https://www.oftwominds.com/blogapr19/erosion-everyday-life4-19.html

Charles Hugh Smith

Working hard and doing what you’re told is no longer yielding the promised American Dream of security, agency and liberty.

Volume One of Fernand Braudel’s oft-recommended (by me) trilogy Civilization & Capitalism, 15th to 18th Century is titled The Structures of Everyday Life. The book describes how life slowly became better and freer as the roots of modern capitalism and liberty spread in western Europe, slowly destabilizing and obsoleting the sclerotic tyrannies of feudalism.

Today I want to discuss the erosion of everyday life as a manifestation of the endgame of the current version of state capitalism, more precisely neofeudal state-cartel financialization, which combines financial predation of the home (core) economy and global exploitation of the Periphery (a.k.a. neocolonialism.)

Unlike the era Braudel describes, our era is characterized by the decline of liberty and the distortion of capitalism to serve the few at the expense of the many.

The over-used analogy of the boiled frog remains apt in understanding the erosion of everyday life: everyday life has become increasingly more difficult, more stressful, less rewarding financially, more deranging and less free for the past two generations. This erosion has gathered momentum in the 21st century as the status quo has ramped up its dysfunctional dynamics to keep the increasingly unequal distribution of wealth, power and liberty in place.

Consider the costs and capital flows of planned obsolescence...

In the relentless drive for higher profits, every component is outsourced to the lowest cost supplier…

This is the only profitable model of late-stage state-cartel corporate capitalism: force the consumer to upgrade their perfectly functional mobile phone, tablet, etc., every few years, or engineer the appliance/device to fail in a few years.

The favored corporate exploitation/predation mechanism is the long-term maintenance plan:…

Here’s a related issue: corporations have made it essentially impossible to repair or service their products unless you are willing to jump through numerous hoops...

Traffic congestion... Workloads… Loss of purchasing power, a.k.a. inflation... Loss of political agency:… Financial insecurity…

Nonsensical narratives: Here’s a simple test to prove the derangement caused by the ceaseless hyping of nonsensical narratives: stop watching “the news” and indeed all social media and all corporate media–go cold turkey other than following your local college and high school sports.

Do you feel less upset, less stressed, less deranged, less angry, less hopeless? Of course you do.

I could go on, but you get the picture: everyday life is eroding, getting harder and less free for the bottom 95%. And even the top 5% has increasingly had enough: working hard and doing what you’re told is no longer yielding the promised American Dream of security, agency and liberty.

Be seeing you