Why Capitalism Needs You Stressed & Angry
And how to break out of that cycle
Every time your anxiety or anger boils over, your ability to think clearly shuts down until you feel calm again. It’s part of your “fight or flight” response: put all the complex ideas on hold until the threat is gone. But when the “threat” is other people around you living their own lives, or a towering structure of oppression grinding you down for cash, thinking clearly may be the only thing that can save you.
The status quo (Capitalism) likes it when we’re stressed, angry, and dumb, because that means we’re too overwhelmed to give much thought to the situation we’re in. If you’re struggling to survive every day, you don’t have time to question the fairness of the whole arrangement, or what any realistic alternatives might be. Hell, if you don’t even have time to read all your emails, you’re definitely not staying up late to read anthropology texts or counterculture debates.
It’s a huge benefit to The Way Things Are™ when your brain is too clogged with stress hormones to feel curious about anything. Because that curiosity might lead to big ideas like demanding the same pay, benefits, and social programs that most other Western countries take for granted. You might start asking why CEOs are allowed to make 400x more money than their employees, whom the company couldn’t function without. Or why there are more vacant properties in the U.S. than there are people without homes.
The rich and powerful need you stressed, they need you angry — and they need you angry at people who aren’t them. That’s why politicians and news outlets spend so much time telling you who to be angry at. They tell you that all your problems are caused by poor people, by Black people, by immigrants, by Democrats, by Republicans, by China, by Millenials — anyone and everyone except for the people who actually hold the reins of our country and its economy.
That way, in your stress-dumbed brain, you’ll spend your time cursing at all the people who are struggling just like you are, rather than getting to know them and working together to cut a better deal for yourselves.
And it doesn’t help that social media algorithms promote negative content, since that gets more engagement than positive stuff does. There’s a reason the news doesn’t report on every airplane that lands safely — we’re wired to focus on danger and despair.
We can’t look away from the train wrecks and celebrity scandals, and being bombarded by negativity every day makes us cynical. We start to believe that the world really is an awful place, filled with horrible people; all of whom want to hurt us and take our stuff.
But that’s not realistic. In fact, if you think about all of the good people that you personally know, and then consider that almost everyone knows that many good people or more, it starts to paint a different picture in your mind. We tend to assume a lot of negative things about strangers, without ever getting to know them.
Most people have the same or similar needs and wants — safety, love, happiness. And that looks a little different for each of us, but it’s rare that someone else’s happiness actively harms your own.
Let’s pin that on the “Hope Board” first — most people just want to be happy, and their happiness likely doesn’t detract from your own. Internalizing that idea will lift a huge amount of that anger at other people off of you, and free up some room for other thoughts in your mind. That’s a major step in pushing back against the people who do want to hurt you and take your stuff — the “owners” of the world.
Put this into practice next time you feel yourself getting angry at someone: lean your mind toward curiosity, instead. Are they always like this, or are they having a bad day? Did they choose this belief, or was it taught to them by their parents? Do they represent all people from their background, or are they just one individual out of millions?
Even if that soothes your anger, though, there’s still all of the stress to deal with. Walls pressing in on all sides — work, bills, relationships, appearance, the environment, the future… How do we manage it all without shutting down and crawling under the covers forever? Well, we don’t. We don’t need to manage it all. Not all at once, anyway.
Lots of us have a nasty habit of trying to nail down everything in our lives for the next 6 months, 5 years, 10 years, or more. But life doesn’t work that way. It’s naturally dynamic, and unpredictable. And despite how unwelcome surprises can be, it is okay not to know how everything will turn out.
The first step to feeling less stressed is letting go of a deep need for control. When we learn to become more flexible in response to an ever-changing world, we’re less likely to feel like we’re landing on our ass if things don’t go as expected. And when our brain power isn’t throttled by anxiety, we’re better able to think through our problems and develop good solutions (bonus points for working through problems together with friends or family or professionals who care about you).
It feels counterintuitive, maybe even dangerous, to let go when you’re overwhelmed. But I’m not saying “don’t deal with your problems” — I’m saying “don’t let your problems gang up on you”.
You’re not a supercomputer. You only have one brain and it works best when you attend to one thing at a time. That’s not a bug, it’s a feature. When we’re able to slow down and focus on something important, our creativity can spill over and create possibilities we don’t notice when we’re splitting our attention between a dozen other things. The other items on your to-do list aren’t going anywhere, and you’ll get through them much more smoothly when you focus on them one by one.
As the saying goes, “slow progress is still progress” — and the reduction of stress you’ll feel along the way might be life-changing.
So, to recap: less anger, less stress, more brain power, more solutions. It’s insanity to keep circling the same drain we’re all whirling around because we’re too preoccupied to think our way out of it. Don’t just go through the motions of life; don’t let a bad situation carry on just because things have been that way for a long time.
Groups like Moneyless Society are working to connect people, share ideas, and develop paths forward that lead away from greed and suffering and planetary destruction. And we’re always looking for more minds, more perspectives, more hands to help build a future that cares. You can be a part of that, and meet people who not only feel what you feel, but also want to help.
If you’d like to get involved in helping to make a “moneyless society” a reality in your local community, you can sign up to be a volunteer here, join our discord, and/or connect with us on social media by following @MoneylessSociety.
We also encourage you to check out the new book by our co-founder, Matthew Holten, Moneyless Society: The Next Economic Evolution, and our podcast to learn more about who we are, what we do, and how you too can help create a new, better, and more sustainable future.
To see more thoughtful content from Ev Malcolm, you can visit his Instagram page here.
