Crisis of Late Capitalism and Covid-19

I was driving along the Gardiner recently and I saw a McDonald’s ad that read: “You crave it, we bring it”. With an image of a bag nicely sealed and left on the door-step of a house. You don’t even need to leave the house, because through UberEATS they’ll bring it to your door-steps. Immediately! In fact they are going to guarantee a delivery time, because heaven forbid if people should have to wait a bit longer for their delivered food.

‘You crave it, we bring it’ – in a nutshell – is the problem we are dealing with in Canada.

Under Capitalism, we have grown to expect that whenever we want something we must get it immediately. Our desires must be satisfied quickly, because it is our right!

This is what we have been sold for decades. This is part of the process of capitalism: ‘The customer is always right’. When you constantly repeat this message to the masses, why wouldn’t they believe it? Why wouldn’t this sick campaign to buy more, consume more, get everything you need when you need it, as quickly as you desire it, not turn people into monstrous consuming machines who are not satisfied when they don’t get what they want.

If the message for the past 100 years of advertising has been around the self, what the individual needs and wants and how we can sell those to them, an insatiable human-machine is formed. Whatever it is given, it’s not satisfied.

We are sold happiness as a thing to be acquired at a moment’s notice and if we cannot access it, we grow impatient. But happiness cannot be sustained. I think we all know that on some levels, despite the messaging we have received for decades.

Happiness is fleeting like everything else. There are moments of happiness that pass and moments of sadness, grief, or anger come to stay and no matter what we buy, contrary to what we are told, we cannot bypass other emotions that show up. But we are told if we keep consuming and if we keep feeding our individual desires that we can be happy. Happiness does come from individual desires to be sure, but that is often short-lived.

Let us look for contentment instead and I believe contentment often arrives in helping others, in the moments that we step outside of ourselves and our little lives with all of its big problems and connect with someone else in order to lift them up. Stepping outside of ourselves and reaching towards other people and beings, especially by trying to be useful to them in some way, is a powerful antidote to capitalism that brings the relief of contentment.

Contentment lives in finding meaning in life. I believe at the end of the day that is our calling: to help others and ourselves and in the process find the meaning of our life.