The revolution is never coming

Or, navigating despair in a divided country

I came here to write down my thoughts on several different things I’ve been mulling over a lot lately. I keep having conversations that lead to speculation on why everything feels so difficult and hopeless right now, and I wanted to put all my observations in one place. What it turned into is a bit of a rant. I’ll be perfectly honest, it will either rile you into action or make you shake your head and think “she’s lost it now”. But I hope you find reading it as cathartic as I found writing it.

The struggles we face 

This all begins with an observation I made to my best friend. We’ve been lamenting how difficult it is to motivate ourselves to go to work, even though we are both technically happy in our jobs. My view is that at the root of this conundrum is not only capitalism, but how we’re still expected to operate within the old accepted system of ‘go to work to earn money to live’, when the world has changed so much, yet there are very few allowances to help us cope with those changes.

We’re all dealing with so many struggles: climate change, the aftermath of a global pandemic, mass genocide and ethnic cleansing playing out before our very eyes while our media spreads lies and our politicians do nothing to stop it. We’re witnessing the rightwards creep of the political landscape, far right leaders being elected in Europe. We’ve seen economic collapse. The wealth disparity in our country is getting wider and wider, and once again we’re entering the winter knowing there are people who won’t able to afford to heat their homes, and just as many are sleeping rough in freezing temperatures, while the one percent is rolling in its riches, with second unoccupied properties in their possession. Social housing has been sold off, and property developers and corporate landlords now rule the housing market. Our health service is on its knees. Everything feels broken. 

It’s no wonder so many of us are dealing with mental health struggles: depression, anxiety, suicide ideation. Who wouldn’t start to crumble under these conditions? And yet our society is still telling us that we must pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and go out to work.

The meritocracy myth

Someone I know recently had a breakdown, left her job and moved back in with her parents. She’s finding some peace in that decision, and shared a reel on Instagram to normalise the need to take a step back without feeling like a failure. Clearly what she says is resonating with people, because I’ve watched her Instagram account go from a few hundred to ten thousand followers in the space of about a week. And yet, among the many comments thanking her for sharing these things, for validating people’s coping strategies, there are still people reprimanding her for having “given up”. I’ve seen her accused of “quitting” (quitting what, exactly?), and of “romanticising failure” (failing what, exactly?).

And this is part of the bigger problem. We live in a late stage capitalist country under the ruling of elites who have barely had to work a day in their lives to make ends meet, and we’re told this is a meritocracy. That if we work hard enough, we’ll reap the rewards and have a good life. That ‘success’ equates to a good job, lots of money, a big house, and an expensive car. And anyone who doesn’t have those things, didn’t work hard enough, and therefore failed.

Who does this attitude serve? It forces us into wage labour, despite the fact that our mental health is diminishing at an alarming rate, we’re burned out, many of us can’t stop crying or even go outside for days at a time, we’re not sleeping properly, we’re turning to food for comfort (and don’t get me started on how the only affordable food most people can access is processed rubbish pumped full of sugar and chemicals and devoid of nutritional value). We’re kept in a perpetual state of sickness, exhaustion and depression, and told to just get on with it, otherwise we’ve ‘failed’. And the people who didn’t fail? The people who are having it all? Many of them have inherited their wealth and ‘success’. But it’s a meritocracy. Sure.

Where does it go from here? How much longer are we expected to continue like this? How did we get to the point where your only options are to push through illness in the hope of making ends meet (if you’re lucky enough to actually earn a living wage, that is), or burn out and fall between the cracks? And don’t expect any kind of help if you do, because we’re not funding any social care in this country, and if you’re contemplating suicide you’re looking at several years on a waiting list before anyone will see you. Unless you’re able to pay for it, of course. Pay a lot for it. Then we’d be happy to accept your money. That’s how this system works.

Divisions and distractions

And all the while, we’re not talking about these things because our government and media are doing everything they can to distract and divide people. Immigration, Brexit, transphobia. Anything that can be sensationalised will be sensationalised in the hope that you’ll be too busy arguing with strangers over the internet about whether or not the country is overpopulated, so you won’t pay any attention to people fleeing war-torn countries (whose militaries we’re arming, by the way) being washed up dead on our shores, or the billionaires who are evading tax, flouting the rules set for the rest of us, selling off portions of our public services to private buyers, accepting huge donations from lobbyists to make decisions that will line their pockets rather than serve the people, and, oh yeah, profiting from wars and genocides happening all over the world. 

But all they need to do is bandy about terms like “a right to self-defence”, “antisemitism” and “the will of the people” to shut us up and keep us in line. And it works! I’ve seen so-called ‘inclusive’ groups who shouted antiracism from the rooftops in 2020 who are suddenly eerily silent now. The fear of being labelled an antisemite for calling out Zionism for what it is — land grabbing and ethnic cleansing — is keeping many people with valuable platforms quiet.

The need for solidarity

And I see us reaching breaking point. I, unfortunately, am completely addicted to reading through comments sections on inflammatory Instagram posts, and I see so many calling out for people to mobilise and make change. 

Our government is elected by us, they’re supposed to represent us, work for us, we should hold the power. But we don’t, because they’ve divided us. They’ve turned us against each other, so we can’t rise up as one against them. 

Even as a million people marched through the capital calling for a ceasefire, and brought the city to a standstill for an entire day (and much of the evening), still the rhetoric of the “hate march” was being thrown around. Still the media downplayed it to “thousands”. Still there are people regurgitating what they’ve read on Facebook and in the Daily Mail. Still people (including myself) are seeing their pro-Palestine comments being deleted, and facing 24-hour bans from Instagram. Still we’re seeing art institutions cancelling events and censoring Palestinian voices, saying it’s to avoid the risk of “straying into the political” (hello, art is political), when the real reason is they’re afraid of having funding pulled by private donors protecting their own interests. And still we’re seeing the people who speak out against this being labelled as “pro-terrorists” displaying “shocking behaviour” by people who still believe forty babies were beheaded on 7th October.

What have we become? And where do we go from here? I don’t want to be all doom and gloom, I’m trying so hard in my daily life not to bring everyone down, but the truth is I just don’t know how to go out there and engage with people anymore. I have friends who have barely heard from me at all since the beginning of October, and perhaps it’s partly down to me being so immersed in despair that I’ve not had the energy to make an effort to talk to them, and perhaps it’s partly because they’ve gone very quiet after seeing what I’m sharing on social media.

Last week I let my pre-written newsletter on queer book recommendations go live because I hadn’t worked on anything else, and I do still think that it helps to escape into a good book, as a form of self-care. But it feels shallow and empty, really. When I wrote that list, I was in the middle of a solo writing retreat in the summer. I was feeling good in myself and I wanted to share some things that made me happy. The world has changed so much since I wrote it, and now I’m here typing furiously from my bed, in my third week of illness that’s just not shifting because I’ve not been looking after myself well enough, and all I can think to say is “WHAT IS GOING ON?” because I feel like I’m very close to hitting my limit for misery now. 

I don’t know what it’s going to take for things to change. Every time I try to pick myself up and look for a silver lining, I find more to be afraid of. I tell myself that surely people are turning against the Tories now, and at the next election they’ll be gone, but then I’m reminded that Keir Starmer is effectively a Tory with a red tie, and our First Past The Post system of “democracy” will ensure that we only have a choice between Blue Tory or Red Tory. Because of course, while we could all mobilise and vote Green, and completely overhaul the system, we won’t, on account of being so divided.

It seems that the most likely outcome of the next general election will be that those against the Tories will be too divided to vote in favour of one main opposition party, and we’ll probably either end up with yet another Conservative term (and how bolstered will they be then?), or a hung parliament that won’t do anyone any favours. So many Labour voters have abandoned the party thanks to Keir Starmer’s actions (or lack thereof), but I think it’s extremely unlikely that our FPTP system will allow a smaller party to take the majority. Either way, it seems bleak.

Recently I was thinking very seriously about emigrating. I know I have the tendency to catastrophise and I need to be kept from spiralling a lot of the time, but I don’t think it’s completely irrational to feel that our country is potentially on a slippery slope towards fascism. We’ve seen our government rush through new legislation to stop us from protesting, to stop companies from boycotting, and we’ve seen how much power the police have, and how they’ve abused it repeatedly. We’ve seen an NHS surgeon arrested for selling books about Zionism, and two women arrested for displaying Arabic writing on a placard. So what could be next?

Closing thoughts

I’m sitting here, having written almost 2,000 words about how scared and angry I am with the world, and I don’t even know if I can come to a reasonable conclusion that satisfies my readers. 

What is the solution? I sure as hell don’t know. I don’t think running from it is the answer, and I don’t think we should give in and let them win, but how do you actually mobilise millions of people, many of whom would prefer to bury their heads in the sand? And that really is what is happening. I was struck when I recently attended a silent vigil for Palestine, at the amount of people who were very obviously focusing on the ground as they walked past, out of fear of looking at our signs and being forced to think or feel something. 

Maybe I’m the one who needs a list of book recommendations to escape into. I’d definitely settle for some suggestions of actionable coping mechanisms to pull me down from the ledge. Or perhaps this is all just a way of saying that if you’re exhausted, despairing, and utterly sick of being so angry all of the time, you’re not alone, because I’m right here with you.