How Society Colonizes Our Mind Space
Photo by Hasan Almasi on Unsplash
I spend so much of my time on numbers. I worry about how much I am spending. I fret over bills and filing taxes and whether or not I can meet a healthcare deductible. I look at my retirement accounts and chart out the thin red line on my computer screen, looking at a date decades into the future when I might not have to worry as much about money.
I then am pulled to the present and worry about the numbers for my job. I pore over click rates and read times. I study SEO optimizations and organic marketing strategies. I keep spreadsheets upon spreadsheets of application deadlines, hoping that this next listing will push me over the edge for that day, month, or year.
On my groggiest days, I do not have much mental and emotional space left. If I have time, I will watch a TV Show, send a quick meme to a friend, or play a video game. Sometimes I spend so much of my time thinking about these numbers and dates that I can’t go to sleep. I play them over and over again in my mind until my legs twitch and I struggle to breathe. I pound my fist against my chest, hoping to clear my mind — to push the white noise of facts and obligations outside my body into the world where they belong.
In the process of all this worry, I neglect many things I truly care about: I miss the ability to sit in on meetings for my local city council or activist organization; passion projects wither; birthdays pass me by; plans go by the wayside.
We are taught that this society improves our lives, and in some tangible ways, it does, but more often than not, it demands our time in exchange. We are forced to entertain so many useless endeavors so that we can live, and in the process, all of us lose out on the space not only to work on things that we enjoy but labor that could benefit society as a whole.
Chances are that you worry about the same numbers that I do. In the States, most of us fret about taxes and healthcare costs because not doing so will cost you even more time and money down the line. If you don’t figure out how to optimize your tax bill or spend hours researching healthcare plans, assuming you are even given the privilege to spend this time at all, it can cost you hundreds, maybe even thousands of dollars in fees and penalties. Millions of Americans owe billions to the IRS in back taxes every year, and even more people struggle to pay medical bills and debts.
These systems, however, are overly complicated by design. It’s been revealed, in part thanks to brilliant reporting by ProPublica, that the corporations Intuit (the maker of TurboTax) and H&R Block have for years lobbied the US government to make filing taxes purposefully obscure. As Justin Elliott and Paul Kiel write in ProPublica:
“For more than 20 years, Intuit has waged a sophisticated, sometimes covert war to prevent the government from [filing our taxes]…The company unleashed a battalion of lobbyists and hired top officials from the agency that regulates it. From the beginning, Intuit recognized that its success depended on two parallel missions: stoking innovation in Silicon Valley while stifling it in Washington. Indeed, employees ruefully joke that the company’s motto should actually be “compromise without integrity.””
Many countries around the world prefill your taxes for you, leading to a process that not only takes minutes but is completely free. Yet because of a single company's greed, Americans spend over 15 hours preparing their tax returns. “Americans spend more time every year doing their taxes than playing golf — and golf takes ages,” jokes the website Quartz. We waste space within our minds tabulating numbers and figures so that two predatory companies can turn a profit.
The same can be said of healthcare as well. At 17.7 percent of our GDP, the US spends more on healthcare than any other country, but we do not see this in terms of outcomes. Our system is not only inefficient and expensive (with two-thirds of all bankruptcies citing medical issues as a key contributor), but it leads to a lot of wasted time. According to one study, we spend 45 minutes per health appointment traveling and waiting to be seen.
We then spend an inordinate amount of time navigating insurance companies to figure out what they do and do not cover and arguing for them to cover the medication and procedures that they should. “I consider myself a smart person, and my siblings are smart,” one person told Elemental on their difficulty in selecting an insurance plan, “but it’s just so baffling. So much is at stake. That’s why it’s even more horrible.” Healthcare costs remain frustratingly obtuse in the United States, with the cost insurance providers will cover often not learned about until after a patient has been billed.
Unsurprisingly, this confusing state of affairs is something actively maintained by healthcare companies and organizations. There have been decades of lobbying efforts from the likes of the Federation of American Hospitals and the American Medical Association (AMA), some of which are still ongoing, to kill government alternatives to private health insurance or even just greater regulation on the costs of drugs and services. As Jill Quadagno wrote in 2004:
“From the New Deal of the 1930s to the 1970s, the chief obstacle to national health insurance was organized medicine…Across two-thirds of a century, physicians and their allies lobbied legislators, cultivated sympathetic candidates through large campaign contributions, organized petition drives, created grassroots protests, and developed new “products” whenever government action seemed imminent.”
Once you see this pattern, you find it everywhere. Ever wonder why retirement accounts are so complicated or the fact that you have to buy title deed insurance when buying a home? Actors within those industries lobbied local, state, and federal politicians to make the world slightly more complicated. No one designed our system to be this way. It’s the result of thousands of smaller cuts made over time, forcing us to take in more and more nonsense into the recesses of our minds.
Deductibles. Premiums. 401(k)s. The numbers fill my head a little bit more every year, and the things I want to do seem to get further and further away. It’s like a fog settling into my brain. I begin to see everything through the lens of what numbers I need to give others.
And so far, these are only the problems hanging around the periphery of our lives. Most of us have to fill our minds with far more complicated facts and figures to survive.
The percentage of Americans living paycheck-to-paycheck, according to one poll, sits at 56%, and often this is after engaging in multiple sources of income. According to the Census Bureau, 7.8% of employed Americans in 2018 took on another job. And we know from other sources, anywhere from 37% to almost half of employed Americans are engaged in a “side hustle,” or an income stream performed in addition to their job. Although some of these side hustles are monetizing things that people love, most are geared towards making money.
These jobs or side hustles require that people absorb additional knowledge and invest more time and energy to keep them afloat. Some of the most popular side hustles, such as e-commerce, coaching, or freelancing, demand that you keep track of multiple contracts and bids to turn a profit. “Welcome to the wonderful world of freelancing :(,” one Reddit poster joked in response to another poster talking about how they had lost the majority of their clients. “These things happen, you cannot expect a steady paycheck every month.”
To be successful with an alternative income source, you have to fill your mind with a whole ecosystem of dates and numbers crammed into an already busy world just to survive, let alone thrive. On top of whatever familial obligations someone might have, these de facto businesses are being started while managing a job or two on the side — that’s literally what a side hustle means. It’s intense, and it leads to immense levels of burnout. “I’m totally overwhelmed at work,” begins another poster. “12 hour days, lots of risk for failure, everyone expects me to be flawless….My energy is sapped, can’t sleep, creativity is in the garbage and I have feelings of guilt for neglecting those in my personal life.”
We glorify the hustle in American culture, but it has morphed into a celebration of the loss of our autonomy. “There is no glory in a grind that wears you all the way down,” cautions Elaine Welteroth from the NY Times, but many Americans continue to grind themselves into nubs anyway — either for the glory of the hustle or simply because economic reality doesn’t leave many options. In the words of Isabella Rosario for NPR:
“The problem is, hustling still isn’t a choice for people who aren’t at the top. There’s a world of difference between staying late at the office to score a promotion and peeing in a bottle to keep your job at an Amazon warehouse.”
The lower you are in America’s racialized caste system, the less the space taken from you is a choice, even if you rationalize it as such inside the prison of your own mind. Many have to overextend their emotional and physical space to survive without ever deluding themselves into thinking they will be millionaires. They take in shift schedules, company rules, SEO targets, and many other useless numbers for the ability to exist and nothing more.
For those that do have the privilege to invest more fully in our capitalist system, it doesn’t always come with less stress. Middle-class “hustlers” may have a temporary reprieve from poverty, but they have to give more and more of themselves over to their schemes for financial independence. The side hustles that are the most profitable, such as renting property or investing in stocks or cryptocurrencies, require a lot of initial liquid capital and knowledge upfront. You not only need the money to invest, but you need the ability to know what to invest in, which is not something someone juggling a second job often has to spare.
The people that do try to enter these fields from outside the upper echelons of our society have to not only save the cash necessary to invest, but they have to spend months if not years of their lives learning about the investment — all to capture the value of a volatile asset that might take everything from them. Many crypto stories involve people liquidating their savings for a chance at wealth, and although some are successful, others are not. Some have lost fortunes to hacks where hundreds of thousands of dollars are transferred out of their wallets. Others have placed their life savings in assets that crash months later. And in the process, investors become hooked on taking all this information in. “[my phone] was cooking my brain,” one investor told The Guardian. “I’d look at it constantly.”
There is also the biggest drain of our time — our jobs. Most of us do not find profound meaning in our work. We see in poll after poll that many jobs do not make us happy. Many people work to get the money necessary to eat and live and are not necessarily doing work that matters to them or society at large. The pandemic proved rather viscerally that many of us are not “essential” employees. We engage in professions that anthropologist David Graeber would classify as “bullshit jobs.” Positions that “which even the person doing the job can’t really justify the existence of, but they have to pretend that there’s some reason for it to exist.”
Many of us are so focused on capturing whatever profits are available that in the process, we take up these bullshit jobs, which ends up creating an economy that isn’t very valuable. There is a shortage of teachers, social workers, nurses, and other essential positions that are needed to keep society turning; however, there is no shortage of people trying to invest in crypto, selling you get-rich-quick classes online, or plugging vitamin powder at the end of poorly researched videos.
This speaks to our society’s utterly perverted set of incentives. Some of the brightest minds right now aren’t working on improving our lives through greater affordable housing or food security, but rather they are adjusting the UI on predatory retail websites or figuring out how to make some stock numbers go up. “I loved teaching. I loved working with my students to improve their lives. But that wasn’t really my job. No, my job was to meet the common core requirements for reading and writing,” laments one person on why they made the plunge from teaching to programming. I have had so many friends leave nursing or teaching to become coders because they are tired of doing a thankless job for little pay. “Make no mistake: a teacher’s salary is awful,” remarks another poster who left the profession.
We fill our minds with the most useless of things so that we have the chance for a better future, and it's suffocating. We get so little time and space to live our lives, and we have to spend it calculating numbers and times that are not our own. We balance banks accounts, pay bills, invest in stocks and bonds if we are lucky, and take classes to fill our brains with ever more facts and figures.
Imagine all the breakthroughs and developments that did not happen because someone chose to build an app instead; all the teachers and social workers that do not exist because creating a business or being a programmer were considered more lucrative professions; the stories and songs unwritten by artists, who decided to become lawyers or bankers; the cures and machines that could not be tinkered on because they weren’t profitable. Most of all, imagine all the time that has been taken from you because your head is filled with a world of numbers and expectations that are not your own.
Sometimes the thought of how this society has taken my mind overwhelms me with anxiety and dread. I think of all the information still left to be acquired. My breath gets short, and I hyperventilate as I worry about everything I must do to fulfill my obligations. The taxes. The bills. The emails. They feel like they are sliding down my throat, clogging my windpipe so I can’t breathe.
Mostly, though, these expectations make me mad. I am angry that I have lost so much space inside myself that even my dreams are not my own. I dream of amassing wealth, where once I had plans to write novels and make games, and this transformation chills my soul. No to-do list can fix this injustice. No self-help article can reclaim the ever-expanding list of musts that we are required to do to hold onto the dream of a good life, and for many, to even exist at all.
The first thing we must do is notice that the colonization is there. We must take note of the thousands trying to claw away at our space. To trace the line inside our head to the people and institutions that are responsible so that one day we may demand justice.