible to the people who have no choice but to notice.
Thinking about this too deeply activates a swirling mind vortex with the gravitational pull of a black hole. It’s all connected. Violence, eugenics, oppression, and theft are the foundational pillars of the United States. Marginalized communities are discouraged from existing through implementations of systemic oppression. Disabled people are shunned. Divergent thinkers are punished. And it’s all by design.
This realization is an important one to have. It’s vital for us to step out of the haze, to disembark from the never-ending rat race and see it for what it truly is — a nefarious sham that’s responsible for driving our planet and our humanity to its absolute limit.
Honestly, we had it coming — not as individuals, but as a global collective. Corporations place the onus on the individual consumer to recycle, use paper straws, reduce power usage, and not drink too much water. These same corporations are producing toxins at unprecedented levels that are tainting every aspect of our present and future. We kill each other over a paper currency that we made up. We starve, bleed, weep, and suffer for dollars and cents. We sell hours of our life so that we can sustain our bodies with nutrients. Not enough people realize that we’re the only species on earth that pays to be here. Green paper and numbers on a screen determine our quality of existence. How does that not boggle or bewilder the mind? How does that not infuriate and radicalize people? None of this is sustainable, so why is everyone continuing to play along?
It doesn’t have to be like this.
Inevitably, every time I lament about the endless pitfalls of capitalism, I become chum in the water for those who still place their entire identity on their paycheck. These folks don’t realize that they’re two missed pay periods away from houselessness, but they’re so deeply invested in capitalist propaganda that they see themselves as pre-millionaires in their Humble Beginnings Era. They berate me, call me useless and lazy, call me an idiot for signing up for student loans, call me a loser for being unable to work, and call me a shill for bringing any of this up, not realizing that they’re pushing the peddling points of the soulless wealth hoarders at the top. Capitalism depends on internalized shame and fear of houselessness to get us out of bed in the morning. What they fail to mention, though, is that the houselessness crisis is a problem that they’re voluntarily refusing to solve.
600,000 houseless people + 16 million empty homes across America = WHAT ARE WE DOING?
I wish I could snap us all into a reality where we have a chance to thrive without this capitalistic behemoth breathing down our necks. Our monetary worth should have fuck-all to do with our survival. We shouldn’t have to suffer the physical consequences of living in an oversaturated, overheated, over-polluted environment. As hyper-individualistic as Americans tend to be, it’s not impossible to change the narrative. This bubble is long overdue for a burst, and when it does, we have an opportunity to build something better. None of us asked to be here, so why are we voluntarily making shit harder than it needs to be?
I wish I could wake more people up.
