Capitalism Isn't Why You're Unhappy
Some young adults blame "capitalism" for just about everything. But it's only a convenient scapegoat.
Are you feeling bad? Sad? Lonely? Despondent about your life? Anxious about politics? Angry about the state of the world? The gurus and influencers and deep thinkers of the internet have identified the culprit, the reason, the overarching explanation for why everything, everywhere sucks all the time.
"Do you feel horrible? That's capitalism, baby!" says the wildly popular mental health influencer TherapyJeff in a TikTok with nearly 50,000 likes. "Is your self-worth based on who you are or what you do? If it's what you do and the value you create, that's internalized capitalism."
In another video on the platform, two attractive 20-something women discuss how "late-stage capitalism" has affected their social lives and complain that there's a lack of public "third spaces." The video was filmed in what appears to be a public park.
In another video, this time with over 14,500 likes, a young woman declares that "capitalism is the root of all evil" before adding, "I'm also a business owner. But fuck capitalism, right?"
@therapyjeff Do you feel horrible? That's capitalism, baby! #capitalism #america #mentalhealth #therapy #therapytok #therapist #burnout
Online, "capitalism" has become a shorthand for just about every disliked cultural trend, no matter how universal or eternal. Unrealistic beauty standards? Capitalism. Monogamy? Capitalism. People not wanting to give you a ride to the airport? Capitalism.
Capitalism gets conflated with everything from consumerism and government corruption to the concept of work itself. Online anticapitalism is not so much a reaction against economic reality as a reaction against, well, reality. It's the all-purpose villain ruining everything that should be good about modern life.
@ameliamontooth if ur my friend and ur seeing this lets b radical anticapitalists together while you drive me home from LAX ???? #wlw #friends #friendship #20s #femalefriends #friendgroup
Hatred of capitalism has coincided with a boom in popularity for socialism and even communism. In a recent Pew poll, only 40 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds had a positive view of capitalism, while 44 percent viewed socialism positively. In another poll, 34 percent of young people reported a favorable view of communism, which in Josef Stalin's Soviet Union killed millions of people from famine alone.
This sort of thinking has already had real-world political consequences. In June, self-identified socialist Zohran Mamdani handily won New York City's Democratic mayoral primary on a platform of state-run grocery stores and a rent freeze. Some polls now indicate he's the front-runner for the city's top elected office.
It's hard not to read this shift as downstream of a real malaise among many Americans, especially young adults. Surveys consistently find that young people feel lost and forgotten. They're having a hard time finding jobs they like and friends they can count on. Young Americans frequently feel that "the system" simply isn't working. And so they blame that system for their fears, frustrations, and anxieties.
But capitalism isn't the reason why you, or anyone else, is unhappy. Blaming capitalism is a fantasy, a rhetorical escape, that allows people to shift the blame from their own choices to a powerful external force outside their control. The capitalist blame game is a social-media-friendly cover for a lack of personal meaning and social connection, a crutch for those who have not made their lives their own.
By arguing that capitalism is the cause of your dissatisfaction, you deny your own agency. Your problems become both unsolvable and someone else's fault. And if your problems are intractable and insurmountable, you no longer have a duty to try to overcome them. This lack of agency is comforting, but only leads to more unhappiness in the long term. The solution is not to blame capitalism—or any other shadowy, conspiratorial force—for your problems, but to accept that you're in the driver's seat of your own life.
Capitalism vs. Fun?
"There's no way that you're going to tell me I'm going to work my whole life," says one 20-something travel influencer in a nearly manic viral video. "I'm going to sit behind a fucking desk and work nine-to-five each day of my life until retirement. There is no way that is what life is about….I want to have fun, like I actually want to have fun, and I don't understand why this is the norm and we're putting up with this."
In another popular video, a young woman films herself lip-synching from her cubicle, with the caption "When I tell my parents I'm sick of working and they say some dumb shit like 'welcome to adulthood' or 'you're just getting started' like bro I genuinely have nightmares about having to work for the next 60 years." In the comments, "it's actually very upsetting, i cry abt this all the time" and "Like y'all KNEW how much it sucked and y'all STILL had me" have more than 2,000 and 1,000 likes, respectively.
@ellaajaee capitalism is hitting hard today tbh #quit #travel #9to5 #zoocosis #life
@tsahailayne Ive had a job for 6 years like what do you mean "just getting started" ???? #fypシ #fyp #help #xyzbca #whywasntibornrich???? #capitalism
In the discourse of internet anticapitalism, this feeling—that adulthood should somehow just be more fun—comes up time and time again. It's often paired with a general aversion to having a standard nine-to-five job at all, even one that pays well.
So it's no wonder that many young people seem to share a politically left-leaning sense that just about anything is better than the American middle-class standard, whether that's Europe, communist Cuba, or even prehistoric hunter-gatherer tribes. You might remind one of these creators that Spain's youth unemployment rate is over 25 percent, that 10 percent of Cuba's population fled the country in 2022–2023, and that Stone Age life was no lovefest, but you probably won't convince them to extoll the virtues of free markets and the dramatic reduction in poverty wrought by global capitalism.
And that's because this kind of anticapitalism is fundamentally an escapist fantasy. It's a form of utopian thinking that irrationally assumes capitalism is the only thing standing between you and a life without real problems.
You can find utopian anticapitalism on the far right as well. Instead of dreaming of a world without work or consumerism, right-wing trad bros fantasize about a past when women were financially dependent on men and immigrants didn't compete with native-born Americans for jobs.
On the left, though, a world without capitalism is often imagined as a world without responsibilities of any kind.
This view is laid bare in one viral 18-second TikTok in which a young woman creates a mock dialogue between "humans" and "capitalism."
@sara.grace.young Can I please just get paid to make videos and do art? #fyp #capitalism #wlw #curlyhair #lgbt
"What do you dream of doing?" Capitalism asks, to which Humans reply that they "really like just hanging out." For a punch line, an exasperated capitalism huffs, "We can't exploit you off that, pick something else."
Yet a world in which everyone can "just hang out" instead of working is a totally unworkable plan for human society.
To believe capitalism is the only thing holding us back from endless leisure is to suggest that food and clothes can grow and sew themselves—and that you've forgotten that the automation we do have in those industries is itself an outgrowth of capitalist industrialization.
It's the kind of magical thinking that, as one band of online communists made clear in an infamous 2020 Twitter thread, assumes that everyone on the commune gets to brew lattes and write poetry while no one has to scrub latrines or dig ditches.
The obvious problem with this utopian antiworkism is that work, especially of the grueling and miserable kind, has always been a part of human life. Capitalist exploitation is not the only reason why human beings engage in labor.
In fact, it is only in the modern capitalist world that any significant portion of the population has labored with their minds rather than their bodies. Under every economic arrangement, in every point in history, human beings have had to earn their keep, whether that's in an office, in the fields, or in the home. The only people who could be convincingly described as living in comfort while not working are the absurdly wealthy—and leftists presumably believe that no one should be that rich.
The Purpose Problem
It's easy to call these utopian anticapitalists lazy. And there may be some laziness there, especially on the more extreme fringes of the online "antiwork" movement. But what's going on here is less an abundance of laziness than a lack of something to make work seem worth it. It's a lack of meaning—of purpose.
Part of this comes down to the assumption that your job will be a major source of meaning and fulfillment in your life—what Atlantic writer Derek Thompson calls "workism." In one 2023 survey, 88 percent of parents believed it is very important for their kids to have a career they enjoy but just 21 percent said it is very important that their kids get married; a similar proportion thought it's very important that their kids have children of their own. Teenagers agreed: 95 percent said that having a career they enjoy as an adult is very important to them, and only around half placed the same importance on getting married.
But according to the University of Virginia sociologist Brad Wilcox, being "very satisfied" with your job increases your chances of being "very happy" with your life by 145 percent. Being "very happy" in your marriage increases your chances of general happiness by a staggering 545 percent.
This gulf isn't exactly surprising. Most jobs—even most elite, college-level jobs—are not particularly interesting or intrinsically fulfilling. Even the best jobs, perhaps including the one that allows me to write this essay, aren't likely to provide the sense of contentment and joy that a good marriage does. The message that you can reliably expect happiness and meaning from your job sets young people up for disappointment and incentivizes them to deprioritize the interpersonal connections that are much more likely to lead to fulfillment.
It's no secret that young Americans are delaying family formation. Lyman Stone, a researcher at the Institute for Family Studies, has argued that under present trends, 1 in 3 young people who are 19 or 20 today will have not married by 45. Around the same percentage of Gen Zers and millennials say they neither have nor want kids. And young people aren't replacing family responsibilities with rich friendships. A 2023 poll found that 1 in 4 Americans aged 18 to 29 reported experiencing loneliness the day prior, seven percentage points higher than the adult average.
In-person socializing is plummeting too. "America is in a party deficit," Atlantic writer Ellen Cushing put it in an article aptly titled "Americans Need To Party More." "Only 4.1 percent of Americans attended or hosted a social event on an average weekend or holiday in 2023, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics; this is a 35 percent decrease since 2004," she wrote. Compared with just a few decades ago, we're in a world where the median 20-something has fewer reasons to leave their house, fewer parties to go to, fewer friends, and fewer opportunities to meet a romantic partner. In such a world, no wonder so many young people are looking to their jobs to make them happy, and feeling cheated when they don't.
Sometimes internet anticapitalists identify workism as a problem. But they blame it on the economic system that makes their work possible, not an optional social attitude toward work. The rise of workism is best explained not by capitalism but by a decline in social connections outside of work. When your job feels tedious or physically taxing, knowing that there's someone you're doing it all for will inherently add meaning to the monotony. It helps to feel like you're working for something other than yourself, whether that's to support a family or a spouse, or even to fund outings with friends. It is a fact of life that we must work, but you're unlikely to be happy if you don't have anything going on when you clock out.
Conversely, having something going on in your life besides your job also staves off the worst kinds of workaholism. If you find meaning through your friends, family, or religious community, working yourself ragged for that promotion or following a prestigious career path you hate feels less crucial for maintaining your self-worth.
I do think the internet anticapitalists are right about one thing: Compared to what came before, societies with freer markets tend to rely more on merit-based distribution of social advancement. Where you end up in life is, imperfectly, downstream of your own choices and talents.
I want to stress imperfectly. Of course, all kinds of unfair inequalities exist that lead individuals to be born with radically different opportunities. The good news is that never before in human history has a person born into poverty had more opportunity to escape it. It's the essence of the American dream—that no matter the circumstances of your birth, anyone can make it big with enough determination and talent. At the same time, in the grand sweep of human history, never before have those born into wealth had to fight harder to keep their privileges.
Just because these opportunities for advancement exist does not mean that enough people are taking them, or that economic mobility is on some forever upward march. But that may be part of the problem.
So much agency is destabilizing. It's a tremendous responsibility. It's also the source of tremendous shame, especially for the downwardly mobile children of the upper-middle class, who seem most likely to adopt this resentment-driven, muddled anticapitalism. If you failed to achieve your dreams, if your adult life is boring and predictable—especially if you grew up in economic privilege—your own choices are at least partially responsible. But facing your own inadequacy or lack of ambition is extremely difficult. Blaming an amorphous supposed social evil is much easier.
Many anticapitalists will bristle at this framing. Capitalism, they'll argue, really is that big and monstrous. It's a system that's tilted toward the rich and powerful, that compels people to work in horrible, exploitative jobs, that keeps people from being able to afford a home or health care.
Most of these complaints come down to confusing the state of American politics with capitalism. Crony capitalism isn't free markets, neither is the overregulation that makes housing and health care much more expensive than they would be in a true free market system. But internet anticapitalists rarely make cogent economic arguments. What they're suffering from is not the competitive economic individualism of capitalism but a kind of interpersonal hyperindividualism. The cynical complacency they're sensing is not about monetary resources but emotional resources.
The fantasy of internet anticapitalists is much sadder than it seems on its face. It is essentially a fantasy of being happy—of liking your job, of having friends to hang out with after work, of maybe even having a partner to come home to at night.
Capitalism is not what keeps people from obtaining these goods. Working for money rather than living on a utopian commune does not keep you from finding a community. Capitalism doesn't stop you from volunteering after work or attending a religious service or asking out that nice girl across the bar. It also doesn't stop you from saying yes to that party invite or the suggestion that you join the local adult kickball league. What does keep people from finding community and joy? Bad luck, of course. But also risk aversion and fear of rejection.
Building a fulfilling life requires effort and risk. It's hard to show up to a party where you don't know anyone. It can be awkward to make small talk with strangers or start a new hobby. Adult sports leagues and run clubs and church groups are usually pretty dorky. It's easier to blame your isolation, your brittle friendships, your romantic difficulties on a shadowy force beyond your control.
Coming to terms with your own agency, with the choices afforded you by our big, beautiful modern world—that's the hard part.
