IndieAgora

How I came to dislike living in a capitalist society

- I think it was my upbringing, my parents didn't mould me toward any career from a young age, I seem to remember my dad deriding career minded people, maybe, it's all a long time ago and I don't remember clearly. Five years ago, I was working in something as close to a career I'd ever got. I'd been in a small local business for five years, in the interview, a friend of the family who worked at this place, pretty much did most of the talking for me - selling my skills, for which I was grateful, I am a useless interviewee, the owner of the business was wearing a tracksuit, and was slumped in a chair, making jokes. Anyway, five years later, a colleague (of the persuasion that says "what's to stop people identifying as toasters" as an argument against transgender people) was proclaiming his disdain of the youth, and one of our younger colleagues who was clueless, clueless about the direction they wanted to take their life, while he, the man, was thrown out the house by his father at sixteen, blah blah blah.

I was clueless. I wanted to be an artist, but other than how to make art, I was clueless - especially when it came to making art for other people - all I wanted to do was follow my inner drive to create. I was absolutely clueless about how to proceed after college, where I came close to failing my a-levels. I was still clueless after university studying art.

It seems preposterous that a young person without any experience of work should have any idea about a career. Maybe I was just someone who was considered by my teachers as not worth directing toward a career. It was an art therapist of an art therapy group I attended between college and university my doctor had directed me toward that had suggested I go to university to study art.

At school we used a computer system that asked us questions about seemingly random stuff, and it told me my ideal career was either to be a mastic asphalt spreader, or a piano tuner. A lot of us considered the jobs suggested as jokes.

I'm another who fell for the what has recently been a widely expressed trap - believing that working hard will be rewarded. It's futile. There's no reward if you don't quite fit in, no reward if you show signs, hints, expressions of resistance to the system.

As the 90s progressed, I kinda felt betrayed, some of the ideas floating around in the early 90s, that had excited me with their potential, seemed to be giving way to capitalism. Capitalism was homogenising the scenes, multiple genres of (art/music/creativity/etc) previously existed alongside each other became fractured, tunnel-visions of what they could be, separated and capitalised on.

Then in the early 2000's I came across Linux, and Free/Libre/Open Source Software, the ideas around this excited me again, sharing of information, people from around the world contributed to software development, removal of the black box, providing people with less economic means access to software, and access to learning how to modify and create software. And again, the same thing happened. Gradually the corporations came along, and the spread of anti-FLOSS sentiments became evident, people - individuals - complaining that the license's weren't working for corporations, and Richard M. Stallman who'd previously been heralded for his contributions was starting to be framed as too hardline and troublesome (I don't know the details of this, don't think it was strictly B&W), that the licensing terms for software he pushed were too restrictive for corporations, and also for example people like me who were supportive of software freedom, but also wanted to play games with their NVIDIA graphics cards - free software wasn't able to match the performance of the proprietary binary blob graphics drivers (ie a black box system, hiding it's workings, not able to be contributed back to, not able to be modified, other than by the corporation who sold it).

Eventually people who'd previously been fans of Linux, were starting to [[words... words... what word...]] move over to the idea that freedom meant the freedom to chose whatever system worked best for their use case, and it seemed that for them, at work in a corporation with the budget, proprietary systems (ie MS Windows) were the answer.

Why I dislike capitalist society.... Just consistently failing to achieve anything that has consistently progressed my career, consistently failing to sell myself, consistently failing to be someone I'm not.... YadadyayayddAyada

And that's just my personal selfish reasons. The reasons which are real to me which I've directly experienced.

The experiences of other people in the world, are a million times worse, such that my experience is considered privileged - white male privilege. Compared to many of my peers I don't feel that privilege. I see people around me and wonder why they deserve what they have and I do not.

But capitalism funds genocide in Gaza, it's not always easy to resist pushing this stuff away, as in terms of my experience, it's too abstract, I've experienced nothing like it, I can't comprehend living under those conditions. Two stories recently I've read recently which have just horrified me as to, [i]"this is what people are intentionally doing to other people"[/i]?

Famine by design -
https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2026/2/5/starvation-by-design-how-israel-turned-food-into-a-weapon-of-war-in-ga

Gaza development peace board = real estate investors -
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/1/23/imperial-agenda-whats-trumps-gaza-development-plan-unveiled-in-davos

Trump - Saudi $500m Crypto
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/02/trump-uae-crypto-deal