American Grief

The burden of personal incorporation

Category: The Social Contract

You don’t remember applying for the CEO position of Your Life, Inc. But sometime in your twenties, maybe earlier, you got the job. No interview. No training. Just an ambient cultural pressure that said: you are a business now. Act accordingly.

The Incorporation

The language started creeping in. ‘Personal brand.’ ‘Networking.’ ‘Investing in yourself.’ ‘Your value proposition.’ You weren’t becoming a person anymore. You were becoming a portfolio. A return on investment. A startup with you as the sole employee, sole investor, and sole product.

The Self-Optimization Complex

You’re treating yourself like a business problem to solve. The optimization is endless. Your morning routine. Your productivity system. Your health metrics. Your mental health. There is always something else to improve. Always another version of yourself to become. You can’t rest. Rest is unproductive. Rest is wasted potential.

What You’re Mourning

The permission to be ordinary. You’re not allowed to be ordinary anymore. Everyone must be exceptional. Must have a unique value proposition. Ordinariness is failure. You’re grieving the possibility of a life that doesn’t require constant exceptionalism. A life where being regular is enough.

Good Company

Do Nothing — Celeste Headlee, 2020
Headlee traces how Americans went from people who worked to people who became their work. She digs into the history, how busyness became status, how productivity became identity, how we ended up believing that optimising every hour was the same as living well. It’s meticulously researched without being dry. The kind of book that makes you realise the exhaustion isn’t a personal failing, it’s a design feature of a culture that forgot to include an off switch.
Nomadland — Chloé Zhao, 2020
Fern loses her job, her town, her zip code, the entire economic infrastructure that was supposed to be her life. She drives a van across the American West and meets people who fell out of the system or walked away from it. Zhao made a film about what’s left of a person when you strip away the productivity, the personal brand, the quarterly growth. It’s not romantic. It’s not a breakdown story either. It’s the quiet aftermath of an economy that used people up and then acted surprised when they left.
American Idiot — Green Day, 2004
A punk opera about being sold a version of American life that doesn’t work and being too angry and too tired to keep pretending it does. Billie Joe Armstrong wrote it about post-9/11 media culture, but it landed on something bigger, the feeling of being performed upon by a country that wants your loyalty, your labour, and your enthusiasm, all at the same time. It’s loud, furious, and underneath the fury, quietly heartbroken. Sometimes the most honest response to mandatory optimism is a power chord and a refusal.