Has anyone ever lived as anything besides a worker - consumer or worked alot less? [Archive]

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Thrasymachus

23rd March 2014, 20:21

People under capitalism(and other advanced top-down systems) live pseudo lives as narrow workers earning a wage, usually totally unconnected with the vital life processes and needs like the procurement of water, food, shelter and clothing. Instead they rely on their salary -- to as consumers procure all their needs. I cannot cope with living under capitalism, it causes me too much emotional stress, anxiety and I feel constantly suicidal. Maybe I could cope if I had to work less, and I indeed did cope better then comparatively in such cases, but I always had low self-esteem about making so little money that I could not support myself financially* in northern New Jersey where for a one-bedroom apartment in my area you need like $1,000 - $1,200 or more a month. Finally I landed a job that pays well, but paradoxically I feel more suicidal than ever, because I feel stuck. Normally I cannot work a job more than say 1-2 years, after that I get suicidally depressed and have to quit, because it seems especially by then as Studs Terkel mentioned a job too small to encompass my soul. But I am reaching a crisis point because I know if i leave this job, not only will I hate any replacement job, but I will never come close to being able to support myself financially -- so I feel stuck in this job and feel like I cannot get out. This is causing me alot of emotional stress, triggering panic attacks, anxiety and constant suicidal feelings. It makes me feel so powerless, I have no choice between constant powerlessness between financial inadequacy or staying at a job that is killing me prematurely with its attendant psychic trauma.

I have been exploring options like living in an intentional community or commune. There is one called, Ganas, nearby in Staten Island, but they charge arguably alot for tiny rooms that are little bigger than a rich persons closet, but they do include amenities like a stocked fridge, etc. I have also been thinking of obtaining knowledge of farming techniques and methods somehow and trying to do myself as much as I would need to survive instead of relying on the market, which it kills me to partake in. Or maybe I could just move somewhere that is not ridiculously expensive like Morris County in NJ(the sixth wealthiest county in the entire United States).

* See this article which explains how income inequality causes feelings of inadequacy, withdrawal, mistrust, anxiety, depression and narcissism:
NYTimes: How Inequality Hollows Out the Soul (You will have to copy & paste it in, I cannot post links...)

Does anyone have any solutions, suggestions or personal experiences to relate?

Sasha

23rd March 2014, 21:04

Squatted a lot of years of which some I was unemployed, even within capitalist society you can bring down your expenses down to really low levels, cooking simple vegan food, squatting etc etc.
But if I'm honest I think I enjoyed it far less if I don't know I had a safety net of parents and a semi-functioning welfare state. It was a luxury to be able to drop out like that for a few years.
I do try to get back as close as possible but really independent now by trying to buy a communal house and learning an artisian skill etc etc.

Thrasymachus

23rd March 2014, 21:20

@Sasha:
Where do you live or did you live? I don't think in the Northeastern USA that squatting is a very realistic possibility. The police forces are just too powerful, numerous and active and the average selfish, proud social-darwinist American would provide no solidarity or aid in any confrontation with the forces of "law and order".

Actually I am vegan now and don't even use a car either. I just bicycle or use public transit. Part of what makes me frustrated and angry is that I am subsidizing the lavish lifestyle of others, while until a few weeks ago, I couldn't support myself with my own salary till my latest raise.

1) I don't drive but since in the USA, the low gas taxes can only pay for about half the highway construction, road construction and upkeep. The rest has to be made up for by other taxes. This is especially unfair for poor people who cannot even afford automobiles but have to fund the lifestyles of the comparatively better off, so they can disadvantaged by transportation apartheid. It is like I am paying to be terrorized by two ton vehicles riding on the ass or very close to my bicycle relegated to the median(assuming there is even a median...) which is anyway where all the sand, salt, debris and glass accumulate.

2) I don't eat meat, but have to pay taxes so large agri-industrial concerns that grow fodder soy, corn and wheat for livestock can have subsidized access to agro-chemical inputs to pour onto their fields, to make meat artificially cheap.

3) I don't have kids but have to pay large taxes so those who do can send their kids to school to compete for jobs against me in the marketplace on the basis of how much publicly funded schooling they received compared to me.

4) I do everything right in terms health: exercise frequently since I bicycle to get places and avoid meat(saturated fat, cholesterol), free oils(olive oil, canola, etc.), but I have to pay into health insurance for co-workers who do everything like avoid exercise, get obese, smoke and drink.

I could go on. It just takes so much work and effort just to get the money needed to live. It is absurd. I would have alot less stress if I could work any job and sustain myself, instead of the trapped feeling that I have to hold this current job with a death grip. By all means I don't see why someone who lives such a meager, modest existence like me as a single adult should have it so hard. But it is just so damned expensive where I live and I don't have the confidence or social skills to pack up and move elsewhere.

Crabbensmasher

23rd March 2014, 22:13

I have been exploring options like living in an intentional community or commune. There is one called, Ganas, nearby in Staten Island, but they charge arguably alot for tiny rooms that are little bigger than a rich persons closet, but they do include amenities like a stocked fridge, etc. I have also been thinking of obtaining knowledge of farming techniques and methods somehow and trying to do myself as much as I would need to survive instead of relying on the market, which it kills me to partake in. Or maybe I could just move somewhere that is not ridiculously expensive like Morris County in NJ(six wealthiest county in the entire United States).

* See this article which explains how income inequality causes feelings of inadequacy, withdrawal, mistrust, anxiety, depression and narcissism:
NYTimes: How Inequality Hollows Out the Soul (You will have to copy & paste it in, I cannot post links...)

Does anyone have any solutions, suggestions or personal experiences to relate?

This is one of the things that keeps me going.

We have to understand though, it's a bit naive. It's almost a pipe dream. Nobody talks about just 'dropping out' and leaving your shit behind. Also, as a revolutionary practice, it's generally frowned upon. In the context of global capitalism, I consider it a form of escapism like any other. It makes your individual life more bearable through 'running away' from your problems. I don't mean to criticize, because I would gladly pursue the lifestyle given the chance, but there are other sides to the coin.

If you're anything like me though, you at least want to have hope. I'm coming from a different perspective - I'm young, I don't have a long history of working my ass off. I'm not a cynical disillusioned bastard yet.

Here's the thing, friend. The reason we want to 'run away', so to speak, is because we are anxious, we do have bad self confidence. We don't fucking compete. Looking as far back as I could, I never submitted to competition. I would always stay on the sidelines. It's the same thing we're experiencing now. We can't bear to submit ourselves to the 'rat race' or whatever the hell they call it. Life is just one fucking thing after another. You want more, more, more, and you lose yourself along the way. In a sense, because we're on the sidelines, we recognized it. We're observers with no vested interest. We know it's fucked, and we want different.

So yeah, I'm with you. It's a fucking pipe dream, but it keeps me going. A few more years here, and we'll see. As for you, I wish you the best of luck.

Thrasymachus

24th March 2014, 01:27

@Crabbensmasher:
You said it yourself and the key is: you are young. The thing is young people have the luxury of feeling like they have more time, thus they delude themselves that things will be "better in the future." I lost that luxury when I hit my late twenties.

I am 31, going on 32 in a few days. I have never came close to being able to support myself financially until a few days ago, and I don't have the qualifications or degree to do it outside of this job. I have been economically adequate for so long, I don't feel like a person. Now that I finally make enough money to finally move from my mom's ouse out at my advanced age, I feel like I cannot cope with my job and have to quit, because the psychological distress could bring me to suicide.

I feel like I cannot do what it takes to live in this world. I hate my job, my co-workers, dislike my family, dislike my drug and shopping obsessed friends, hate my living situation. I have nothing going for me. Yet if I quit my job, I will also face having no chance of ever moving out.

The article I referenced, sums it up well.

NYTimes: How Inequality Hollows Out the Soul

One of the well-known costs of inequality is that people withdraw from community life and are less likely to feel that they can trust others. This is partly a reflection of the way status anxiety makes us all more worried about how we are valued by others. ...

Our tendency to equate outward wealth with inner worth invokes deep psychological responses, feelings of dominance and subordination, superiority and inferiority. This affects the way we see and treat one another.

A few years ago, we published evidence that showed that in developed countries, major and minor mental illnesses were three times as common in societies where there were bigger income differences between rich and poor. In other words, an American is likely to know three times as many people with depression or anxiety problems as someone in Japan or Germany.

...

More recent studies have affirmed the pattern we found. One, looking at the 50 American states, discovered that after taking account of age, income and educational differences, depression was more common in states with greater income inequality. Another, which combined data from over 100 surveys in 26 countries, found that schizophrenia was about three times as common in more unequal societies as it was in more equal ones.

...

In a study published in 2012, Sheri L. Johnson, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and colleagues reviewed a vast body of evidence from biological, behavioral and self-reported accounts, and concluded that a wide range of mental disorders might originate in a “dominance behavioral system.” This part of our evolved psychological makeup, almost universal in mammals, enables us to recognize and respond to social ranking systems based on hierarchy and power. One brain-imaging study discovered that there were particular areas of the brain and neural mechanisms dedicated to processing social rank.

Ms. Johnson concludes that psychiatric conditions like mania and narcissism are related to our striving for status and dominance, while disorders such as anxiety and depression may involve responses to the experience of subordination. Similarly, she suggests that the pressures of coping with social hierarchies may contribute to other conditions such as antisocial personality disorder and bipolarism.

If mental illness is related to dominance and subordination, you might assume that disorders like narcissism would be more common at the top of the social hierarchy while others, like depression, would occur more frequently at the bottom. The full picture, however, is more complicated.

It is true that depression is much more common lower down the social ladder, but it does exists at all levels: Few are immune to feelings of defeat or failure. Similarly, people can be narcissistic or strive for dominance anywhere in the hierarchy — although Paul Piff, also a psychologist at Berkeley, has shown that higher status is indeed associated with more unethical and narcissistic behavior.

Mr. Piff found that drivers of more expensive cars were less likely to give way to pedestrians or to other cars. Higher status people were also more likely to help themselves to candies that they had been told were intended for children. He found that they also had a greater sense of entitlement and were less generous.

So how does increasing inequality factor in? One of the important effects of wider income differences between rich and poor is to intensify the issues of dominance and subordination, and feelings of superiority and inferiority. Two sociologists at the University of Toronto, Robert Andersen and Josh Curtis, found that although there is always some connection between people’s income and the social class to which they feel they belong, the match between the two is closer in societies with bigger income differences between rich and poor.

Inequality not only intensifies the problem, but also makes it more extensive. A new study by Dublin-based researchers of 34,000 people in 31 countries found that in countries with bigger income differences, status anxiety was more common at all levels in the social hierarchy. Another international study, from 2011, found in particular that self-enhancement or self-aggrandizement — the tendency to present an inflated view of oneself — occurred much more frequently in more unequal societies.

In the United States, research psychologists have shown that narcissism rates, as measured by a standard academic tool known as the Narcissistic Personality Inventory, rose rapidly from the later 1980s, which would appear to track the increases in inequality. The data all point to the fact that as larger differences in material circumstances create greater social distances, feelings of superiority and inferiority increase. In short, growing inequality makes us all more neurotic about “image management” and how we are seen by others.

Humans instinctively know how to cooperate and create social ties, but we also know how to engage in status competition — how to be snobs and how to talk ourselves up. We use these alternative social strategies almost every day of our lives, but crucially, inequality shifts the balance between them.

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that we become less nice people in more unequal societies. But we are less nice and less happy: Greater inequality redoubles status anxiety, damaging our mental health and distorting our personalities — wherever we are on the social spectrum.

Crabbensmasher

25th March 2014, 17:46

Thrasymachus

28th March 2014, 00:57

Well it is really easy to write platitudes on the internet telling someone how their social condition is better than it is, but it is hard for that person to cope with their life as if cheerleading from strangers matters.

I have no close friends, and I simply don't want to live surrounded by capitalist desiring subjects who only care for their next cigarette, beer, the next sports game, the next television show or other packet of distraction, who value money and material objects over people and the lived environment consisting of the trees, the plants, the soil, the air, the water, etc. I have a job I hate, but I finally made enough money to support myself in the prohibitively expensive real-estate market I live on, but the job is killing me mentally. There is a HuffingtonPost article about this called: "How Your Job Is Slowly Killing You". But in my job the stress is not from deadlines, it is from snitching union co-workers who gossip and shit-talk worse than little girls in junior high school.

I truly have nothing going for me in life. When I look into the future I see no hope for me. I can keep working at this job and be miserable but finally move out away from crappy family at age 32. But I will be totally socially isolated, because I have no interest in befriending the disgusting type of person mass produced in a capitalist society. Or I can quit my job and forever be some loser who cannot even support himself in his mid 30's and beyond, because I am locked out of any job that pays anything close to a living wage.

I was hoping at least one person here had some experience with living in a kibbutz, commune, or a back to the land type slow living project based on farming, or something of that sort.

Red Economist

29th March 2014, 13:22

Well it is really easy to write platitudes on the internet telling someone how their social condition is better than it is, but it is hard for that person to cope with their life as if cheerleading from strangers matters.

I've had depression for five and a half years and have been stuck at home with my parents as a result. I'm going to be 25 this year and do actually feel that my 'best years' are probably behind me and it is a long-slog ahead. My situation is therefore not the same, but psychologically is similar (and a lot of what you are saying is VERY familiar).

As someone who has felt suicidal in the past, I can promise you there is a massive difference between thinking about it and doing it. Thankfully, It was an emotional gulf I never crossed.

I haven't read this book, but it might give you some ideas and show you what alternatives are possible within your current situation.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Cultural-Creatives-Million-Changing/dp/0609808451

Given what your saying about your mental state, it is important to re-think what is possible; Corporate Capitalism presents itself as a 'monolithic reality' to which there is 'no alternative' and everyone is "trapped" in the system. This is bollocks, but it is certainly very hard to break through and takes a lot of guts to go against what other people think is 'obvious', especially when they are close friends.
If you can find 'holes' in your reasoning and pull them apart to find new ways to feel fulfilled in life (much easier said than done), it will ease some of the psychological problems and give you the confidence to keep going.

You should consider going to see a therapist as having a time and place to talk about these problems can help alleviate the symptoms in the short-run and give you a 'breathing space' from the most extreme emotions. (I've had panic attacks too). However, how you change your personal situation in the long-run remains up to you and what matters most is putting yourself back in control of your life.

This is more than simply changing jobs and given that you have had recurrent problems, you need to take a step back and look at how you got to this point.
As a communist sympathizer, I have found that Marxist and strongly anti-capitalist beliefs can get in the way of this process and make it much harder to live in a capitalist society if you think of them in terms of 'right' and 'wrong', 'true' and 'false' and I've changed the way I've used them to thinking about what is practical, so I have watered them down a bit so I am more flexible and happier.

Thrasymachus

20th April 2014, 23:21

At the end of March I stayed at the intentional community/commune I mentioned earlier, GANAS in Staten Island. I only stayed for a short time, but I liked it alot there. The better there actually do other things besides watch tv all the time, drink, do drugs, and shop. In general they are not much like the average person. I remember at dinner, someone was talking about they read that alot of criminality was linked to lead exposure levels and it started a discussion resembling something relevant to real life processes, totally unlike my workplace where or home where the world of television fantasy or the insidious claims Madison Avenue advertising firms are the only possible sources of conversation.

@Red Economist:
In general I think people over estimate how little control they actually have in their lives. Take the average American, for example. They watch 32 hours of tv and use the internet for 23 hours every week! That is massive amounts of advertising forces being exerted on the individual in a lifetime! David Smail a Marxist psycho-therapist has a good essay on this here:
"Power, Responsibility and Freedom - David Smail" (you will have to Google it, I cannot post links...)

He maintains that more powerful, hidden, distal social forces actually exercise more power on any given individual than they can on their own lives. He further states the whole field of mental health is predicated on a false notion of "inferiority" by positing everything as being the fault existing in the mind of an individual, ignoring any analysis of social power and how it operates.

That said I think I would be much comparatively happier if I quit my current job full of people totally obsessed with making and spending money, who are generally quite base, venal and mean and living with more of the type of cultural creative you could find at some intentional community like GANAS. Everyday I feel like I am deer in headlights, I cannot enjoy my off-time from work, and instead I panic knowing that work is just a few hours away. Increasingly I feel I cannot function, I am just not the type of person that can adjust myself to capitalism. I am pretty sure I would perhaps rather die than continue living a narrow, pitiful existence consisting of work and shopping, with no outside possibilities available. That is just not life, it is the embodiment of death.

Ele'ill

23rd April 2014, 03:08

This is a good thread. I think you should follow up with your desires and not let it lag.

Thrasymachus

23rd April 2014, 23:13

The issue is that from my best observation:
Being an adult in the society I live in is about doing what you don't want to do most of the time, and convincing yourself you have no choice, that it is natural and/or if you are especially duped, that you want things that way.

I never seen anyone do anything much out of the ordinary, so it makes me hesitant to try anything unorthodox, like quit my job and live at that intentional community.

MarcusJuniusBrutus

16th May 2014, 01:17

Student. I actually work a lot more as a student, I just don't get paid for it.

Red Economist

16th May 2014, 05:40

My apologies for replying so late.

At the end of March I stayed at the intentional community/commune I mentioned earlier, GANAS in Staten Island. I only stayed for a short time, but I liked it alot there. The better there actually do other things besides watch tv all the time, drink, do drugs, and shop. In general they are not much like the average person. I remember at dinner, someone was talking about they read that alot of criminality was linked to lead exposure levels and it started a discussion resembling something relevant to real life processes, totally unlike my workplace where or home where the world of television fantasy or the insidious claims Madison Avenue advertising firms are the only possible sources of conversation. yeah. so much conversation is just dominated by what people have heard over the TV, radio, internet and stuff. it is a fantasy world for the bourgeoisie, especially "reality tv". It is really hard to find people who have got out of the system, even intellectually, emotionally and psychologically.

@Red Economist:
In general I think people over estimate how little control they actually have in their lives. Take the average American, for example. They watch 32 hours of tv and use the internet for 23 hours every week! That is massive amounts of advertising forces being exerted on the individual in a lifetime! David Smail a Marxist psycho-therapist has a good essay on this here:
"Power, Responsibility and Freedom - David Smail" (you will have to Google it, I cannot post links...)

He maintains that more powerful, hidden, distal social forces actually exercise more power on any given individual than they can on their own lives. He further states the whole field of mental health is predicated on a false notion of "inferiority" by positing everything as being the fault existing in the mind of an individual, ignoring any analysis of social power and how it operates.I am going have to read up about David Smail. I've used Erich Fromm and Wilhelm Reich to think about my own personal problems but it's always been kind of subsidized by a heavy does of materialism to identify the social roots of distress.

I gave up TV about a year ago and it is probably the best decision I've ever made. I'm shocked just how much influence it has had on me and how powerful it is as a medium and have kind of had to 'wake up'. I'm beginning to think the internet may cause a similar problem, so I started cutting back on how much I used it back in January this year.

That said I think I would be much comparatively happier if I quit my current job full of people totally obsessed with making and spending money, who are generally quite base, venal and mean and living with more of the type of cultural creative you could find at some intentional community like GANAS. Everyday I feel like I am deer in headlights, I cannot enjoy my off-time from work, and instead I panic knowing that work is just a few hours away. Increasingly I feel I cannot function, I am just not the type of person that can adjust myself to capitalism. I am pretty sure I would perhaps rather die than continue living a narrow, pitiful existence consisting of work and shopping, with no outside possibilities available. That is just not life, it is the embodiment of death.Is it the job or is it actually the people? (not sure if I've asked this before). And not adjusting to capitalism is entirely healthy. :grin:

I've had suicidal thoughts of my own and I found that the biggest problem for me is that I'm sexually frustrated (Wilhelim Reich's influence) and I'm unable to connect with people because I can't express myself naturally.
As I've got better, I've found that 'loneliness' is a symptom rather than a cause of my problems. it is the product of my own inhibitions (caused by society) rather than a purely external force.

exeexe

16th May 2014, 06:05

You could watch all episodes of out of the wild, dual survival, survivor man, man vs wild etc - Then one fine day when you feel you are ready buy a one way ticket to the rainforest and go survive!

But first of all you should watch this movie to get you started:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0758758/

lm8oxC24QZc

huey

21st May 2014, 13:05

I know some people in NJ that grew up in the Israeli Kibbutz, 2nd generation, I guess. For one, they each report of serious emotional issues regarding their family and parents since they were sort of raised by the 'village', plus many of the parents were sleeping around all over the place.

Second, by and large they were not working class people in this commune, more wealthy owning class and the whole thing was heavily funded from outside capitalists and govt as sort of an 'experiment' in communal living.

Well, the 1st generation had it going pretty well, they liked it, but their kids basically wanted to get out of there and go do the cap/consumer thing and have their own nuclear families.

So, the funding pulled out and that was the end of the experiment pretty much--it was never realy self sustaining. Hard for intentional communes to self sustain within the capitalistic milieau.

huey

21st May 2014, 13:42

Organic farming is real tough, its no joke. I dont recommend it as 'fun thing to do' unless you are really commited to it. Still, I wouldnt do it. Hardest way to be poor I know of.

Better to just do an organic garden on the side.

Lynx

21st May 2014, 20:53

What do you do when you're not working or sleeping? Have you considered volunteering in your community?

Thrasymachus

11th June 2014, 05:45

@Red Economist:
Willhelm Reich: I would ultimately forgot any of his works and resist its influences, he just had empty, hair-brained theories. He thought fascism was equated to sexual repression. But we are alot freer in sexual mores today than in the early 20th Century, but arguably far less free. Infact I dare say those the most obsessed with casual sex, club goers, chronic party-ers, I know, tend to be some of the worst people. Getting casual sex in our society is a social game based on lies and deception, you cannot say outright what you want, so those the best at this game, are the more socially manipulative people you could meet. He also had lots of laughable theories about orgone energy.

Fromm: He has an interesting work titled "The Sane Society" which I haven't had the time to read fully. But unlike the mental health field which focuses on pathologizing the individual, he turns the tables and instead indicts the society and social order underpinning it.

What I hate in general is the nature of work, selling the only thing valuable I have: my life as expressed in time, for what should be a nominally useless abstraction called money. But it seems that the life force I give to that abstraction expressed in my time, gives it inordinate power over me, the rest of society, the natural world. Further, in general on the railroad, where I work you find mostly money and status obsessed within their means blue collar types. If you cannot talk about what you plan to buy, what sports teams are doing, what car you have, etc., you may as well not talk much with most of them. The way they think and they way I think, are not compatible. Indeed I don't want to be compatible with most people around, but at the same time I grow tired of it and the crushing isolation I feel all the time. I just want to be somewhere I can semi-fit in for once in my whole life. That is why even more than ever before I am considering trying that intentional community. I have an appointment tomorrow with the employee assistance program in my work to hopefully get some type of medical leave or whatever to try things out.

I've had suicidal thoughts of my own and I found that the biggest problem for me is that I'm sexually frustrated (Wilhelim Reich's influence) and I'm unable to connect with people because I can't express myself naturally.
I wouldn't listen to that crazy guy Reich. Do you honestly observe those who you perceive having the most sex being more discernibly happy? Touring rock stars perhaps have some of the most sex, but they are often jerks, deep drugs addicts. Why? Because you need a solid community of people around you as a human being, to feel secure, not a constant gaggle of users looking you use you for your fame, for access to drugs, while you try to use them just the same. Anyways, most of those rock stars at least pretend to settle down and get a constant partner. According to Reich's over-estimation of sex, they should be the finest specimens of liberation, happiness and virtue, and yet they are so obviously not. You see, what he theorized is now so dated and nonsensical. If you ever read the "Brave New World", that novel by Huxley is a more accurate depiction of the role of sex and having a good time, than the alleged non-fiction of Reich's social theories.

I'As I've got better, I've found that 'loneliness' is a symptom rather than a cause of my problems. it is the product of my own inhibitions (caused by society) rather than a purely external force.
Money, capitalism, technology, science, etc. are the sources of loneliness, they make people no longer need other people. You just need access to money instead and you are "secure".

Anyway, you worded it incorrectly, your inhibitions are internal and cannot be caused by society, which is the external force.