Or being competitive. Or business. Maybe all three. I can be professional in a workplace, when I actually manage to get into one. I can work hard. But the process of finding work is soul-sucking. The work itself, even if theoretically meaningful in a vacuum, can still be part of a soul-sucking process. The ever-changing landscape and “I got mine” rat race to stay above the water and “get yours” depresses, rather than motivates, me.

I don’t want to be a personal brand, I want to be a person. I don’t want to sell things, I want to build things. I don’t want to profit off of people, I want to help people.

And sure, some of these things aren’t always mutually exclusive. But when they are, capitalism makes sure you suffer for it. Chip away at your humanity or lose out on stability. Angst of the soul or angst of the stomach. Neither makes you a happy, healthy human being.

I try to be patient with it. Take it one day at a time. Work toward a goal. Improve on myself. For what world? What future? One with rising sea levels? Burning forests? While capitalists chill on yachts?

I know it isn’t hopeless. In my heart and mind, I know that it isn’t. But capitalism makes it feel hopeless. Trying to work within that framework often feels pointless when it doesn’t feel painful.

The healthier I become, the more clear it becomes how sick capitalism is. Capitalism depends on you turning the blame inward. But when you start to address some of your legitimate problems, it becomes evident that the poison of capitalism is still there and has not changed.

You can’t appeal to the goodwill of capitalism because it has none. You can’t reform it because it has no interest in being anything less than what it is; in a word, exploitation.

Of course there are the day to day realities to contend with. There are the processes to contend with. There is the science of socialism to contend with. You can’t upend it through willpower. But it still sucks to suck at it or to have the soul sucked out of you by it.

It doesn’t make you an idealist to want to be human. It doesn’t make you a utopian dreamer to want to share instead of hoard. And it doesn’t make you a dictator to want to end exploitation. Your communal ancestors would be stunned to see the chains you walk with daily and the gears that you turn, so that machines thousands of miles away can do more wanton destruction.

You’re incredibly normal in history to be disgusted with what you’re a part of, it being the system of exploitation, domination, and destruction that it is. That’s a consolation. You’re about as opposite as alone in this as you can be. No matter how bad it gets, remember that they’d be by your side if they were still here. The majority of humans, who lived in communal styles and mostly worked together in shared interests. No matter how it ends, that’s what you’re a part of, to be human. Not this fleeting soul-sucking system of exploitation and colonization.

Bring it back into being in every way that you can. Shared humanity, through the struggle for liberation. I don’t know what way the arc of the universe bends. But the arc of the Earth bends toward where we collectively bend it with what is there to bend, inside and out. Move through the shifting contradictions. And create the world that we need.