the privatization of stress

and how we can solve it.

Earlier this week, I announced a brand new way for us to hang out, our very own live sharing circle! It’s a place for us to reflect and connect around issues that we care about. I was thinking about what could be a great topic for us to discuss this week, and I came across a compelling concept that I felt would be very fitting for us to start with: the privatization of stress.

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Perhaps you’ve encountered it in your life. Coined by British writer and cultural theorist Mark Fisher, the privatization of stress is a theory about how our mental wellness has become impossible to achieve, and its pursuit, privatized. Living within the confines of capitalism inevitably makes us sick, but instead of blaming the structure, we responsibilize the individual. Mental health challenges are viewed as an individual failure rather than a collective one, which only keeps us trapped in a cycle of being in charge of fixing a problem that we cannot solve alone, and that we did not create.

I noticed the privatization of stress in my own life as it relates to the excruciating gig economy. One evening last spring, I remember staring at my computer depressed from having to work another late night, just so that I could make enough money to keep paying for the therapist that helps me cope with the depression that’s caused by the job that I need to keep in order to pay for the therapist that allows me to do my job in the first place. What a great way to keep us enslaved forever! Keep people working jobs that make them miserable, so that they can one day afford to be well.

When stress is privatized, work becomes both the source and the solution to our woes. In order to get the money to cope with your stress, you have to do more of what is stressing you out to begin with. It’s a vicious cycle that harms the masses and benefits the very few at the top who profit off this catch 22.

What makes this more ironic is that our jobs have never made us more miserable and paid us (relatively) so little. According to a recent Gallup poll, we haven’t been this unhappy at work in a long time, and wages haven’t even kept up with inflation (or the price of therapy sessions). Most Americans report feeling “emotionally detached” from their job and 18% say they are “miserable.” According to these numbers, the majority of the workforce is quiet quitting, which means doing the bare minimum just to get by.

Our collective misery is why characters like Corporate Erin, who embodies a cruel corporate culture cosplaying as compassionate, have exploded in popularity on social media.

@lisabevolving#CorporateErin and #NonprofitBoss bond over overserving underserved communities and why rats don’t have an ERG #Community #Corporate #Charity #Causes

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In many ways, Corporate Erin represents the new “professional–managerial class.” It’s a faction that Barbara Ehrenreich describes as a group of “salaried mental workers who do not own the means of production and whose major function in the social division of labor may be described broadly as the reproduction of capitalist culture.”

Feigning empathy for her figurative underlings, Corporate Erin’s job consists of indirectly blaming employees for the toxic work environment they’re forced to operate in. Corporate Erin responds to complaints about the lack of work-life balance, by setting up a meeting outside of working hours to discuss it. She’s the kind of boss who proudly announces a new and improved maternity leave policy called “maternity stay,” that forces moms back into the office immediately after childbirth to save them the stress of falling behind in their Q1 goals. Corporate Erin’s weaponized aloofness has resonated with millions of workers who experience the cognitive dissonance of being in a workplace that lauds itself for creating solutions to problems that it created in the first place.

Photo by Christina @ wocintechchat.com on Unsplash

But we haven’t only individualized the cause of our suffering, we’ve individualized the cure. When someone inevitably ends up being dysregulated by our dysregulating world, they often don’t receive support inside their community, they’re told to leave and seek individual therapy to fix it. There’s simply no public mental health safety net. While everyone has a mind, taking care of it is expensive, and rarely covered by insurance. Our historic level stress is a problem created by the collective, that we’re encouraged to fix on our own.

And while I’m a huge advocate of counseling, its sheer inaccessibility is an enormous barrier to our recovery. Research shows that the lower-income you are, the less likely you are to know where to find the mental health resources you need, and receive them. And no country has figured out how to appropriately respond to the mental health crisis, and globally there’s still a dearth of leadership and resources.

And this dwindling public funding for mental health resources hits women and marginalized communities far harder. Discrimination like homophobia, racism, sexism and ableism impacts mental health, and yet being part of an oppressed group makes you less likely to have what it takes to address it. And as we’ve discussed before, there’s a cost to healing when you disobey the rules of a system that requires your unwellness to properly exploit you.

But I believe that we can be the answer. I usually tell you about solutions that others have come up with, but in this case I’m telling you about ours. I believe in the power of community-led support, and that’s always been my dream for Airplane Mode. You don’t have to fix yourself or the world, alone. The solution to suffering is always connection, and that’s why I’m so thrilled to get to build and expand this sharing circle together. Our first sharing circle will take place on Sunday at 9PT/12PT with a zoom link going out that morning. Bring your friends, invite your family, the more the merrier!

Don’t forget to subscribe now. For only 5 bucks a month, you can be part of this thing. And if the cost is a barrier, please get in touch I don’t want anyone to be left out of this magical project we’re building together. And if you want to donate subscriptions to those in need, you can do that too!

Thanks for being here.

x

Liz