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Let’s Talk About Capitalism and Mental Health.
What our economic system is doing to us psychologically.
There are mornings where I’ve woken up, and the feeling of depression and anxiety at the thought of going to work was so all-consuming I actually threw up. It got so bad at one point at my old job that I lost twelve pounds over the course of a little over a week. I was down to barely over ninety pounds.
Even now, working at a job with coworkers who have become like family, I still get that feeling frequently. It’s not as pronounced as it was at the previous job, but it’s become almost like a soft, constant drumbeat there in the back of my mind.
What am I even doing here?
The feeling of being stuck, tied to a job where you make next to nothing living in an area with little employment opportunity can literally suck the life out of you if you let it, and it’s almost impossible not to.
We’ve all felt it. Burnout.
“Burnout” has become so profound and widespread that the World Health Organization has actually classified it as a real occupational phenomenon. According to the WHO:
“Burn-out is a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. It is characterized by three…
