A Simple Way to Care for Your Body and Bank Account

It’s the most expensive time of the year. From Halloween until the New Year’s ball dropping, we’re told it’s time to go shopping, but “late-stage capitalism” is exhausting.

Also known as “late capitalism” or “end-stage capitalism,” a term coined by German economist Werner Sombart at the turn of the 20th century, it perfectly describes our present reality. With the fight or flight response to the pandemic wearing off, it could also explain why many Americans are feeling tired.

Annie Lowrey wrote in The Atlantic back in 2017 that the phrase was “suddenly everywhere.”

“A job advertisement celebrating sleep deprivation? That’s late capitalism. Free-wheeling Coachella outfits that somehow all look the same and cost thousands of dollars? Also, late capitalism. Same goes for this wifi-connected $400 juicer that does no better than human hands, Pepsi’s advertisement featuring Kendall Jenner, United Airlines’ forcible removal of a seated passenger who just wanted to go home, and the glorious debacle that was the Fyre Festival,” Lowrey explained.

These are my sentiments exactly.

She provides clear examples of the absurdity and irrationality of the current economic system made clear by the pandemic. Capitalism is just not working for many Americans.

With more time alone with their thoughts, many have become armchair philosophers and the work week grind increasingly doesn’t make sense.

It turns out that if you sit in your house long enough, you can hear the gears of the capitalist machinery. If you look hard enough, you can see where you fit in the rotation and realize why the current system is self-defeating.

Working to go shopping, working to barely make a living, working to keep up with the Kardashians who will never be in touch with your reality is not something we should all strive for.

I am so tired of clicking, subscribing, watching and engaging. I am tired of buying and the rise in prices is not encouraging. Blame it on inflation due to corporations that raise the price to increase their profit margins.

“Inflation is eating into everyone’s paycheck — unless you’re a CEO,” wrote Allison Morrow, senior editor at CNN Business.

The Economic Policy Institute found that CEO compensation in 2021 had risen to nearly 1500% above 1978 levels and company executives are being paid nearly 400 times more than the average worker.

With numbers like these, I don’t suspect that we’ll stop talking about late capitalism any time soon. But Karl Marx talked about it long before now.

In the first volume of Capital: A Critique of the Political Economy, Marx wrote: “It is not enough that the conditions of labour are concentrated at one pole of society in the shape of capital, while at the other pole are grouped masses of men who have nothing to sell but their labour-power. Nor is it enough that they are compelled to sell themselves voluntarily. The advance of capitalist production develops a working class which by education, tradition and habit looks upon the requirements of that mode of production as self-evident natural laws. The organization of the capitalist process of production, once it is fully developed, breaks down all resistance.”

However, when a paycheck is broken down and it doesn’t keep up with the cost of living, there will be resistance.

First, there was the “Great Resignation,” which continues, soon followed by “quiet quitting” as persons realize that they do not want to live to work or vice versa.

Employees no longer believe that if they stay late and work harder that their commitment to a company will eventually pay off. No longer willing to work their fingers to the bones, they are unsubscribing from the hustle culture.

“Rest is resistance because it disrupts and pushes back against capitalism and white supremacy,” says Tricia Hersey, founder of The Nap Ministry and author of the newly released Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto.

Also known as the Nap Bishop, Hersey encourages her members to take naps as an affirmation of their humanity and to break away from systems that exhaust too much of our time.

So, if you rubbed your eyes or yawned while reading my words, then it might be time for a nap. You don’t earn it through vacation days. That’s not how it works.

Replace “it’s that time of year” with “it’s that time of the day,” and instead of shopping, try napping. Your body and your bank account will be better for it.