Read on Twitter
Re: the stupid line learning discourse. Sometimes you're just utterly demotivated to give your all when the material is uninspiring and there are shitloads of you and a large number of you will ultimately be flippantly dismissed.
Not to get too IT'S ALL NEOLIBERALISM but IT'S ALL NEOLIBERALISM.
We end up individualising our failures or successes that are in reality almost completely out of our hands.
We end up individualising our failures or successes that are in reality almost completely out of our hands.
As Mark Fisher pointed out there are two sides to this.
1) ‘Magical voluntarism’ the idea that you can magically WILL yourself into success. It's the most Thatcherite load of shite. Sometimes you smash it AND you get the job: sure. But often you smash it and you don't get a sniff
1) ‘Magical voluntarism’ the idea that you can magically WILL yourself into success. It's the most Thatcherite load of shite. Sometimes you smash it AND you get the job: sure. But often you smash it and you don't get a sniff
Side number 2) of this is... depression. It is the flipside of magical voluntarism. It is the feeling that we are uniquely responsible for our own misery and therefore deserve it.
Fisher says in his Good For Nothing piece
"A particularly vicious double bind is imposed on the long-term unemployed in the UK now: a population that has all its life been sent the message that it is good for nothing is simultaneously told that it can do anything it wants to do."
"A particularly vicious double bind is imposed on the long-term unemployed in the UK now: a population that has all its life been sent the message that it is good for nothing is simultaneously told that it can do anything it wants to do."
If only you try hard enough you can do anything. This is demonstrably not true. But we're made to individualise every "success" and "failure" we have as uniquely down to us. We know this is stupid but we feel it anyway.
I think we should be a lot kinder to ourselves. Not through some mindfulness app, but partly by acknowledging that this state of things is down to attacks on our material conditions which directly affect our mental health, confidence, capacity for solidarity etc
the replies to that tweet like "I WOULD WORK HARD FOR YOU, NOT LIKE THOSE OTHER LOSERS" might make people feel like they're being proactive or consoling themselves that "at least I'm hardworking", but they do little to nothing for those individuals, and cause damage to solidarity
support each other, don't punch down, fight the Tories and don't be a bootlicker, rebuild class consciousness.
"Rebuilding class consciousness is a formidable task indeed, but, in spite of what our collective depression tells us, it can be done." Mark Fisher RIP xx
"Rebuilding class consciousness is a formidable task indeed, but, in spite of what our collective depression tells us, it can be done." Mark Fisher RIP xx
