The privatisation of stress

Mark Fisher talks about the privatisation of stress. Stress has become an individual phenomenon, not a social one: people are encouraged to look first at themselves, at their pasts and their chemical balances, before mounting anything like a critique on the social causes of such mental illnesses as anxiety and depression and ‘lesser’ mental maladies like stress. However, there are clearly good grounds for such a critique, for two reasons.

First, the casualisation of labour has made it very difficult to rely on regular, secure income. With the proliferation of temporary and zero-hour contracts, workers rarely know when they’re going to be working, making it very difficult to plan ahead ( ie when trying to plan your outside work life) or to feel anything like security for the future (my employers, for instance, are currently deciding whether the ‘spirit’ of the government’s pay protection scheme can be captured adequately by paying us our contracted [4-hour] wages).

Second, for those whose jobs are less casualised in this respect, ‘working from home’ and the increased digitisation of our jobs has allowed the stress they induce to enter the personal by another means: the worker is kept in a constant state of ‘on’. The age of technology has allowed our jobs to enter our homes, meaning we have even less space for switching off and not being there - our bosses are only ever an email, a phonecall, away.

Fisher argues that this phenomenon is so widespread, and so irresistible, because it has tapped into our libido: to some extent, he says, we want to be kept constantly ‘on’ in this way, constantly in demand, constantly needed, since it is precisely this sort of unfulfillable drive that the human urge for fulfilment latches on to.

There is the temptation, then, to respond to our recent isolation with an increased bout of productivity: now that physical isolation means neither removal from the business world nor from the (digi-)social, we could fill this void by throwing ourselves even deeper into our projects, either working hard on our jobs or trying to make something happen on social media. And there’s no reason not to do this, straight up: we should just be critical about it. Think about whether your job is really making the best of you, and whether throwing yourself into it will really be fulfilling. Think about whether the world needs you to commodify your skill, your ability to sing or your sense of humour, into something to be shared on the internet. And take the time to reflect on the stress caused by work and social media, even if they are things we ‘want’: constant connectivity might feel good, but it also seems to be fuelling a culture in which we retreat ever more online and forget about the unstructured, non-digital reality.

But this is a reality that should not be forgotten. Today, I went and sat in the park in the sun, and read some shit. I engaged with some people. I saw two crows fall out of a tree, fighting, and smack against the pavement. A potent symbol if ever there was one - i’m not sure what of. But life is still happening.