Capitalism And Grief

Raised in an ex-communist country like Albania, I feel proud to have been around the environment that could save my authenticity, and ability to feel, be curious, and passionate about people, things, and life. I dream big and draw roadmaps to get there. I believe in measuring performance to goals and working to ensure we are strengthening the communities we serve. I thought everyone was like this, I thought it was human to be and feel like this until I moved to Ireland and then to Canada. I realized something different, something that I could not understand what was it. People were nice and polite, talking about the weather and stuff, saying thank you to the bus driver every time they would get off the bus on that 2-minute route on the urban city bus. It seemed to me like I was on a different planet. I could talk with people but not really connect with them. Then after a while, I realized it was this political correctness culture that was not evident at all in Albania even after 20 years of democracy.

Today, political correctness culture is most commonly associated with movements such as gender-based bias, gay rights, and ethnic minority advocacy, but you can feel it in every moment of your daily life. People are busy and politically correct, afraid to say what they think, and afraid to feel what they feel. While writing now, I recall what one of my favorite thinkers Jordan Peterson said: “If you hide what you think and feel you gradually lose your critical thinking”. And I definitely feel this. I often have wondered if people do not like to think anymore. They are lazy to think and feel trying to be nice and polite. Is the need for validation the new way of thinking?

So is it time to stop and think? Where are we going amid all of this?

One of the things that happen in capitalism is that our ability to feel gets compressed and erased. The pressure on us to keep going and be liked is so great that we have less and less space to feel over time. Add to this a built-in assumption in society that there is something wrong with you if you feel sad, down or angry as if there are no reasons prevalent in the culture for these feelings. Most of us have never experienced the permission we need to question capitalism let alone grieve over how we are forced to exist inside of it.

Why is that? What would happen if we actually had the time and space to feel, to reflect, to register the harm done, to move the pain through our bodies and to grieve what happened to us? So much would change and that is why, by design, we never get the chance to be with grief. Collective grief is powerful and transformative.

A whole world of insight starts pouring in and a lot of it includes realizing how much these systems have had us under lock and key, hustling, trying, thinking it’s our fault, thinking we should try harder, thinking we should be different somehow. When the truth is this: capitalism needs you focused inward. It needs you scrutinizing yourself instead of the system that we are living in. And when we realize this, like really register it–there’s so much sadness. So much disappointment.

But we have to have a way to move some of our emotions through when we unlearn the ways we’ve hurt and been harmed. We have to have a place to say what’s not okay, without anyone fixing anything or excusing anything. The gaslighting has gone on so long.

We have no time to cook

No time to make love

No time to be loved

No time to nurture our children

No time to move our bodies

No time to listen to our thoughts

No time to explore our communities

No time to be creative

No time to focus on healing

No time to exist

All we have time for is work and figuring out how to make money so that we don’t perish.

Capitalism interferes with the time and space we need to nourish connections that money can’t buy, and then tells us that’s just the way it is.

The best practices of capitalism:

Get more than you give

Take more than you need

Make sure it works for you as the individual

Keep yourself in the center of the transaction

See yourself as separate from the collective

Capitalism plays and depends on our most basic fear: that there is no one and nothing waiting to catch us and that we are here on this earth, without resources or one another, completely on our own. It’s all a lie.

I hope that knowing this gives you a little breathing room, and also a little hope. Whatever we begin to see as we break the spell this year has a place to be honored. Whatever we understand now is really not okay and has a place to be acknowledged.

I hope you’ll feel the encouragement I feel knowing we are in this process together.

“It is not length of life, but depth of life”. — Ralph Waldo Emerson