How capitalist cause loneliness

loneliness American epidemic epidemic of loneliness hurts you more than smoking cigarettes debilitating levels loneliness if you've watched Bo Burnham's inside you've heard about it before and experts say it's as bad as eating 15 cigarettes a day but what is loneliness really and is it a problem the answer to both of those questions is yes because loneliness is a problem that has existed behind the shadows for too long and I came to realize this when I first began my tenure Surgeon General and I traveled the country and would talk to people who would tell me that they were lonely but they wouldn't use that word they would say things like you know I feel I have to carry all these burdens in my life by myself where I feel if I disappear tomorrow nobody would care or I feel invisible feel anything right and it turns out that millions of people struggle with loneliness when you dig into the data what you find is that about one in two adults in America it was reporting levels of loneliness and these numbers are even greater among kids but what you also find is that loneliness has serious effects on our mental health and our physical health raising our risk for depression anxiety and suicide but also increasing our risk of heart disease stroke dementia and premature death loneliness is a massive problem that's only gotten worse we know this because earlier this year researchers published this paper and these are the graphs they came up with using a national survey tracking people's habits on random days for 17 years researchers found that between 2003 and 2020 people started spending a lot more time alone and a lot less time with friends family and acquaintances like you heard the Surgeon General explained earlier that's a big deal it's not like people are a little lonely so they feel sad for a bit and then happy for a bit and it all kind of evens out we're spending a lot more time alone which is bad for both our mental and our physical health everything from depression to dementia to heart disease gets worse the lonelier we are and the data shows that's an increasingly large number of us and while the pandemic brought this into focus and made things even worse the researchers behind this study stressed that these Trends were already there well before kovid started we've been on this path for a while so who do we blame smarter we talked a lot about the phone we talked about the way technology has changed our lives and it's a little more insular even though we're connected in digital ways and technology is utterly transformed how we interact with one another now so I'm that can be good or bad it can help us or hurt us technology has transformed the way we live and work now where these connections are happening on Zoom online could you stop that smartphones in a lot of the interviews and public addresses you've probably seen about the loneliness epidemic phones social media and technology in general get blamed taking up a lot of air time and don't get me wrong social media definitely has a bad effect on our mental health we've known this for a really long time now and just about every study we've ever done confirms it for example a study that came out just this year found that more social media time equals worse mental health and as a solution it recommends that quote social media users be cautious when interacting with social media features especially likes comments followers media and posts because of their significant effect on mental health yes phone bad phone not only thing bad while social media for sure has a role in this crisis of loneliness something a lot bigger is either completely absent from or barely glossed over in these interviews something that socialists have known contributes to isolation for a long time and that's alienation for centuries now socialist thinkers led by the Dapper young Marx have anticipated that capitalism would produce the kind of acute loneliness we're experiencing today and if you've heard about alienation before watching these news segments can be a little frustrating before we explain what it is alienation is a structural feature of our capitalist Society it's almost Universal and for the most part out of our control that's important because when these reports downplay it or don't acknowledge it which is almost always the case it leads them to conclude that while loneliness affects a lot of people it's ultimately an individual problem with individual Solutions and finally their personal practices look in all of our Lives we can do simple things by taking 15 minutes a day to reach out to and connect to someone we care about to make sure that we are giving people our full attention when we're talking to them in conversation aren't distracted by our phones and at the end of the day as you say this the solutions are on us it's on people it's on individuals and families and groups of friends to do something and these relationships do take work as we're reminded I feel like I'm in touch with them don't get me wrong personal practices to improve our isolation and our mental health are good things and they're not the only thing in the surgeon general's report or the interview I keep pulling clips from both do mention larger scale approaches to this problem like regulation for tech companies government investment and Community organizations and improvements to Public Health infrastructure it's not all bootstraps and getter done but a really large piece of the puzzle is still missing in these reports there's something else that's to blame for a big chunk of the loneliness we feel that can't be addressed by either individual practices or a little extra funding for Community organizations and that's capitalism which especially in its neoliberal variants produces thrives on and actually even demands more individualization and the ever greater atomization of our society let me actually explain alienation you'll see what I mean [Music] on the economic front capitalism is a commodity production system that's the engine that keeps things running stuff for the sole purpose of selling it for more than it costs to make profit motivated production the way this production is organized under capitalism is by class you have the class of people who own the resources needed to produce commodities [Laughter] and those who are hired to use these resources for the production of goods capitalists and workers employers and employees what does this have to do with alienation it turns out a lot in some of his earlier Works Marx identified that the way we organize work and production under our current system alienates us meaning it creates a separation between us and four things nature work others and ourselves nature because through the logic of commodity production it's no longer something we're a part of it's just this dead resource we extract from to make stuff work because most people work for someone else in order to make something that the other person owns you work in a Funko Pop Factory once you're done making that Funko Pop it's not yours to sell you sold your labor power but the product of it belongs to someone else and then there's alienation from others and ourselves in the labor market we are Commodities almost all of us sell eight or more hours of our day to somebody else during that time we kind of stop being people and become just another resource that yields profit for our employers that's already not great being reduced to this one thing for most of our waking hours instead of being the complex interesting human beings with different interests and emotions that we are sucks we're expected to just turn that off and compartmentalize while we're on the clock we're interchangeable in the eyes of capital and it's why so many people relate to the idea of being just a cog in the machine that feeling of alienation is miserable and isolating but it doesn't end there like what about all the other cogs as Commodities in a competitive market we are constantly pitted against one another whether that's for job positions promotions or layoffs there are always fewer jobs than people to fill them and while you can be friends with your co-workers in the back of your mind there's always going to be a little voice that says if the boss ever wants to fire someone you'd rather it'd be them than you social cohesion is harder to come by in the zero-sum competition that decides if you get to eat this month also when in spite of the odds solidarity and compassion do get realized in the workplace and it takes the form of a union capitalists are merciless in their efforts to turn workers against one another teamwork and collaboration are one thing but solidarity terrifies them of course real life is less binary than this we make friends on the job our boss can be a real life nice person but the built-in competitive element of Labor under capitalism puts a strain on these relationships and that's the problem the way our economy is organized runs against our natural drive and physical need to socialize it doesn't make it impossible but it sure as hell doesn't help and I've been talking for a while now but we still haven't gotten the full picture yet not only does capitalism's Reliance on a competitive labor force contribute to us feeling lonely at work its demand for ever greater exploitation makes work a larger part of a lonelier life if we go back to that study I used earlier the one with all the the graphs and the trends uh this one there we go if we go back to this study one of the main conclusions literally the first line at the top of the page in this big highlighted box says quote hours worked per week emerged as a structural constraint to Social connectedness in Normal words you work more you feel lonelier ass and grind [Music] do it what you doing but if you want something different in life you gotta do something different you gotta go all in your boss will always be trying to make you work more and pay you less that's one of the main ways they increase their profits if they do that by increasing your hours without touching your salary you now have less time to socialize if they do it by keeping your wage the same but reducing your hours you now have less money to spend on Leisure someone with a higher income may be able to pay for someone else to do their chores while someone earning less has no choice but to stay home and do it themselves regardless in either scenario what decides how lonely you are is the threat of poverty keeping you at your job and your boss taking advantage of that to either make you work more or pay you less they can't afford to care if that makes your life worse they need to be profitable and if you're lonely because of that that is not their concern and all this is before we even get to the neoliberal part of the equation you can add neoliberal culture and politics to these economic factors inherent to every iteration of capitalism neo-liberal culture values things like self-reliance rugged individualism disdain for the poor and unfortunate and of course neoliberal pundits are constantly hammering on the myth that meritocracy is real even though you can accurately predict a baby's future salary using only the ZIP code they're born in their race and their gender and on top of the rhetoric you can add neoliberal policy things like defunding social institutions like schools which are then forced to cut their arts and after school programs or defunding public health institutions where loneliness and other mental health difficulties could be treated or deregulating work so your boss can work you longer set aside loneliness for a second and think of mental health more broadly how many sources of anxiety stress suicidality depression anger and misery do you think could be avoided if we used all the empty houses at our disposal to guarantee people a home instead of sitting on them until they turn to profit how much of the mental health puzzle could we solve if millions of people didn't need to worry where their next meal would come from because we distributed food freely without bureaucratic means testing gumming up the works how much of a load off someone's mind would it be not needing to worry about getting around when their car breaks down because of a robust system of public transportation when all of society is geared towards maximum exploitation instead of Maximum well-being of course mental health is going to suffer between the material incentives of capitalists that isolate us from nature work each other and ourselves and neoliberal insistence that we are alone in our personal responsibilities combined with their policies that Force us to be it's a miracle we aren't even lonelier the solutions are on us it's on people it's on individuals but I forgot to mention another way this capitalist blindness further contributes to our isolation since the loneliness epidemic became part of the Zeitgeist employers have started using it as another argument in the long fight to bring workers back to the office after kovid a bunch of companies probably including the one where you work have spent the last few years playing around with this idea that work from home is to blame for all the isolation and loneliness people are feeling if you don't know what I'm talking about it's all those like come back to the office the culture here is so great statements every HR department is sending out and I don't fundamentally disagree with their premise their execution is laughable but work from home can be lonely however that doesn't mean going to the office is necessarily better nor is being forced back the solution people want we want our work to be less isolating more meaningful we want more time out of work to socialize most people want some amount of flexibility so they can stay at home part-time and go into the office every once in a while we want to have the power to put our social lives and our needs before profit maximization most people want the ability to have a say in how policies are decided but bosses don't want that they want absolute control this is not an employee choice they don't get to choose their compensation they don't get to choose their promotion they don't get to choose stay home five days a week I want them with other employees at least three or four days we've told people we expect them on May 17th one or two days a week get used to it get your head wrapped around it get your head wrapped around the fact that we may if we can and the legal issues about requiring vaccines but by June by mid-july 50 percent will be back in obviously capitalists think working from home means working less they already have a ton of surveillance Tech on people's computers to police you at home but of course that's obviously not as good as putting you in an open space where everyone's eyes are on your screen guilting you into never taking a break that's why they're always talking about returning to the office they don't care about loneliness they care about their bottom line and power they want to regain the control they lost when you stopped being in their line of sight eight hours a day five days a week none of these guys are doing interviews saying we work our people too hard and research shows that's making them lonely we should really tone it down no they just want to tell you what to do and make sure you do it or you know their real estate Moguls and they're losing money with all these empty office spaces here's the thing when we don't talk about all this about how overwork exploitation and our disgusting politics of rugged individualism profoundly affect loneliness we open the door to capitalists and their rhetoric if we don't talk about work they will and they get it exactly backwards they'll take this loneliness epidemic this massive detrimental problem to our society this thing that's making us miserable and literally killing us and use it as an argument for more time in the office like they're doing us a favor don't fall for it the roots of this problem go far deeper than they will ever acknowledge and before I cut this video off I want to reiterate something if you know or suspect a friend is having a hard time with these feelings of loneliness please reach out to them and if you're experiencing loneliness yourself please reach out to someone in your life or a medical professional or someone on the other end of a warm line to talk about it even with all this structural pressure around us there is help available it works and you can overcome this you are allowed to and deserve to feel happy we need more Connection in our life and that's how I want people to think about this loneliness is not a source of Shame it's like hunger or thirst a signal that our body sends us when we need something for our survival.