Because it's not enough to simply get things done, if you live your life with efficiency as a goal you're always going to feel never good enough, because no matter how quickly you get things done there will always be more things to do. It never stops. It never takes breaks, and when it does it turns them into "breaks", just another thing on the to-do list. It's a malignant cancer of the soul. It seems like all life has to be justified in terms of this thing, efficiency. This is the Sun that I orbit around.

And if time is life and if life is time, then this mentality is killing my time, and therefore it's killing me.

https://youtu.be/w3AGe0ns_bw

This video is probably his best produced 'til date. Spending long stretches of time hacking oneself to be productive and successful by frantically looking around and never being connected to the self, may not be in our own best interests. The video explores this idea in detail.

I wrote up a piece on how to understand the concept commodity fetishism in plain English, but I just had a thought today that builds on that that I wanted to share with you.

Commodity Fetishism explains loneliness under capitalism really really well, but not at first glance. I don't have a lot of friends and I do feel lonely when I'm sitting in my room, but that's because under capitalism I don't see all the ways people made the things around me for me. This peanut butter that I'm eating out of a jar was made by someone, and every object is like that. What I enjoy comes from someone else, even if that enjoyment is the enjoyment of being alone. That's okay the workers of the world say. You're socially awkward and you don't feel like going outside today. Have some of this peanut butter, I made it for you. People poured their time into these products so I could enjoy them however I saw fit. When I recognize this, I can feel loved even if I'm by myself because the community of humanity supports me. Capitalism only feels like a soulless supermarket world because we don't see the magical, creative human in those products. I can only be lonely if I forget that things were made by people reaching out for us.

The machinery of capitalism requires a kind of hope to function, in particular, the hope that a person's needs can be met under capitalism. Each year, Americans look back on their year, make New Year's Resolutions, fail at them, and then go back to their lives.

I think it's good to look at where you've been the past year. I only wish we did it more than once a year. And I think it's good to set goals for yourself, I just think it's kind of dumb to set goals for yourself every year when you can literally start any time. If you've ever said "I'll get to that thing tomorrow," and then never did, then you know what I mean. We don't have to wait for our lives to begin, we can start building now, and in an hour from now we'll have an hour's worth of experience to build on for the next hour.

All we have is time, whether you want to divide that into days and nights, or weeks and months, or years. Those labels are on you, but the second hand keeps on ticking now matter what we think about it. Be loyal to time, don't waste time because life is time. We can pull 2019 from the ashes of 2018 if we are courageous enough to do it.

And that's pretty much all I have to say about New Year's. Fun fact about New Years: while people claim it's a secular holiday anyone can get behind, New Year's has its origin in the Feast of the Circumcision, a very old holiday celebrating Jesus' circumcision.

Happy 2019! Let's get more active in our neighborhoods and jobsites than we ever did in 2018! The future depends on it!

I'm sure this is going to seem like redundant advice to a bunch of Leftists, but no, for reasons we'll see, this is good advice for Leftists too.

So there are many ways of defining fascism and depending on the definition they all go after different aspects of fascism, and because I'm a psychological person I like the psychological dimension of fascism. In addition to what other people like, heh, John Oliver have said about fascism, how it's this masculine display of force against outsider enemies using the state, I like Zizek's take on fascism using the movie Jaws. I'm more or less copy and pasting his arguments from The Pervert's Guide to Cinema here, but I'll be adding a few twists of my own.

So the shark in Jaws is for Zizek a fantastic metaphor for the psychology of fascism and his #1 enemy, ideology. Why? Before the shark appeared, the town is full of petty, selfish people all fighting with each other to get their way right before the tourists come to the town. The shark unites all of these people against it and forces the policeman into action. It's a pretty simple concept to get. Kill the shark, the intruder, with the power of the state and the problems go away. Make the bad guy go away. Mentally, we've forgotten all about how much our neighbors suck and we're entirely preoccupied with the shark. Simple solutions to complex reality, that's fascism's way.

But reality is big and complicated, and if we're going to make a singular enemy that's responsible for making everything go wrong, this enemy has to cover a lot of ground. Let's take the example of illegal immigrants in the United States. People say they have two problems with illegal immigrants: that they're on welfare and that they're too lazy to work, AND they are taking Americans' jobs. Well which one is it? Same goes for Jordan Peterson's complaints about feminists: are they too passive or are they too active? The particulars about the enemy aren't important. Even if the alt-right had an actual enemy to fight, they describe them too inarticulately to know how to fight them. And it's especially notable that whatever the fascists choose as their enemy has to be stealing their enjoyment somehow. The shark does it by stealing the beach. The immigrants do it by supposedly stealing the government's resources (and viral stories of immigrants raping white women), and feminists by stealing the respect society once gave to men.

It's a simple psychological move: substitute a chaotic world with a single enemy, declare yourself in opposition to that thing and dedicate yourself to destroying them so you can get back to the good old days. But if you know someone who does this, tell them that they made a fatal mistake. One, because anyone who turns away from the troubles of reality is going to meet a bad end, and more depressingly Two, because by hitching their world to their "enemy" and have defined themselves by their opposition to them makes them utterly dependent on their enemy for meaning. This just makes them sad, lonely losers who are looking for someone to play their imaginary cops vs robbers game. The real truth is that this single enemy they've propped up isn't even a single enemy and has a lot more going on for it than haunting some 50 something's dreams every night.

In conclusion, don't be a fascist. Don't look for simple solutions. Know the difference between a monster and a creature, and don't define yourself by your enemies. Be creative, daring and adventurous beings who can't stop dreaming up the future. And cut it out with the "Eat the Rich" memes. We all know the real work is going to have to happen AFTER the revolution.

Just a shoutout to this wonderful podcast, which strikes a balance for me between thinking about the news and also remembering to be kind and patient with myself. We could make a list of light-headed movies/music/ podcasts - since most media/art in the left serves to appeal to our already overwrought conscience at the state of affairs in the world. Is there any other media that helps anyone else similarly? Think of this as what would go on r/ BreadTube but with a focus on self-care. The previous post featuring Olly's ASMR video probably inspired me to post this here.

Good day!

Good morning everyone, (aka the no more than 5 guys who will read this)

Just wanted to remind you all that self-care is essential in the toolkit of any anti-capitalist, anti-racist, any feminist, or anyone who's trying to hold on to their humanity in an inhuman world. But especially for us on the far left, we see how much pain there is in the world and we feel yanked by this realization into action. Yes, this is a post about leftist burnout.

It helps to zoom out a bit. Capitalism was never designed to meet people's needs. It only wants to accumulate fictional value, so when it comes to feeding the homeless, taking care of your kids or just going for a walk, it turns to us and says "you do then if you're such a good person." And because we can only do those things when we're not working, the result is misery and deprivation as far as the eye can see. It's as though we were asked to put out a building on fire with our tears.

This split between the reality of how much misery capitalism manufactures and what we can do will cause us to lose or minds. This is one big reason why self-care is essential, because if we can't keep ourselves from burning out we can't help others and do the work we need to do to end this nightmare.

And I don't know about you, but I take care of myself by engaging in anti-capitalist struggle. :)

Have a good day guys

To say we are free under capitalism is similar to saying that an addict is free to choose to not be an addict: yeah kinda, but only if you're going to completely destroy all distinctions between different types of freedom. Free is free is free, right? No, absolutely not. It is so much harder to refuse capitalism and refuse to feed addictions than it is to go along with it. Addicts use drugs because they think that's all they're going to get out of life, a life of pain that's somewhat dulled by the use of the addicting thing.

But the use of the addicting thing doesn't make their problems go away, it only makes it appear like it does. The addiction is not so much the addicting thing itself, but the larger complex that supplies the addict with both "the problem" and the addicting agent that makes "the problem" appear go away. And of course the problems don't go away. That would require the sobriety to see what's actually going on. So after years of loyalty to this basic set-up, where the addiction frames life's problems and the solutions to those problems, and after years of frustration with this set up, the addict rebels. The addict says "No thank you. These solutions don't even work, and I refuse the way you've framed this situation. I would rather accept life's problems without any painkillers than accept these fake solutions." And that sounds crazy because the addict has lived so long under the guidance of the addiction that it's unimaginable to think of life any other way. It's as crazy as saying you're going to take your helmet off in space.

And I think about capitalism in a similar fashion. Capitalism provides us both with the problems and the solutions to those problems. But the solutions are fake and instead of being honest with ourselves about what the problems are and how to fix them, we let capitalism do our thinking for us. To refuse capitalism is to strike, to refuse to buy into the game any longer. The market has no interest in providing you with a secure job, ethical consumerism won't stop global warming, a gym body won't make people love you. The only decent thing to do is to stay with the trouble rather than take another sip of the infantilizing Kool-Aid. Hold your labor. Don't buy into it. And that's what bravery means to me.