Capitalism’s required realism is essentially a normalized collective depression

Evidence

The attitude of realism that dominant capitalism requires is essentially depressive. The management of this collective depression goes through a series of thresholds. First of all, we come to expect very little: nothing will ever happen again. Then we think that maybe the things that once happened weren’t actually so great. Finally, we accept that nothing has ever happened, nor could ever happen. The more that depression is normalised, the harder it is to even identify it. Radically lowered expectations become habituated. Time flattens out. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1907

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The staged thresholds of normalized depression constitute a dense, paradigm-shifting understanding of the affective economy of late capitalism.
• XREF: connects to: Capitalism sustains itself by calibrating workers’ dejection just below paralysis — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1829; Capitalist realism and depressive realism share a drudgery-based notion of fairness — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1858; Capitalist realism’s required realism is an escalating series of depressive thresholds (+8 more)

Broader Connections

• Depression’s felt realism mirrors capitalist realism’s lowered expectations #expands (0.90) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1489
• Capitalist realism’s required realism is an escalating series of depressive thresholds #expands (0.88)
• Capitalist realism’s self-diagnosed realism mirrors the fatalism of depressive realism #expands (0.86) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 2217
• Depression mirrors capitalist realism, rendering collective problems as personal failures #expands (0.78) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 2217
• Economic realism under capitalism is itself a form of collective insanity #qualifies (0.75) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1410
• Capitalism structurally requires collective mood swings to function #complicates (0.75) — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 75
• Normalizing misery through privatizing stress enabled the rise of capitalist realism. #expands (0.72) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 2131