I wouldn’t say all of our mental health problems are directly caused by capitalism, but it definitely takes a big chunk of the blame. The sheer number of conversations I’ve had with friends about the ever-present need to be “productive” and how stressful it is, should be a reason enough. It’s infuriating and depressing alike to see the bullshit we’re raised to voluntarily put ourselves through. All in the name of some future “success” and “happiness.”

As many of you already know, college was not a healthy environment for me, to say the least. But honestly, I can’t think of a friend who went through college and didn’t experience some form of anxiety, stress, and/or depression because of it. The only ones I can think of who got through it scratch-free (or hid it well), were already slated to “grab success by the horns.” No one is surprised they got as far as they did, so quickly. Unsurprisingly, those people are also extremely boring. They have the priorities of a forty-five year old suburban husband on the cusp of a mid-life crisis.

Most of my friends have done a great job at realizing the mental and spiritual destitution they were put through. Relatively new concepts like “self-care” have played an integral role in opening up people to a world that doesn’t require incessant self-immolation.

I mean, for real...joy and happiness do not come out of sweat and blood. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either trying to exploit you, or is a sadomasochist.

The notion that some people willingly make their lives harder, while the vast majority of people don’t have a choice in how hard their lives are, is all you need to know that these people have a weird fetish (and are so isolated class-wise, they don’t know how hard actually is for the people who prop them up).

In a world where we’re constantly told we must toil endlessly for scraps, self-care becomes a radical move.

But self-care doesn’t work if you adhere it to the same old rules the sadomasochists play by. If self-care becomes another endless cycle of desire and satisfaction followed by dissatisfaction then we’ve been played. Capitalism exists in this cycle, promising an unattainable future satisfaction. It’s not unattainable because we never get anything, but because the goalposts are always moving ahead of us. We’re always on the lookout for a better job, a new promotion, and a new resume builder to accumulate more and more capital, thinking that will give us satisfaction. We endlessly scroll through products, taking pleasure in the possibility of ownership, that is, until we acquire it, moving onto the next object of our desire. We think we’re winning (by owning more, and earning more), but we’re actually losing. Satisfaction is never found, because it is never fully realized in each new acquisition. The new promotion is never enough. No “final purchase” exists.

True, long-lasting, transformative self-care begins here: realization and accepting the futility of it all. The vast majority of us will die in the same income bracket we started in. Our shit will be thrown in waste baskets. The corporations we worked for will forget us, and eventually decompose.

Self-care must dismantle, not soothe the pain, of this system. It mustn’t be institutionalized through the marketing of products and lifestyles, but actualized through an understanding of how our sufferings are baked into the game.

For starters, a lot of self-care talk is focused on the wrong form of materialism. It addresses our individual consumerist desires, instead of our collective material needs. Poverty is not a healthy state to exist in. But it’s a necessary characteristic of our capitalist ecosystem. An underclass has to exist to be exploited for the benefit of the production and consumption process, and the accumulation of capital. Poverty is not “natural” in a human sense. No one wants to be poor and exploited. It is thrusted on them. Self-care realizes that material exploitation destroys us all, especially those with the least. It therefore fights for economic redistribution. No one deserves to be poor, and it is certainly not a choice.

A living wage is by far a bigger step toward mental health than any lifestyle gimmick could ever be.

Access to free healthcare, mental health systems, education, safe and healthy housing, and a living wage are a few others.

I’d label these necessities as physical needs acquired communally. We fight together for these characteristics of self-care (or, at least, we should be).

The internal side of self-care is more complicated than a lot of people are aware of. I think a lot of what gets promoted as “self-care” is on the right track. But the mindset behind it is off.

For example, getting rid of this concept of “productivity” from our lives. For me, it’s playing video games. I have a hard time justifying the time I spend playing video games. Right there I’ve already signaled two mental hiccups that we all need to move past. First, justifying certain actions in relation to others when both are taken for similar reasons. Secondly, this concept of “spending time.”

Video games have to be justified in my mind because they live in contrast to the so-called productive actions I could take. In reality, I write, read, and research because I take pleasure in those activities. If I didn’t like writing, I wouldn’t do it. If I didn’t like playing video games, I wouldn’t do it. I’m simplifying this a little bit, but it’s to highlight the ridiculous categorizations we apply to the things we enjoy. For a lot of us, the actions we label “productive” are the ones we’ve been influenced to consider monetarily profitable. I could, and have made money off of my writing in the past. Reading and researching are integral aspects of that process. Therefore, I bundle them all together as more important than enjoying a good video game, because the monetary aspect is readily available with the former, not the latter. Thing is, I generally take as much pleasure playing video games as I do reading. It just depends on my mood. Sometimes, if I play with friends the pleasure is exponential.

We consider time spendable, not because it makes sense that we can (you can’t refund spent time, you can’t produce it, or trade it, etc), but because our lives as laborers revolves around the time clock. Our lives revolve around being “on the clock.” It makes sense that the rest of our lives would become saturated with this concept. Especially if we begin to categorize pleasurable activities along lines of profitability.

One mental barrier I’ve found hard to get rid of is the idea of “wasting time.” I get it if I went to an event that I knew I really shouldn’t have, and now regret it. But when I’m engaging in pleasurable activities why do I consider it wasted time? Again, it goes back to the profitization of time, and the categorization of certain activities as “productive” over others. I’m not on the clock. I don’t get paid for any of this. What the hell am I wasting? (I’m wasting mental space beating myself up over this, that’s what I’m wasting.)

This is where true self-care comes in. It doesn’t deal in “rewards” or “justifications.” It goes for the root of the issue. You’re unhappy and unsatisfied because you’ve been taught to expect satisfaction in the future, through sacrifice. You’re not unhappy or unsatisfied because you had fun playing video games.

Letting yourself once in a while buy something nice to treat yourself is the wrong way to look at it. You need to recognize what that momentary purchase is doing, and why you’re allowing it. In effect, you are rationing your own pleasure. You still believe that by working hard all the time, taking little-to-no breaks, and trying to climb the corporate ladder you’ll find happiness eventually. I know this sounds cliche by now, but a big part of true self-care is getting off the capitalist hamster wheel that so many people depressingly label “a life.”

I’ll continue to elaborate on radical self-care in the coming weeks and months. Because, you know, that’s how I do it! But if you’re gonna take anything out of this, remember that self-care should be a band-aid on a cancer cell. Happiness is not found in a diet plan of pleasure. Diets don’t work, and neither does rationing pleasure.