The Difficulty of Self-Actualizing During Late-Stage Capitalism

The less time allocated to laboring over menial tasks due to automation and tech advances means more time you have with yourself or at least “doing what you want to do.” That way, when you come home from work, you can do fewer chores, and you can enjoy your evening with your family. Then, in the workplace, automation supposedly makes your job easier by making production faster. But don’t forget it’s for you; remember, automation is for you. It’s for you. It removes the human from labor. Then you make products, so when you go home, your reward is less labor. When you go home, you’re exhausted and yet mentally restless, and you take a load off with drugs or dopamine from more technology. And yet so much of your workday is dedicated to passive compliance in your shift. You don’t have enough time for silence, and you don’t have the patience for boredom; you need to feel human, and you need to feel it now. These are your few hours to feel human. The exhausted state from laboring all day suffocates spontaneous whims of curiosity, which must be caught and then carefully planned into the week, and defined as a “hobby.” Then you have to track the progress of that thing to feel fulfilled by that thing because you never have enough time to get into flow, further alienating you from the feeling of fulfillment because what was once something you toiled over for leisurely pleasure and self-expression has now become a project with an outcome, and then you have to practice mindfulness, become a master of mindfulness and continuously repent for not being able to fully focus on the hobby because of your weak, ungrateful, westernized mind. You don’t know how to slow down and constantly pull yourself back into your body and out of your mind where the constant tirade of curiosity pulls you endlessly from imagination to worry to wonder and also death. But remember capitalism is the severance from the body and rest is an act of resistance and presence is an act of resistance so you have to fight for those things too. You think too much and so you have to shut it off because you have to choose to play and craft or carve out the time to follow a thought all the way through. Then this thing that is supposed to be an exercise of your humanity during your few brief hours of humanity turns into work or an example of a once-hopeful effort to feel more fully human. It’s the tennis shoes in the closet, the sewing machine in the corner, the chess set from Christmas. And it’s trophied among other failed hobbies as that thing that could have been, but the world interfered with, and you didn’t work hard enough to claim.

Instead, you could throw in the towel on trying to contribute to upholding normalcy. Say that you no longer care about social constructs and become an artist. Fight for flow by claiming it as innate to your humanity. Turn it into a side hustle. Turn it into a reason to persevere. Tell everyone it’s what makes you human and that you have a right to self-expression, and that this is what you can contribute to resistance, talking about humanity. But then you have to prove it. And then you understand that the evidence of labor is your ability to participate in buying consumables because you don’t have any other way to measure impact. So take purpose to the market. Believe that this is an example of how every man has a god inside them, and so fulfilling your niche to completion is your god-given right. Becoming an artist means that your expression is your divine contribution to the human story. Say that art is a form of resistance. Host parties where everyone has an opportunity to feel like a god, no, sorry, a star. Decide that making people feel good means doing good in the community. Having more time to become more fully human, then, is not about being human; it’s about divinity, and doing your part as a good human is the act of bestowing upon humanity your divine right, your god given abilities.

Then you have to admit that being more fully human means that you contribute to society. And now that you don’t participate in social labor, you participate in bohemian venture capitalism, you have to become excellent or entirely entitled or go back into labor with better boundaries. You continuously defend your right to expression, but you struggle to stay in that place. Something pulls you away. Self-expression in its own right doesn’t make you feel more fully human. It alienates you from space and time and class struggle and your role in this epoch of global strife. You have to ignore suffering and pretend you can outrun it or pretend you have nothing to do with it and that you are too small to change it. Then decide that soon everyone will suffer too and things will change inevitably.

Now that you’re not laboring and you’re just working on your purpose your time is pinched by the exhaustion of grief and the crusade in Gaza and the concentration camps and the fact that seniors are losing healthcare and bodies always bodies never ending bodies and when you can’t pretend to not care anymore, you move from denial and into bargaining. you decide that human nature is also about taking care of one another but also having your own purpose and you can’t sacrifice your purpose out of charity, white savior, who do you think you are anyway and also you never learned how to build things because of all the time spent laboring and you never invested in policy because you were laboring and you don’t know much about the economy because you were laboring and God, do you have to do everything? Do you have to know everything? All this hoopla is interfering with your ability to be more fully human and the key component of being more fully human is loving the work that you do so you never have to work a day of your life so you can feel fully alive which at this rate really just means not panicking. You decide that you have a purpose and so your activism should be related to your purpose and your art can help you overcome class struggle. You can become the CEO of your own business, sell earrings on Depop, and put pride flags on them and if you market well enough you’ll be a good CEO and you’ll do labor the right way. In the meantime, you can post Instagram graphics about ICE and remind everyone that brown people are people too, and they also deserve freedom so they can become bohemian venture capitalists because a key component to the human experience is the ability to do the work that is your purpose and love the work that you do and never work day in your life because you love it so hard and loving every second of every day and never feeling bad feelings is evidence of human life. Either way, you just hope to make enough money to sustain your debts until death and even if you can’t support yourself off your purpose it’s okay because you’re human and you believe in humanity. So you’re an artist and your job is to make good art and one day if you make art good enough you can say #landback in your acceptance speech.

This doesn’t work either though because then you have to become wealthy and you have to become famous and you hate money and you think everyone should express themselves authentically not bandwagon collective thought and besides that could take a long time and people are dying right now and what if you’re not that good and so there has to be another plan in motion. But now you’re frozen and you can’t get into flow, and you can’t make art and you can’t engage with purpose because you just started doing it for fun, because it made you feel human, you did it before you knew it had to have a purpose, a statement, a reason for meaning, an explanation, and a defense. Now, you’ve alienated yourself from purpose again because your purpose has ceased to exist as the expression of your humanity. You’ve turned it into a means of saving humanity and in reality it saves you. Now you’re alienated twice because you don’t know how to save the world and you don’t know how to save yourself and if we’re being honest do we really believe that what saves ourselves saves everyone else and does it have to? Finally, you decide what makes you feel more fully human is fragility. The weakness that comes with empathy and grief and uncertainty. The weakness that comes with being completely incapable on your own. The weakness that comes with this never-ending restlessness to take care of the world, and be taken care of by the world and no idea how to involve yourself in both with perfection. And for your art, for your crafts, it’s the fact that the things you make are just okay and you don’t need to pretend that you believe yourself Van Gogh to enjoy doing it. Maybe no one looks at it and maybe the quiet moments you slip away and toil on this thing and those moments when you’re alone with your imagination and your toys and those moments when you’re just playing for the sake of playing and those moments remind you that you are a tall child in the world with tall children and you need to be looked out for and you need to look out for everyone else. That maybe becoming more fully human means that you’re not an artist and you’re not a laborer and you’re not an activist. You’re a person and for that reason you make things and you involve yourself in the well-being of other people and the planet. You are a person, and for that reason, you are biologically designed to create for the world and with the world. Maybe you’re not an artist, you’re a person, equally subject to the constraints of time and place and revolution as a form of evolution and maybe when you take a step back, you’re not a star that has to be a staple of models and principles and a demonstration of perfect values, you are a person and not an amalgamation of ideas. You are a person, which means you become more fully human through actions, through the physical tending you do to the world and the tending you do for yourself. You are not a title; you are not marketable because being human means involving yourself in the never-ending process of creation. You are fully human every way you engage with the legacy of love and transformation, which are born out of the responsibility you take to involve yourself in the welfare of life, all life, including your own, because although you watch yourself all day on a screen, you are not a star; you, like everyone else, were made of them. And tonight, just for me, tonight, you do me a favor. Tonight, you go outside, and you look up, and when you look up, you look into the black frozen narration of our family tree, and you see that at the end of everything, we are still beginning.