Capitalism Makes Trauma Worse and Trauma Makes Capitalism Worse
I'd like to heal but I have to go to work.
If you haven’t already noticed, this is an anti-capitalist Substack. As something of a trauma expert, I advocate for the end of capitalism, because capitalism traumatizes, makes trauma worse, and makes it more difficult to heal.
There are other reasons to be against capitalism, and I hate it for those reasons, too, but here we’ll go ahead and focus on the trauma part.
Nearly at the very beginning of this year, the website I was writing for imploded. They were my only client as a freelancer, which is not recommended practice, but they took up a good amount of my time and the work was more tolerable than any had been in my working life. When they decided to shut the site down, I was left with no income.
Luckily, my spouse was going to grad school and was able to get enough student loans to cover our bills if we were careful about spending. We’re going into a ton of debt, but unlike others who have been in a similar situation, we were not in danger of eviction or other dire consequences.
Regardless, being unable to make money for a time brought up some deep trauma-related issues and threw them right in my face. As generative “AI” and other capitalistic factors wrecked the writing industry and resulted in mass layoffs among reporters, trying to find new work was a daunting task. The market was flooded with writers. LinkedIn posts asking for writers are still getting dozens of comments, and job posts hundreds of applications.
My chronic childhood trauma has a lot to do with feeling like a burden and an imposed belief that my worth comes from what I can do for others. Being unable to contribute to the bank account resulted in frequent bouts of depression and increased levels of anxiety for months until I secured new work with a former client in May. I’m now left lamenting that I was unable to spend those months relaxing a little and enjoying the freedom of unemployment, or at least focusing more on treating my carpal tunnel syndrome than frantically job searching.
Capitalism both requires an unemployed population in order to drive down wages and naturally pushes the attitude that those who are not working or cannot work are worthless. It wasn’t difficult to figure out why my depression got so bad while I wasn’t working. In a better world, I would have been allowed to take a break for as long as I needed or wanted. In a system that prioritizes the well-being of humans over capital, all traumatized people could work on themselves rather than working for others, allowing them to heal as much as possible and go back to work (if they chose to do so) without all the symptoms of trauma that make it harder to function in a workplace that must demand self-sacrifice from workers.
Imagine if you didn’t have to worry about money. Imagine if you were guaranteed a roof over your head, sufficient food and water, healthcare, and whatever else you needed to survive and heal, for as long as you desired. It would be so much easier to heal without the stress of bills piling up.
Imagine a world full of people who have been able to take all the time they need to rest and heal from trauma instead of being forced to go to work to survive and acting out on those around them. Maybe so much of our lives wouldn’t be run by people who need therapy but instead cope by working obsessively in an attempt to chase down a sense of self-worth and/or distract themselves from the trauma that screams for attention.
An Oxford study released early this year, less than a month after my source of income was deleted from the internet, showed that those workplace mental health programs that so many companies have implemented to try and address a growing problem without doing what is actually necessary to combat it are not very effective at all.
“These programs are a point of pride for forward-thinking human resource departments, evidence that employers care about their workers,” writes New York Times reporter Ellen Barry. “But a British researcher who analyzed survey responses from 46,336 workers at companies that offered such programs found that people who participated in them were no better off than colleagues who did not.”
The only exception to this finding was giving workers time off to volunteer for charities. Mindfulness training and wellness apps and other cheap substitutes for what people actually need for their mental health did not work.
What does help, according to researchers, is schedules that prioritize work-life balance (read: working less) and better pay.
Because better rested people have better mental health even if they’re not actively working to improve it, and more time away from work of course leaves people with the energy to do this work if they need and want it. And more money means more peace of mind and maybe enough cash to pay a therapist.
Unfortunately, capitalism creates a constant pressure to increase profits year after year, requiring infinite growth to avoid collapse. The easiest and eventually the only way to make this happen is to pay workers less to work more. It is, as they say, unsustainable.
Unsustainable on a finite planet and unsustainable for human mental health. And that instability creates more trauma as dwindling resources fuel war, as stress makes abusers more violent, and poverty wrecks the lives of inconceivable numbers of people across the globe.
I am undeniably one of the lucky ones, and I’m still struggling as capitalism impedes my healing at every turn. As someone who desires mass healing, I simply cannot support a system that puts profits first and people second. I’m not sure our species can climb out of our trauma hole under the stranglehold of capitalism.
100% agree. I guess the only good news (?) is that we're in End-Stage Capitalism.