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Wayne Emerson Gregory Talks about A Nursing Guide to Patient Care | Greenville, South Carolina
Nursing is a noble profession vital to providing quality healthcare and improving patient outcomes. Effective patient care requires a comprehensive approach encompassing technical skills and compassionate care. We will explore a nursing guide to patient care, highlighting fundamental principles and strategies to help nurses deliver exceptional care and foster positive patient experiences.
By Wayne Emerson Gregory South Carolina3 years ago in Education
10 Money Rules for Financial Success
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By Punit kumar3 years ago in Education
The truth about recessions
we're in a recession Maybe maybe not though it's not super clear are we headed towards a recession it is coming I think we are on a slow bleed into the recession all of our indicators suggest that leading indicators consumer confidence CEO confidence all point to a recession in the U.S economy it's been at least a year since people started talking about a possible recession nobody's really sure when it's coming or if it's already here because rather unhelpfully there are some contradictory signals right now having their fun speculating and we could too just 20 minutes of pure guesswork but we're gonna do this video a recession is coming no matter what we know it with 100 certainty what we don't know yet is exactly when though based on current trends most people expect it to be sometime soon not to be too obvious with my thesis statement or anything but in this video we're going to break down why we know for sure that a recession is on its way we'll also talk about the fact that these crises where profits go down are counter-intuitively a good thing for capitalists unlike what you might hear them say and then we'll take things a step further and talk about preventing recessions because the truth is we could stop recessions almost entirely if we wanted to okay this is a graph you knew that specifically it's a graph of GDP in the United States if you didn't know GDP or gross domestic product is a garbage number that doesn't really mean much but it means a whole lot to governments and businesses so unfortunately they've made it everyone else's problem roughly speaking GDP measures the total value of all the goods and services in a country in a given year GDP doesn't care if one guy makes all the money from this or if we cut down every single tree in the process or if we're all miserable GDP only calculates the value of all the stuff exchanged for money while cutting out the middlemen in the calculation I'm really oversimplifying here but as long as there's more stuff or more services more value produced than the year before on paper the line goes up these shaded areas here are times where that doesn't happen it's in moments like these where GDP goes down for long enough that an official recession is declared by the nber and as you can see there's been a lot of them currently we estimate there's a recession every four to seven years on average like this right here is 2008 the last big recession before covid in the U.S this line going down was accompanied by nearly 9 million people losing their jobs during the Great Recession unemployment went up to 10 percent 8 million homes were foreclosed on and millions of people lost their savings or their retirement funds just trying to get by [Music] this is why recessions are a big deal they're brutal they're not just a few months where you need to cut down your spending on say four dollar artisanal bread to take a completely random example death rates alcoholism suicide all sorts of really terrible things go up during periods of economic contraction and predictably mental and physical health get a lot worse recessions are incredibly traumatic and difficult sometimes even deadly events for millions of people and for some reason they're treated as a natural phenomenon we know recessions happen regularly under capitalism you saw the graph but rather than contest this part of the deal were expected to accept within our current economic system is that whenever there's a brief lull in growth which happens every couple of years this sort of purge-like event will be announced seemingly out of the blue and life will be measurably worse for millions of people through no fault of their own it's just a part of life but it's not recessions happen regularly under capitalism and not for no reason and almost every school of economics has its theories as to what triggers them marxists for example and here I'm pulling from The Economist Richard Wolff in case you're interested often explain recessions like this in periods of growth companies expand that makes sense things are going well so confidence is high and companies receive Investments borrow money from Banks hire more people merge and acquire produce more stuff and sell more things the numbers go up and this works for a while but as more and more companies do the same thing eventually production exceeds effective demand there's too much stuff being produced because almost everyone is chasing growth by producing for the largest market possible and when everybody follows the same strategy they inevitably step on each other's toes not everyone can produce this much and reap the rewards there's just too much stuff in the economy because we aren't producing a according to our needs each company is producing for its own selfish bottom line not only is this obviously terrible for environmental reasons faced with a lack of effective demand many companies won't make the profits they expected to and invested their money for so they'll lay off their workers investors will stop investing and all throughout the economy the repercussions of this failure to grow begin to bounce from business to business as everyone's inputs dry up more people are suddenly unemployed businesses shudder to a halt profits take a dive and GDP the total amount of stuff being bought and sold goes down and you get a recession foreign to note about this is one it's cyclical and two that recessions can begin under capitalism not because of anything bad happening but simply because profits become harder to come by for the tiny minority of business owners steering the ship eventually though the survivors find ways out of the downward spiral either with bailouts buyouts or increased exploitation of suddenly desperate workers looking for literally any job amid high unemployment the economy starts growing again and kicks off the next boom that'll lay the foundation for the following bust it's cyclical and it's why we know that recessions are always on their way Beyond just looking at the historical record capitalist economists tend to ignore the boom and bust cycle either they'll pretend that each crisis is a totally random event and give it its own name to make it seem self-contained or they'll call this the market quote-unquote self-regulating casually ignoring that markets don't self-regulate because governments are always there to set the rules or step in with bailout money and that self-regulating is a really gross way of framing these events where millions of people go hungry and homeless for no good reason and look while there's plenty of debate about the specifics of how recessions work one thing is very clear who the winners are cap The Narrative politicians and capitalists prefer makes it seem like recessions are bad for everyone but with the numbers going down workers losing their jobs and businesses going under but that's not a very honest way of telling the story of recessions there are winners in a recession and part of the reason why recessions happen so often is because it's always the same people who benefit from them here's the data what you're looking at is a graph of unemployment and capitalist share of income when unemployment is high and the red line goes up systematically predictably inevitably three years later so does the black line capitalists get a larger share of the total economic pie three years after unemployment rises in other words when unemployment increases so does inequality and it's always the same group that benefits and it's not a big surprise as to why workers lose a lot of bargaining power during periods of high unemployment and recessions it's just harder to get a job when only so many are available and the competition is rough and that means that capitalists can absorb more of the total wealth even if that total wealth goes down they now benefit from a more dominant position in the economy when employment is high the times where growth is happening in some ways that's actually bad for capitalists they may earn larger profits on paper but they lose control their share of total income goes down with their ability to exploit somewhat counter-intuitively this means that capitalists want high unemployment because it makes their slice bigger than the worker slice and nothing is better at producing high unemployment than recessions but just forget the graphs for a second we can make the same case with a more direct example have you ever heard that Baron Rothschild quote the time to buy is when there's blood in the streets recessions are a boon to capitalists looking to buy during recessions when there's blood in the streets those with the power to spend and buy meaning almost exclusively those at the top are going to find deals 2008 was the perfect case for this the signs were everywhere but now it's official we are in a recession at the height of the recession companies like Blackstone came in and spent billions buying up repossessed homes at a fraction of their cost they had the money most people didn't and housing is a necessity so a few large corporations were ready to spend a little while prices were low to prepare for extracting rent from thousands of families for decades to come all of this mind you is a risky Gambit periods of high unemployment and hunger get revolutionary real quick and that can be scary to capitalists while they may a profit off disasters and use them to take a larger cut of the pie crises risk changing how we organize the pie in general it's not the best analogy but anyway that said so far capitalism has survived its recessions more than that they've been ways to embolden the system so when capitalists find ways to trigger recessions by pushing Marcus to the edge playing with prices and expectations and so on taking that risk often pays off and that's not all this same story of winning in a crisis takes place not just between capitalists and the rest of society but between big and small capitalists big corporations which can steer the economy by raising their prices suddenly restrict or increase production influence policy and even trigger Wars to some extent or in the undeniable winners of recessions over their smaller competitors during times of what's called stagflation a recession or period of economic stagnation combined with inflation small businesses are weak they aren't as adaptable and strong as large corporations so these are the times where bigger companies win not by making crazy profits but simply by beating the average driving their competition out by surviving when others fail let's go back to 2008 for a second and look at JPMorgan Chase even as a bank in a recession centered around the banking industry with its profits being cut in half from one quarter to the next amid quote Rising defaults in its mortgage home equity loans and credit cards JPMorgan Chase still managed to have its stock price Jump by 11 percent the company wasn't doing well by any means it was just doing better than its competitors and that's enough even when everybody is losing being the least loseriest of them all attracts investors allows consolidation and is ultimately beneficial in other words crises aren't that bad if you can come out on top and the largest corporations as well as capitalists in general know this and take advantage of it they can confidently destroy an economy with a clear conscience because once the dust settles they can be relatively certain they'll come out on top [Music] so how do we stop processions right now they seem natural inevitable even every recession is treated as some freak accident rather than the culmination of predictable Trends and they are built into our current economic system capitalism which can also seem inescapable but what if we didn't depend on growth and profit to live fulfilling lives if that were the case a periodic dip in growth wouldn't be a problem in other words what if we just had a degrowth economy the truth is that the only context where an economy not constantly growing is a bad thing is under capitalism when businesses have to choose between satisfying the needs of their workers and the needs of capitalists to generate profits the latter always wins out in the end growth means profits for the capitalist class and decline also means profits for the capitalist class therefore periods of degrowth become recessions and austerity for the rest of the population as businesses and governments scramble to make sure that for-profit companies stay open for business capitalist firms can't afford not to make profits above the mean and capitalist governments can't function without growth so if they encounter a dip it becomes a crisis the burden of which they simply pass on to the rest of us d-growth economies don't work like that in a socialist degrowth economy basic services are provided on a universal basis like housing food Health Care Child Care and so on by taking them out of Market mechanisms and the hands of profit motivated capitalists we remove the imperative for them to grow and with that we get rid of the idea that if growth ever stops that life necessarily has to become worse to make up for it in other words the things that make life good are guaranteed independently of profit they are provided without being tied to the ability of a few to enrich themselves and it doesn't have to just be basic Services we can extend this further for example with a more planned economy with a planned economy we can control more Industries democratically produce in line with our needs not randomly having every company producing as much as possible which not only destroys the livability of our planet but crashes the economy when profits don't catch up instead of relying on profit to guide our investments we could simply invest in the things we want to see happen with democratically run financial institutions instead of privately controlled banks that only follow the logic of growth to assess whether something is worth doing alternatively think of something like a mutual Aid Network today Mutual Aid doesn't do for GDP GDP doesn't have any way of measuring something that's done freely it just doesn't consider it to exist since Mutual Aid networks are often just people working together to improve their lives providing each other with services and sometimes Goods usually without money changing hands as long as those things remain insular to the collective life gets better without GDP moving an inch economies don't need growth for life to be good or for life to improve when the motivation for doing stuff is democratic will not profit life gets better without some rich guy's bank account getting bigger it's the exact opposite of austerity and recessions it's abundance for all even in the midst of bad numbers and I get that this is abstract the bottom line is that when capitalists aren't in charge we don't need to satisfy their needs before Societies or hope that the two coincide it's actually really simple people before profits now does this mean no more crises no definitely not another Global pandemic a massive drought or a war can all still cause problems some things just can't be avoided entirely that's the reality of life we can prepare but we can't always prevent that said within a socialist framework the consequences don't have to be so bad because the first priority isn't company profits an economy that prioritizes human well-being would simply continue to do so even in the midst of a crisis unlike a growth economy which is ready to sacrifice Collective good for a small group of people's numbers to look better a crisis can be weathered instead of becoming an excuse to cut Social Services and grow the capitalist share of the pie like what happens after every crisis in this decaying neoliberal era I know this might sound utopian but it's really not it's necessary it's Common Sense we cannot keep chasing infinite growth on a planet with finite resources and we cannot keep punishing average people for the greed of a few capitalists we can get rid of recessions life can be better for all of us we talked a lot about what recessions look like and who they benefit in this episode so I wanted to take a second to give an example of what recession news coverage looks like using today's sponsor ground news let's take a single story The failure and seizure of First Republic Bank and see what headlines look like from Outlets with corporate or individual ownership remember recessions benefit those with capital so let's see how these news outlets talk about economic downturns here are three headlines from three different groups which most people would say have different interests take a look at how all three convert around the same kind of wording here we have examples of Centrist corporate coverage supposedly unbiased coverage from an outlet with a single wealthy owner and staunchly right wing coverage notice how the story is framed in each ominous comparison but no direct mention of recession deflection by saying this is just a fluke and positive coverage of the prophets JPMorgan Chase will make if you read each of these stories not one of them says the word recession and all of them attempt to reassure the reader that the system works and that JPMorgan Chase has saved the day by omitting certain details or by giving precedence to one quote or fact over another news outlets can frame a story in a way that nudges the reader towards a conclusion that benefits their operation often beholden to obscenely Rich individual owners or a particular flavor of Economics this is something I get asked about a lot how do I help parents or friends break out of their little propaganda bubble it's great to analyze an event like this comparing coverage from different interest groups but it's a lot of work and none of us have time for that that's why I always recommend people check out ground news because it has a ton of really useful tools to make building media literacy skills a lot easier ground news is a web and mobile app that Aggregates over 50 000 news sources and offers intuitive easy to understand comparison tools so you can do things like what we did here see how a particular story is being spun by various corporate Outlets you can also see the political leaning factuality rating and ownership of every single news source right in the app no tedious research required now full disclosure as a socialist I obviously disagree with the placement of some of these outlets for example I don't think CNN should be placed as far left as it is but honestly this might be a good thing when trying to educate friends and family if you come at them with well actually CNN is a right-wing Network they're not going to take you seriously ground news is the perfect first baby step towards media literacy if you're looking for a way to give your friends and family a great set of tools to understand media bias who it serves and how to spot it I highly recommend you check out ground news
By Christian Banza3 years ago in Education
The myth of capitalist peace
war huh yeah what is it good for absolutely nothing Adam Smith 1969. if it seems like we can't get enough of War right now that's because it's true we love war and everyone thinks it's great but back in the old days people used to think war was bad what people only one people men in funny wigs and tall socks during the Enlightenment liberal thinkers were the first to come up with the idea of having a conscience and morals except when it came to non-white people and women who they cleverly figured out aren't people and therefore deserve jacket nonetheless the early thinkers of liberalism figured out doing good things and not doing bad things including because it's the topic of this video on web domain youtube.com War but instead of being all sad about war liberals also figured out how to fix the world and stop war from happening entirely free trade from the first thinkers of liberalism Smith Montesquieu Voltaire Hume Conte to the greatest thinker of our time Bush Jr the idea that Global capitalist free trade means peace and good times for all has well and truly endured and the momentum of freedom is growing we have reached a moment of tremendous promise and the United States will seize this moment for the sake of peace across the globe free markets and trade have helped defeat poverty and taught men and women the habits of Liberty so I propose the establishment of a U.S Middle East free trade area within a decade to bring the Middle East into an expanding circle of opportunity look I'm playing it up a bit but the liberal thesis really isn't that complicated war is bad for business and business is good for business so if countries begin trading together and make it easier by dropping things like tariffs embracing capitalism and the Invisible Hand of the market peace will endure because War becomes just too costly by comparison boom just like that the idea is that a Global Network of mutual interdependence ensures the aggressor in any given conflict can't trigger a war without suffering domestic economic repercussions and that means the appeal of War spoils progressively gives way to what we used to call Peace dividends back in the 2000s everyone's happy and the thing about the capitalist peace theory is that if you think of it in very narrow terms it can kind of make sense there's some logic to it and within very specific parameters there's even some not terrible research backing it up but then there's the other side of the freely traded coin capitalist piece is BS really it's a simple story covering up a brutal reality one of colonialism imperialism exploitation and of course profit let's start with recent history and a pretty unfortunate piece of evidence for the Defenders of capitalist peace what you're looking at right now is a graph it's a graph of BP Chevron Texaco Exxon and other oil companies Returns on Equity relative to the average for a Fortune 500 company what's interesting about this graph is whenever these companies start doing badly and not making as much profit as other Fortune 500 companies suddenly out of nowhere who could have seen this coming and energy conflict begins in the Middle East and then not long after but completely out of nowhere again they all suddenly start performing really well eating up market share and getting returns that the average Fortune 500 company can't the researchers behind this graph actually discovered three things about what it says one every energy conflict in the Middle East was preceded by oil companies having a dip in profits relative to the average two every energy conflict was followed by a period during which the oil companies beat the average and three this is the really damning one with only one exception in 1997 oil companies never managed to beat the average without an energy conflict first taking place to simplify all that and state the most obvious thing about wars in the Middle East war is profitable and peace actively sucks but of course Wars are complicated events and never a matter of one single thing but if I didn't know any better I'd be inclined to say that conflicts in the Middle East weren't thwarted by capitalism nor did they teach people the habits of Liberty and peace so much as they grew the profits of a handful of companies in the Imperial core sadly unfortunately for my shot in the dark guess about why Wars start there is absolutely no evidence of people serving in senior government positions during these wars who benefited from or had any sort of important role in the arms and fossil fuel industry the thing is Wars can be cheap Wars can often even be profitable for a range of domestic Industries unlike what capitalist peace assumes it's not always the case that war is the more costly option not just that we know for a fact that corporations exert a tremendous amount of control over government policy so even if Wars are bad for a lot of people so long as they're good for the few with power Wars just happen pair private interests with states that have the muscle to fight Wars free of consequence and all companies need to figure out is an excuse to start one now for those who defend the capitalist peace Theory the fact that these wars are being waged for capitalist profit and in the case of many Middle Eastern Wars to force free trade agreements isn't necessarily a contradiction free trade trumps everything so they might even argue that one war right now in exchange for peace and profit forever is a good trade-off but obviously this is a no good very bad ew gross argument it's never just one quick war in fact it's been centuries of long and brutal conflict let's talk about the enlightenment again liberal philosophies development historically coincides pretty closely with colonialism and the age of European Empires while philosophy Bros waxed poetic about equality a regime of horror that many of them fully condoned or at minimum considered inevitable was busy plundering the rest of the world piece by piece and it wasn't an accident that the two worked together European capitalists got into colonialism not just for fun not just because they could now that they had their better ships and guns but because they needed to domestic capitalist markets steadily become less profitable and the best solution to that entropy problem is and always has been expansion that was on the material front but they needed justification for what would just be straight up murder and for that the liberal philosopher's rhetoric of bringing civilization and trade to the rest of the globe gave them a clear conscience Wars just became part of the process by which capitalism already associated with the ideas of civilization and freedom and soon enough peace would come to take over the world let me rephrase the point is colonialism didn't come out of nowhere profit demanded that Wars had to be waged just like today powerful countries and the companies that made them up wanted their hands on foreign resources people and markets we don't usually think of colonization as a process of War making nearly as much as we do a process of domination because that second part lasted a lot longer but it's important to mention all the wars that happen for capitalism to expand because that usually gets glossed over in the capitalist peace Theory many places just didn't want so-called free trade or capitalism and getting them to enter the global economy on terms that Favored wealthier Nations took a lot of brutal Wars of Conquest while liberal thinkers developed the idea of gentle Commerce fostering peace all over the world capitalism which always required expansion actively became a catalyst for war instead of an obstacle to it so many European capitalist Nations became colonial empires not for kicks but because their economies required endless growth to survive but ignore for a second the wars that installed capitalism all around the world and let's talk peace real quick the point of peace is that it's not violence obviously people don't love war but with all the unnecessary suffering and death and that's actually a problem for the capitalist peace Theory because even if you discount the wars that made global capitalism possible the picture you're left with isn't actually less violent at best assuming capitalist peace theory is true and countries stop fighting with one another entirely violence in the age of global capitalism changed but didn't go away instead of violence between states the world was left with a permanent state of structural violence turned inward we live under a tremendously violent system that's just part of capitalism if you don't work you go hungry you end up homeless and cops decked out in literal military gear beat you up for the crime of being poor that's the reality of this economic system and it persists despite the fact that we have enough food for everyone enough housing for all and enough capacity to spread work equitably so that it's not nearly so unbearable this violence is completely unnecessary homelessness and hunger don't need to exist given how much we produce but they do simply because making life better and providing for everyone's needs unconditionally generates way less profit than artificial scarcity and Desperation and that's before you factor engendered and racialized violence violence against immigrants crackdowns on protests and all the overt uses of violence that police the strict hierarchy of this system for Society to get as top heavy as it is today without the bigger group of people overthrowing the smaller one a lot of completely unnecessary violence needs to be doled out and that's been true in every era of capitalism it's obvious but just take how capitalism brutalized the African continent in every Century since its arrival first slavery drained Africa of its labor force then Colonial capitalism setup shop for European companies to extract natural resources that hasn't really stopped and in fact skip a few decades and the World Trade Organization World Bank and imf's structural adjustment programs exacerbated these practices these free trade programs required developing countries to completely restructure their economies in favor of Western companies opening up their vast markets to foreign Capital adopting austerity politics that cut essential public services in health Agriculture and education they trapped developing economies in debt reimbursement schemes that drained them of their remaining wealth and just to remind you nobody elected the leaders of these institutions or take an even more recent example like NAFTA free trade between North American states completely destroyed union labor and Mexican agriculture while increasing both malnutrition and unemployment [Music] the extremely long-winded point I'm making is that even if you believed that free trade reduces the likelihood of war the fact remains that everywhere capitalism has extended its logic people were brought into incredibly violent social structures whether that was under Colonial powers or decentralized markets violence doesn't just go away with free trade it turns inward countries might might fight each other less I'll get to that in a second but violence and the threat of its use structures every part of human existence in this Arrangement capitalist peace is still capitalism and peace is just not a word that applies to the kind of Brute Force this relies on but let's get back to the original claim liberals make global capitalism really reduced the likelihood of War just plain boring war two countries duking it out once countries are in a Free Trade Agreement does it stop that yes or no maybe but probably not in truth a lot of research has been devoted to this question and it's not settled that's partly because free trade isn't a binary switch countries can turn on and off and also because bilateralism and multilateralism have very different effects on a country's incentives add to that confounding variables like nuclear arsenals American global hegemony unequal exchange non-capitalist trade agreements and the offshoring of conflicts in proxy wars and it's really hard to Clearly say this one thing is what reduces the incidence of War but forget all that at best liberalized trade seems like it can only delay War temporarily and here we can turn to World War one and Lenin's theory of imperialism to understand why like we just talked about before World War One all the capitalist imperialist powers in Europe went out colonizing the planet and spread out like white supremacist butter on toast English French German Russian and other Empires slowly took over more and more of the planet in search of new markets resources and cheap if not outright free labor and in the process their economies became more entangled with one another money moved all over the place it was a global trading Bonanza and there were European companies everywhere this was the first era of globalized free trade after mercantilism and for a while it actually kind of worked it provided economic growth and accrued power for these Empires thanks to the seemingly endless exploitation on the horizon the problem is that unlimited growth is necessary for this system to work peacefully eventually you run out of room physically and metaphorically Market saturate like a sponge [Music] in order to grow once the whole world was covered countries couldn't just find new people to subjugate or land to plunder growth now had to be at some other country's expense and that's precisely the situation capitalist powers found themselves in on the eve of World War One a bunch of European Alexanders wept for there were no more worlds left to conquer and triggered partly by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand these countries seized the opportunity to go at each other's throats in the hopes of weakening and taking over someone else's Empire to satisfy their own need to grow and I'm using World War one as an example but this problem didn't just disappear today as the world's largest economies compete over International markets whether that's an oil natural gas semiconductors or something else even with incredibly porous borders for Capital to flow through proxy wars pop up all over the place and tensions keep escalating between otherwise loyal trading partners someone does eventually need to get their hands on that profit foreign peace human rights and democracy are all good values but they're not why Wars get fought to take a very cliche example Saudi Arabia wouldn't be a multi-billion dollar trading partner and military ally with the us if we just couldn't tolerate Injustice anywhere in the world it's always for profit so why would capitalism ever get in the way of that capitalism doesn't lead to peace capitalism and peace are incompatible I mentioned at the beginning of the story
By Christian Banza3 years ago in Education
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.
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