#34 - Rabbit Rabbit

I’m making it a point this month to divorce as much of my life as possible from capitalistic concepts.

I saw a tweet (ugh) in which someone framed their friends as requiring “emotional labor”. And I just really really don’t want to ever think of human connections and interactions as little tokens that we have to trade for points. That’s like…not why we take care of each other?

The act of friendship, of relationships, should not be debased by a financial system. How dreadful of an idea!

The recognition of the emotional labor done at jobs (particularly customer service roles) and the continued fight to recognize domestic labor as the most valuable labor throughout history is distinctly different, if we live in a world in which we are paid by labor we must acknowledge those laborious efforts through the rewards system we currently have. Where there should/could be an exchange of value for money, my thoughts on friendship do not apply!

Pathologizing speech patterns have been booming in the last year. We can blame TikTok, but it’s just the latest in a string of social media platforms that allow/encourage everyone to become an expert, and where misapplied language can completely change how people view each other—and themselves. It’s also probably a bleed-over from Grind Never Stops 💯 culture, which was the byproduct of All Of Us Are Poor Now Because Of Wage Suppression 🤑 culture, which was the result of like 5 dudes wanting to have superyachts and pay no taxes. So that’s awesome.

We had to make work cool, because it was all anybody had time for. Our time became the most valuable aspect of labor, so it makes sense that people started to see hanging out as a scheduled time block (during which they couldn’t be working) and I get I tooootally get how that translates into time not earning money = time losing money.

But our time is not a resource that we must maintain in order to lease it back to managers and landlords. Talking to a friend about their day is not an expenditure. It’s an inherent promise and part of friendship that we will care about each other on purpose. It also, might be, one of the best ways we have to build ourselves back up. To regulate the elusive work/life balance that appears as an increasingly weighted seesaw.

I saw this and thought of you. This flower has the power to make you smile, so I brought you one. I hope you’re eating your favorite foods. I made those brownies you mentioned you were craving. I went out of my way because I love you, so it never occurred to me not to. Of course I’ll be there. I’d do it again in a heartbeat. Do you want to come over? What are you up to? It’s your absolute favorite weather outside right now, you’re going to love it.

The idea of treating the concept of being a friend as a clock-in/clock-out scenario is just like noooooo and also uuuuugh. (I am actively tugging at my hair and had to stop to keep typing.)

Are there healthy boundaries within great friendships? Of course! Boundaries have nothing to do with the increase in popularity of our treating emotions and human connections as laborious, requiring precious tokens that we run out of. Boundaries are great! And necessary! They have nothing to do with the tit-for-tat “I do this for you therefore you must do this for me” vibes that framing friends as co-workers imply. Things in life don’t run on 50/50, we get to ask for 70/30 when we need support!! That’s what friends are for!! It’s often even, offered, because people love to care about each other! It’s like, why we evolved! Babies can’t take care of themselves for so long. Humans are designed to take care of each other. We are not individual burdens to the world!

And also like, I’m just someone who believes it all comes back. It all balances. We can be generous, so so generous with each other. And I think maybe the fatigue is coming because the systems around us offer little to no support and we might be all each other has right now and that’s hard. I think that when we look at other people and think of them as beings that exist for us to extract things from…it’s uh, dehumanizing and wrong. And capitalism wants us all to see each other that way because it allows for disassociation and encourages competition among workers for narrow gains of incremental amounts of money for the explicit purpose of distracting us to keep us from forming class solidarity. And then like, overthrowing capitalism.

Anyway! In April I’m going to be attempting to remove the frameworks of capitalism from places in my life where they are wholly inappropriate! And, I’m really really fucking grateful for all my friends and I hope they all know how much they mean to me because it’s SO MUCH!!

It’s SPRING! We’re gonna go OUTSIDE! I am going to sweat and try to complain about it LESS OFTEN! The world’s alive and so am I! Let’s get it!