Capitalism = Endemic Low Self-Worth

A deconstruction of the psychological side-effects of our current economic system

Ever since I can remember I've had extremely low self-worth.

I've tried everything that I possibly could to fix it; weeks and weeks of Nathaniel Brand's Sentence Completions, a 90 day self-love lifestyle experiment, a 60 day workout regiment, daily meditation, traveling around the world, breathwork, a plethora of psychedelics, all the self-love guided meditations that I could find, cold approaching people in the park, trauma release exercises, core belief rewiring, the list goes on.

Yet I've only found temporary relief, the core wound is still there. Now I’ll take my attempt at answering; What are all the different systems, large and small, that are acting on this core feeling of not being enough?

Let’s start with the Economic System.

💶 The Economic System

Consumerism.

More is better.

Pursuing having more over resting in being.

The paradigm of growth at all costs within business has seeped it's toxic tentacles into my core ontology. Growth at all costs has translated into I'm lacking as I currently am and need to grow in order to 'be enough.'

It shows up in equally in every domain of life.

As I begin traveling there's this incessant grasping for more experiences. I've always criticized acquiring excess material possessions to try to fill the void within, but now I'm ironically doing the same thing with experience. No matter how many experience I hoard I still feel hollow.

As I traverse different cities throughout Mexico and Guatemala I'm feeling this pang of regret for all the cities I didn't get a chance to see.

Why is there always this feeling that there's something missing?

I posit that our economic system's core paradigm of perpetual growth generates our fundamental feeling of lack.

Charles Eisenstein points out in Sacred Economics that anytime a bank lends money into existence it comes with debt and because there's interest on that debt it's always greater than the amount of money in existence. Which creates perpetual competition and rivalry amongst everyone in society.

In the next article we'll be zooming in and looking at how these rivalrous dynamics play into marketing and the effects of marketing on our psyche.

Much love,

Ethan Nelson