Capitalism Ate My Cat!
By Sarah Phillips
I’m a creative person. I spend my days writing poems, thinking about writing poems, reading, watching tv, listening to music and otherwise engaging with art in every form. Even if I don’t practice the medium of art, I’m still appreciative of the time and care it takes to complete it. As I near graduation and entering the working world, I find my creativity stifled under a load of job applications and incoming meaningless responsibilities.
Why does it matter if my art is marketable? Why do I have to make a name for myself? Why does money exist and why does it control every decision I make? I ponder these questions late into the night and it often leads to frustration and many, many angry diary entries.
Capitalism as a construct makes the art of innovation and moving forward a solitary, business focused effort, rather than something that will aid the common good. A well meaning start up can easily turn into a machine of greed and overwork. A passion project can easily be commodified into its ability to sell. A non-profit can be forced to choose brief immorality for the greater good. Unless you are born or come into wealth, your passion or passions will have a hard time being funded, especially if no investor or benefactor sees promise in them. This leads to lack of creating for the sake of creating and stifles our innate love of art under layers of finances, investments and overall corporate mundanity.
Even if you are making a decent amount of money from a 9-5, how much time are you really left with to endeavor in hobbies or other interests. The lifestyle of work and the system of relying on money exhausts us. Work is not inherently a bad thing, however. We need doctors to heal, engineers to fix, biologists to hold everything together. Though these spaces have become commodified through being more desirable, respectable, and far reaching options over those in the arts, many people do study them out of a genuine interest to innovate. How does passion get turned into monotonous work structure and corporate greed, as we see in these fields today? It’s the fact that a majority of people become a cog in these machines, focusing on product over innovation. A well meaning engineering student sees the salary of a place like Lockheed Martin and drops all good intentions down the toilet in favor of making bombs to support the global war machine. It’s because we, as a society, have built money up as the ultimate good and as our highest level of need.
The idea is: if you have more money, you have more time to create, but the money doesn't come without mind-numbing work which makes all you want to do after a long day veg out and couch and watch reality TV. We are only in control of our circumstances so much. Our success in American society will always depend on how much our innovation and ingenuity breed profit. Hobbies are hobbies, but living and basic needs are what you need to survive. If you want to eat, you have to work. This, to many, counts as in our base needs. But why can’t happiness and the ability to create, count in that as well?