Three words for the treadmill

Be the chicken, not the pig

Last week, I woke up to a client issue at work. It was very minor, and there was little I could do about it right away. Addressing it would have taken about 20 minutes of work, but it didn’t feel important enough to disrupt my morning routine. 

Still, I had a hard time letting it rest as I went about my business. It was an exercise morning, and while I was running on the treadmill in my building’s gym, I found the issue creeping back into my mind. I couldn’t stop thinking about it, until I started to wonder if I should just cut my workout short and square it away. 

But then, as my feet slammed repeatedly against the rubber track, the absurdity of the situation caught up with me. Here I was on a literal treadmill, while my brain was caught up on a mental one. My anxiety lifted, leaving behind a three-word mantra that I’ll keep repeating to myself for the rest of my life: 

“It’s capitalism’s problem.” 

There are plenty of problems that we own as individuals. Our health is one of them; so is the love and care (or lack thereof) that we show to others. But for many problems, the responsibility lies elsewhere, yet we’re dragooned into believing they’re ours. At some point we all practice this type of manipulation, consciously or not, though some of us are more practiced than others. But at the end of the day, nothing is more manipulative than a system - and there’s no system quite like capitalism. 

When I say something is “capitalism’s problem,” it doesn’t necessarily mean I’m going to walk away from it or spit on it or ignore it altogether (though all of these might be tempting). It’s more a matter of putting things into perspective. Like it or not, it’s my literal job to help capitalism - every other week, I get paid for the time I’ve spent greasing the system’s wheels. But that doesn’t mean I have to adopt its problems as my own. 

Think about the way we help other people. If a person is drowning, it’s clearly their problem - but I still want to help them. Yet it does no one any favors if, in a burst of misguided compassion, I jump in to drown alongside them. Likewise, a therapist will be much more valuable to a depressed patient if they don’t overempathize - their contribution comes from remaining detached and objective enough to provide carefully considered assistance. 

The problem is, after 25 years - more than half my life! - working in the corporate world, I’ve become conditioned to internalize capitalism’s problems as my own. The way this was accomplished was via implicit threat. It was always understood that, if I didn’t demonstrate my value as a worker - if I don’t have “skin in the game” - then I ran the risk of losing my job. The result has been that, whenever capitalism comes to me with a problem, it’s been in my own best interest - not to mention capitalism’s - to drop everything else and do everything necessary in order to work it out. This ensures higher profitability for my employer’s shareholders and therefore keeps me on capitalism’s good side. 

But in that moment on the treadmill, it hit me - not for the first time, not for the last, but finally in a simple, clarifying phrase - that just because capitalism expects something doesn’t mean I have to overcompensate for the system’s expectations. Capitalism can afford to wait. 

The problem with trying to please a system is that systems don’t make choices - they’re not intelligent. People make choices as they set systems up, and people make choices as they run them. You can try to please the people, but only insofar as they remain people rather than brute avatars of the system. Because unfortunately, over time the people running a system come to internalize its workings. In this sense, a system is like a virus or parasite that can take over the brain of its hosts, instilling its values and workings within the brains of individuals, who then view everything through the system’s lens. 

And that’s the greatest magic trick performed by the proponents of any system: their ability to convince others that the system is not a choice, but rather the inevitable result of the workings of the cosmos. Who came up with the divine right of kings? Kings! Who believes there’s no alternative to capitalism? Capitalists! But capitalism is not the law of nature, it’s a series of choices about how to run a society - just like communism, socialism, feudalism, and every other “ism.” (Rule of thumb: If it ends in “ism,” it’s 100% manmade.) Hence the popular quip credited variously to philosophers Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek, which was popularized in Mark Fisher’s short, brilliant tract Capitalist Realism: “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” It’s just like the AI CEOs warning about the dangers of their product: If you can convince people that your ideas are inescapable - in other words, that they’re everyone’s problem - you can get other people to do all the work for you. 

So yes, this mindset is a kind of hypnotic magic that reduces us to something less than fully human. It’s the same spell that Circe uses on Odysseus’ crew in the Odyssey - the kind that turns people into pigs. 

A few years ago we ate lunch at a restaurant called The Committed Pig, where there was a quote on the wall along the lines of: “The difference between involvement and commitment is the difference between bacon and eggs. The chicken is involved, but the pig is committed.” Looking it up, I see that variations on this adage have been used in various business and sports contexts for years. Every case that I can find seems to elide the fact that THE PIG IS DEAD. Why would anyone want to be the pig? How is this remotely aspirational???

Growing up in the shadow of the Cold War, the phrase “capitalist pig” was often placed in the mouths of America’s internal or external antagonists as a vivid description of those corpulent plutocrats who wallow in their wealth like swine in slime. But I suspect the real capitalist pigs are the ones who are slaughtered and savored by the system under the banner of “sacrifice.” This shows up most starkly in today’s gig economy, which has succeeded in helping capitalism further offload its problems onto the individual. The implicit threat has been made explicit, meaning that those who don’t accept capitalism’s burden as their own aren’t even allowed in the door. And if they do acquiesce, this new generation of “capitalist pigs” are raised in a kind of financial captivity - a pen with no space to move around, where they’re worked until they’re no longer of use.

At this stage in my life, I’m very, very, very, very lucky. Thanks to unearned privilege and some hot rolls of the dice, I’ve found my way into an employment niche where capitalism’s demands aren’t as insistent as they are for others, and as they’ve been at other stages of my life. This allows me to prioritize other aspects of life - family, culture, creation - over an exclusive focus on capitalism’s problems. For the past few years, I’ve successfully managed not to look at my email before getting out of bed in the morning. I’m able to spend more time with people I love and get more sustained glimpses of the world away from the (virtual) treadmill. 

And yet, even from this fortuitous perch, I can still find myself squealing in panic when capitalism calls with a problem. In those moments when I feel the system close in on me, I break into the sort of cold sweat I imagine Odysseus’ crewmen felt as curly tails sprouted from their behinds. No, I’d much rather be a hen, the type of bird who can squawk and walk, leaving her labor behind to live another day. 

Many would hear this and declare I’m not sufficiently committed. The thing is, I am - to saving my own bacon. I don’t want to live my life as someone else’s breakfast. And what’s more, as a vegetarian, I wish the same for you. So let’s remember that we’re at our best when we’re helping each other rather than the system - and maybe someday we’ll stand side by side throwing eggs at the machine together.