“Narcissistic and Depressed” (or, one of the great many letters I wish I had the guts to send to my Religion professor.)

Dear Professor —— :

I have a lot of suggestions for how this course could be improved, in order to be more sensitive to the diversity among the members of the class, but right now I want to talk about when I first realized this class was not the right place for me. It happened roughly thirty minutes into the first class session, which was the amount of time before you began pontificating about how and why my generation are all ‘narcissistic and depressed’.

“I’ll tell you why we’re all depressed,” I thought immediately. “It’s because the world is dying and we can’t fix it because we’re all slaves under late-stage capitalism.”

It’s difficult but very necessary to recognize the true causes of the malaise and isolation that permeate our society. The ‘narcissism’ that you accused us of is not by choice; nor is it some innate character flaw. We as a society have been systematically stripped of our ability to connect, both to other people and to the things we make.

Karl Marx recognized the danger in this a century ago—his famous exhortation to workers to ‘seize the means of production’ is, in fact, a call to take back our connection to the things we create. I remember my classmate Alex talking about a documentary he saw about the Industrial Revolution, about the gradual reduction of the role of skilled craftsmen in favor of untrained laborers who could then in turn be replaced by automation.

The price of the cheapness and quickness of mechanized work was a shift from creation to production. A switch from humans as makers to humans as cogs in a machine.

What is the value of a human? To the Renaissance humanists—a group you attacked in the same lecture—the value of a human being was intrinsic. Humanism was a call to responsibility and social justice, a recognition of inherent human worth.

Under modern capitalism, a person’s worth is judged entirely by the monetary value of their labor. They are judged by the quantity of the things they help produce, because that is what determines the profit that can be derived from their work.

That leaves us, now, with a system that views disabled people like me, who cannot produce as much before we become useless, as less than human. We have a system that deliberately isolates us from our communities, depriving us of the connections we so desperately need to be human. It lends no room for true creation, for art, for happiness.

Romantic-era poets and artists knew how important that was—they sought to drive change by pouring their souls into their art, expressing the deepest currents of human emotion by the act of creation. Maybe that’s why these days, we aren’t allowed the energy to create. We’re too busy pouring our souls into two simultaneous minimum-wage customer service jobs and crying over the medical bills we still can’t pay.

(Creation is rebellion, and so the only times I really get to make things these days are when it’s an assignment. I loved dabbling in calligraphy as ‘self-directed learning’ for my rhetoric course. Made me feel like I was gaming the system somehow. It helped, just a bit.)

So yes, Professor, we’re all depressed. We live our lives isolated and exhausted, without access to even the smallest luxuries. When we do manage to scrounge up the money, time, or energy for something to relieve the constant grey clouds of a broken system, we are accused of narcissism. We’re ridiculed for enjoying avocado toast and pumpkin spice lattes.

And all of that still doesn’t take into account the vast numbers of young people—myself included—who struggle with chemical imbalances in our brains that make finding those slivers of happiness even harder, and who have been dismissed, degraded, and discarded all our lives even by those who are supposed to be our strongest advocates.

Thirty minutes into your first lecture, I knew that I couldn’t trust you. Not when you so clearly view the results of systemic oppression as an individual moral failing.

I hope and pray that in future, you learn to be more sensitive to the struggles of those you are supposed to be responsible for.

--Emma Crisp

Sources

“I was reading an excerpt from The Wealth of Nations and I got to the bit where Smith starts talking about nail production, and it got me wondering. So, I chose 5 inventions that had been used since ancient times - nails, saws, toothpicks, toothbrushes, and toilet paper (or some form of it) - and tracked their progress throughout all technological periods. There was a pretty common trend among all of them. Ancient versions employed the use of natural materials or crudely formed inventions, which tended to hold until the Middle Ages, where a few advancements were made. From this period until the 19th century, production relied heavily on skilled craftsmen. Once the Ind. Rev. took place, the role of craftsmen decreased steadily. I finished my research by watching the "How It's Made" segment for each item, where the processes had become almost entirely mechanized and automated, with very little human effort involved.” --Alexander Salinas

How It’s Made: Nails and Staples

Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto