Liveable drudgery is more insidious than paralysing depression because it ends resistance

Evidence

The coldly terrifying thing about this state of dejection was that it was not a completely paralysing depression — more a kind of exhausting drudgery. It felt liveable; indeed, it felt like I could — perhaps would — live the rest of my life in it. Perhaps I have expected too much from life. Now I would have to adjust to misery, like everyone else does. Others were much, much worse off than me. It wasn’t like I was to chip ice off the windscreen in the morning. I had been precarious for years — now I was in well-paid secure employment. Why couldn’t I just be happy? OK, so I had to do marketing promotions, complete “quality” paperwork, amend module proposal forms six times — but it was hardly coal mining, was it? — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1826

Categorization

• XREF: Directly instantiates the earlier claim that capitalist realism is a pathology of the left and that ‘depression’s felt realism mirrors capitalist realism’s lowered expectations’ (ch92), plus the Bifo reference and the dejection economy threaded through the book. — connects to: Depression is a philosophical disposition, not merely sadness or a state of mind — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 141; Emotion fails because it denies the world’s resistance while reason succeeds by acknowledging it — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 77
• DEEPTHINKING: The lived texture of ‘liveable misery’ as the terminal state of capitalist realism — the realization that one can live a whole life inside it — is the book’s core dystopia made intimate.

Broader Connections

• Emotion fails because it denies the world’s resistance while reason succeeds by acknowledging it #expands (0.85) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 77