Amidst the numbing set of realities that face our species and our planet–that corporations are commoditizing ecosystems into inputs that become the shitty products we buy, that we choose to machinize living animals into factory farm inputs, that the hyper-abundance of wealth created by fictionalized financial schemes has enabled an ever-growing industrial war machine and increasing inequality–we are faced with the fundamental choice of what actions we choose to take. It feels like there’s no time to grieve what we’ve lost, whether it’s been collective histories, ecosystems, or lives. Many have no choice but to fight back. I’ve been lucky enough to be alongside Indigenous peoples fighting land dispossession from energy companies in Colombia and residents of my American hometown demanding accountability for the industries poisoning their air, water, and soil. 

But for so many of us, including myself, the gifts of capitalist abundance have materially served our needs. I live in a city where a desk job pays me enough to sustain a life surrounded by friends. I never worry about whether I will be able to eat, even if I scour the digital coupons of competing grocery stores I walk to. The current of my consumptive life frictionlessly carries me forward, pacifying me with comfort while physically separating me from the underbelly of cruelty undergirding our political economy.

Modern global capitalism’s raw destruction–its pillage of ecosystems for fossil fuels, its subjugation of human creativity into mechanized labor, its increasingly dematerial and institutionalized integration into the paper pushing of corporate bureaucracy–cannot be separated from the material abundance that sustains my life. It produces the always-in-season produce section at the grocery store and the washing machine that churns my clothes in industrial soap. By the sheer privilege of chance, I have grown accepting these riches as given. But perhaps my freedom to consume was never a choice to begin with: it was a bargain made for me. In exchange for losing my freedom to control my food supply; succumbing to my wage-based employment that leaves me exhausted at the end of each day; and clawing meticulously to climb the job ladder to pay for continually escalating costs–I will never be bored. This freedom of choice creates a bounty of gifts, harmful and precious: of processed fast-food and the joys of traveling affordably; of YouTube short-video slop and medicine treating my grandmother’s degenerative illness. To some extent, capitalism is the hammer pounding exponentially more nails, and we use them both to build shelter and deepen our wounds. 

It feels impossible to verbalize the contradictions that permeate our economic and social lives; it feels much easier to numbly accept the world as it is. These material gifts, whether for our benefit or harm, are what make confronting the ecological and social horrors underlying their reproduction so easy to ignore. We are captured by capitalist amnesia, pacified to the cruelty of capitalism’s frictionlessness, forgetting that we are feeling people above individual consumers and producers. How can we act if it is so easy to forget? 

Our voices cannot be commoditized

I am reminded of a voice that first came to me at the age of 15 after a terrible loss. Depression began whispering to me, then, from within me, within my own heart. Perhaps it had been there all along, waiting for the silence that only grief could produce. 

The voice told my body to collapse into space, rendering me heavy and invisible. At that moment, I did not feel the current of youthful joy and blissful ignorance I’d grown accustomed to throughout my childhood. Instead, I felt submerged in an ocean, buried deep with a bitterness that was quickly growing within my soul. I could not speak–all words would be unintelligible. I could not breathe–I would swallow water. But I could sit there, holding my breath, unable to escape the deep undercurrent and reach the waves above. All I could do was sit in the conviction that I was alone and feel depression uncovering my pain from wherever I had hid it, while the rest of the world continued on.

Depression, for me, is that which I’ve only been able to articulate with time by excavating the remnants of truth by removing the debris of my reactions and rationalizations. Underneath self-criticism and distraction, there is pain and sorrow. But the voice coming from my soul is not a sickness–it is a friend that demands to be understood on its own terms. Amidst a world of distracted pleasures, depression is a voice forcing me to live with the fact that my shadows were to inevitably follow my body, that sadness could move me as much as the currents of passivity. These emotions are mine and mine only, the friction to a world carrying me along its current towards a destination I cannot choose.

The heart tells me to stop

In a frictionless world, my depression becomes my alarm, wiping away my capitalist amnesia. It hits me as overwhelming guilt and grief, as the streets of my city reveal their pulsing energy–a rat race. As I pass by the homeless, the jobless, the amalgamation of bodies who can no longer walk due to diabetes and heart disease where cigarette butts and the smell of urine fill the air, my heart demands that I stop, stay, and yell into the streets that this is all unfair. Like Octavia Butler’s Lauren Olamina in Parable of the Sower, physically hobbled by empathy, I clench my teeth to keep my body from crumbling around my heart. I ask myself whether it is possible to express kindness to someone else when I walk away from them in need, whether I can swallow the reality of the structural circumstances that put people in precarity while accepting the limits of my empathy. My voice does not elucidate a path forward, but it reminds me that my material freedom cannot hide my soul’s cries.

I cannot choose to feel what I feel. What freedom I believe I have dissipates into the complicity and guilt that I live while others die, in part due to my obligation to get my paycheck in a system that I’m clawing to stay alive in. My grief comes from the fact that humanity’s ability to serve one another feels inescapably stolen by the scarcity of time imposed by the labor we all must complete to individually stay afloat. My horror comes from the fact that if I were in the same situation, I would face the same indifference. My inner voice does not just scream at the vast inequity of human suffering. It screams at the numbness all around me. And it screams for an increasingly mechanized planet who cries out as its open wounds are repeatedly hammered into by a million nails. 

The language of loss

My depression teaches me that to be moved by grief is to feel one’s heart speak the language of loss. Amidst waves of material comfort thrashing me into numbness, my heart voices the suffering that inevitably exists in a world increasingly mechanized and atomized into impersonal transactions. It uncovers the unfreedom of the role I’ve unwittingly played to keep working, consuming, pacifying myself instead of renouncing my inhumanity. To stop moving would be to be steeped in the pain and the sorrow of my unfreedom, but to continue would be to accept that I am a machine. Pain hurts me. But it is also a reminder that I can love deeply, for my love can only come from the understanding that I lost, lose, and will lose someone, something dear. And that is what makes me human, what gives me the freedom to love instead of remaining numb.

American capitalism operates by separating the underclass and the unemployed into the incarcerated and the hopeless, while threatening those of us lucky enough to skim a small layer of the wealth and abundance beneath debt like milk foam from our disposable coffee cups. It’s much less painful to navigate the world under the justification of self-responsibility and impersonal privacy. But the painful, debilitating, unproductive empathy–the voice telling me that we are all suffering in a frictionless and disposable world, reminds me that I am much more moved by love than amnesia, much more willing to put my heart on the line for others than protect myself.

There must be a purpose to the love brought by grief that numbness cannot replace, a reason why our hearts feel even when our brains may just as easily accept indifference. The rational choice is one that we’ve grown accustomed to taking–ignoring our grief in the pursuit of frictionlessness and numbness made possible by capitalism’s material riches. If we keep walking, if we keep working, then we can stop feeling.Conversely, depression has shown me the danger of mourning too long. To replace consuming with being consumed by pain, to atomize systemic problems into individual scapegoats, to resort to hating humanity as the only possible explanation of evil, have been the crutches of hatred making me feel morally righteous on my pedestal while my screams rebound back onto me.I try, with difficulty, to hear the voice of depression as a reminder that I may still love, even as capitalism metabolizes bodies and fossil fuels into frictionless cogs. Recognizing the inhumanity behind the painlessness reminds me that my screams are my song, my pain my prose, and my friction my flashlight in a colorless world. And if I may love through loss, then others must as well. Perhaps capitalism’s greatest strength–its ability to produce inconceivable material abundance while fundamentally altering our social chemistry–produces its weakness. Its waste products are the friction of emotion that it cannot commoditize, the language to acknowledge our unfreedom and to make sense of the road beyond our amnesia. For the more of us that follow our grief to love, the more of us may hammer new homes out of recovered nails.

I grieve not only at the screams that engulf me, but also at the possibility that I will be so overwhelmed by the weight of the world that I will lose the capacity to grieve. I worry that my pain will slowly lead to indifference and acceptance, that the burdens of individual responsibility will consume my ability to care for others, that I will force myself to ignore that underneath the chaos of cheap thrills and mortgage bills lies a voice that capitalism cannot take away from me. My freedom is the ability to act based on what grieving tells me, even if the cost is pain.

Depression is one part of what comprises my ensemble. Its voice sings alongside my joy, peace, and anger, and growing with it has meant learning how to listen to its essential notes while not letting it overshadow its counterparts. And when I listen to it and when I feel, I hear a composition ever more stunning and complete. I see it more and more in people around me–not just a sense that they are being cheated by a system designed for them to lose, but that they’re searching for the language to describe a loneliness and grief that consumption cannot quench. I share what my soul cries because it resonates with the voices that so many of us contain. They are searching for community. And that is our freedom as feelers–to remind others that we are not machines but rather humans that may choose to listen to our voices and love even when we do not have to. This is our burden. This is our gift.

This piece was written by Rishab Jagetia in his personal capacity, and the opinions expressed in this article are the author's own and do not reflect the view of his employer.