Certain realities regarding capitalism and the current paradigm dawned on me in an even deeper way today. I recently started a short class series that is essentially about how to create a right, ethical livelihood for yourself that aligns with your values, especially regarding our relationships to each other and to the earth. Some of the people in the course mentioned wanting to do life coaching, one of the facilitators of the course does a sort of life coaching as one of her types of work, and also one of my close friends does coaching work.
As I was walking on one of my breaks today, I realized that even something as well-intentioned as life coaching (especially through the radical lenses that these people are practicing it) is itself just part of the pyramid scheme of capitalism, the slavery that is needing to earn money in order to survive. Doing life coaching work would be unnecessary if people were free from capitalism. People wouldn't need help to find a more sustainable, acceptable way to earn income if people didn't need to earn income at all. Being a life coach and getting to help people through your work is rewarding, but it's also the sort of thing where like not everyone can become a life coach, because then there would be no people left who need coaching.
The same logic can be applied to many areas, such as the legal field. For example, you might be using the law to make wrongdoers pay for their negligence and the harm it has caused, but this slap on the wrist clearly does nothing to actually address the systemic roots of the harmful behavior in the first place. Almost all of the time, the root of that harmful behavior is the way that capitalism incentivizes people to pursue profit at the cost of other people's wellbeing.
Until we are able to totally free ourselves collectively from the need to sell our labor in order to survive, virtually anything and everything we do to earn money will contribute to the workings of capitalism in a way that is inherently unethical. Once we understand this deeply and digest to what extent our lives are controlled by and enslaved to capital, we can see that the only things we are potentially doing to usher in a new paradigm are necessarily things we are not being paid to do. Thus, the more we can free our time and energy from the sadistic clutches of capitalism, the more we can liberate ourselves collectively.
When we free a significant portion of our time and energy, we can use this time and energy to organize, build radical communities, practice mutual aid, cultivate food, research and educate ourselves, and contribute in other ways to increasing our collective freedom.
Capitalism and its adherents are highly interested in keeping us exhausted, distracted, and isolated, because this means we can never gather the time, energy, and resources to build a new world that doesn't rely on capital.
What are some things you can do to free your time and energy and take back your life?
