July 31st, 2024 ~ thinking about capitalism

I feel like a lot of people have been struggling to work lately, but I think I might know part of the reason. Not only is finding and keeping work extremely difficult right now, but prices are also skyrocketing (at least in the USA). On top of that, the majority of the workforce as it stands is mostly 20-something year old people. If you think about that, then you can piece together that most 20-somethings have a more open mind about the world than their predecessors. We are more likely to seek therapy and want to receive help, and we are more likely to seek rest and repair ourselves. I feel like all of the older people I know pushed past extreme and undue amounts of trauma because they had no choice. Therapy was seen as a taboo to both my parents. However, to us it feels like a valid and sometimes even necessary option, especially when thinking about breaking the cycle of abuse. But, we cannot afford it. We cannot afford therapy, we cannot afford to rest, we must keep working, we must keep making money, we must be able to afford food, rent, clothes, etc. While past generations had no hope for their own personal healing (and I'm saying this extremely generally, with the framework that most of the older adults in my life would refuse these notions, obviously there are exceptions), we do. However, we cannot fully access it. We are stuck in a weird limbo where we know things can be better, but we cannot make it better. Thus, we struggle to continue forward in a much different way than our parents did. They had to employ years and years of repression, swallowing their emotions, and shape themselves into cogs in order to survive - which isn't entirely their fault. We don't have to repress it all, though we still repress some.