Why Objectifying Yourself for Capitalism is Killing You
Burnout
0:00
/463.046531
- Burnout isn’t mere fatigue but an existential illness caused by the commodification of humanity.
- Art, when it’s done for its own sake, heals the rift between the ego and the subconscious.
- Creativity contains a spiritual signature handwritten in your human experience. Depriving that expression comes with a deep exhaustion that sleep can’t heal.
When I was a child my mind was filled with my favorite things. My favorite toys, my favorite shows, and my favorite foods lived in my head rent-free. When I became an adult all I could think about was money.
You can’t have much a life in this society without it. We all want more personal space and more personal time than someone living under a highway bridge. Even if that time is spent drinking to cope with work-related stress.
What is burnout, and how does objectifying ourselves for the capitalist dreams of our employers alienate us from our deepest personal sense of self? And how does art fix anything?
Burnout isn’t a mere form of fatigue that can be remedied by relaxation and cracking open a cold one with the boys. It’s an existential detachment from the self. An amputation of the soul. The exhaustion is merely a symptom of a deeper problem. You can relate if you’ve ever taken a few days off work to get as much rest as possible, but returned to work feeling unrestored. You’re not tired of putting in work. You’re tired of putting in work that alienates you from your humanity.
Hell let’s take your perfect day. Imagine your favorite restaurants, time with your closest friends, your favorite park, and your ideal itinerary. If you looped through that same day for eternity, how many days would it take you to become sick of it? More of the same, even if it’s your ideal, is going to make you sick eventually. Diversity of nutrition, conversation and experiences are necessary for your physical and mental health. How much regard does your employer have for those needs?
Unplugging From the Influencer Brand Matrix
Take Your Humanity Back From Engagement Metrics * Branding warps your personality into a marketable product—kill it before it kills your creativity. * Engagement metrics are hollow dopamine traps, not measures of real human connection. * Raw, imperfect, and honest content builds genuine relationships; perfection is performative. * Stop optimizing for virality; start
Derek GuzmanDerek Guzman
How often do they switch up your schedule and your environment to keep things fresh at the office? Valuing your human needs would be counterintuitive to their budget making you too expensive of an employee. They need low-maintenance people, preferably who don’t need to leave the office to attend to their children or elderly parents, who can commit the same actions, the same thoughts, dealing with the same people, and the same emotions day after day.
And for what? To objectify you for profit? To commodify your humanity for the pursuit of someone else’s dreams? They’ve got us believing we need to spend our entire lives working for the possibility of a retirement that may not be there when it’s time to cash out.
What about you?
What about your dreams?
Do you remember what they are?
Did you ever feel that you were allowed to have any?
Art engages the opposite identity that capitalism invokes from you. Where capitalism seeks to domesticate the human soul for business needs art is the release of the creative force of your psychology that engages your sense of meaning and purpose. What is the point of art?
That you fucking like it.
Rekindling the Flame
Restoring Love of Craft Through Self-Compassion Rekindling the Flame0:00/793.5477551× * As adults, we often abandon the spontaneous, joyful creativity of our childhood due to mounting responsibilities, external judgments, and the pressure to monetize or perfect our art. * Social expectations and fears of being “uncool” or “unproductive” push us
Derek GuzmanDerek Guzman
The creative power of humanity begins the moment you look at your progress on the canvas, listen to a melody you composed, or review your dance choreography and realize there’s something that falls short of your aesthetic vision. It’s missing a dash of something that will make it pop.
Why?
Because of your personal preference. You’re cooking to taste. You’re creating something in your image. You’re exercising your role as a creator. You’re expressing yourself through a medium. And the aesthetics need to reflect your vision. A vision that is, itself, a projection of the deepest parts of your soul.
Why?
For no fucking reason. Reasons are what get listed on company emails and political agendas. You’re a human-being unfathomably beyond comprehension. There’s a subconscious aspect to our psychologies that are purely irrational. A languageless contextless experience. Art converts the ego into an avatar for that subconscious. You’re alchemically transubstantiating the vast wordless intuition of your human experience into a monument of your truth. No longer a slave to words, numbers, and reasons--humanity transcends meaning and purpose embracing being, loving, and sharing. Things we can’t reduce to the symbolic languages that convenience the frontal lobe of the brain.
You’re alchemically transubstantiating the vast wordless intuition of your human experience into a monument of your truth.
You don’t even need the traditional mediums like a canvas or a music production studio to engage the artistic state of mind. Take those repetitive days we talked about earlier. Become an agent of your own will and change those days to your preference. Bend the use of time, meaning, or day-dreaming that goes into them. Creatively rearrange each day to more deeply engage your day-to-day human needs. Cooking those days to taste is as much of an artistic task as arranging an oil-painting because artistry is a lifestyle. A state of being. An alignment of the ego and the subconscious.
Find Your Voice Like a Thief
How Stealing the Swag of Artists That Came Before You Builds on Art History Find Your Voice Like a Thief0:00/533.551021× * All great artists, from Da Vinci to Michelangelo, built on the ideas of those who came before them, transforming rather than merely imitating. * Leonardo da Vinci’s
Derek GuzmanDerek Guzman
Naturally, you can’t afford to have this mentality too often in the capitalist hellscape. Your personal needs aren’t going to line up with business needs often enough to feel healthy. But that’s how you’re being alienated from yourself. Bastardized from the subconscious, the ego is commodified into human capital. We don’t need a science fiction like The Matrix to fantasize about soulless machines sucking the life out of humanity for the benefit of a system that doesn’t value us. We can just look at capitalism.
The needs beneath your skin aren’t answered by the economic system we live in today. So you have to take personal responsibility for those needs during your personal time. Or risk an incurable burnout. A deep fatigue that never disappears no matter how responsibly you try to pay your sleep debt.
Creativity is world-building and fantasy-building. It’s hungry, horny, and needy. Which is why generative AI can’t replace artists. It has no vision of a moral good for the human condition. It just spits something that resembles human output while having nothing that resembles a lived human experience. Creativity has aesthetic preferences born from painful life lessons. It inherently possesses a moral compass molded by lived consequences.
The subconscious doesn’t understand your ego narrative about money, bills, taxes, debt, or retirement. It just feels your sensory experience and reacts. We evolved through millions of years of eating, shitting, and fucking while the human brain hasn’t structurally evolved in tens of thousands of years to accommodate for this boom of Information Age technology. Depression, anxiety, and burnout are the subconscious expressions of deep frustration with that tension. It’s sick.
The soul is sick. Sick and tired of living up to valuations and appraisals you never consented to. You’re not going to find the cure for that capitalist suffocation through the market. Take your power back. Take your humanity back.
Even if you create art for a living keep some work sacred. Work that never makes it to a gallery or an online portfolio. Do something for no reason. Create something for no reason. Pick up a paint brush for nothing. Sell it to no one. Create for yourself and your truth, not the gallery. And fuck anyone who tries putting a price tag on your soul.
