Capitalism, Algorithms & Grief

The interconnectivity of it all...

In April 2000, my mother died. At the time, I worked for a private company. I had about 2-3 weeks off organising the funeral, dealing with the grief and everything else we do when a loved one dies.

When I returned to work, I was told I wasn’t allowed compassionate leave, and had to take it as annual leave.

For real.

They weren’t joking.

I was lost for words.

What next? I’ll come back to this later.

Now jump forward to October 2023. I went into the office in a completely different job, as usual on a Tuesday. However, as the day went on I started feeling tight sharp feelings in my left chest, and my arm started going weak. I rang my doctor who told me to check in with accident and emergency, which I did. I fully admit, on my way there, I was afraid for my life. I thought I might die. Thankfully, I had all the tests known to humankind, and it wasn’t my heart or my blood.

It was anxiety.

I was tense.

Bones aching.

Body tight.

My body was carrying intense levels anxiety and stress on a daily basis, and he was telling me it needed addressing urgently.

The doctor’s recommendation: Slow down and take better care of yourself.

At that moment, I finally admitted to myself right then what intuitively I already knew but kept forgetting. I was putting my body through too much. I needed to take care of him. I needed to set some new boundaries.

I understood more fully than ever before, how valuing our own humanity is one of the most important things I or any of us can do.

The reality is, my human body and yours live in a system which is not designed for human bodies. A system which dehumanises us, and allows us no time to process grief and trauma, nor to look after our very human needs.

We call it capitalism.

For me and many others, this has in the past been aided and abetted by a religious system tied to capitalism, which gets God to miraculously take away all your pain without really doing any trauma work. Essentially, toxic religion wanted me to numb my pain too. Not to mention a social media algorithm - especially on twitter - designed to cultivate reactivity and outrage.

It might help to briefly breakdown capitalism and the twitter algorithm here, to help us understand how and why they cause us such harm.

Capitalism, was actually derived from the term ‘capitalist’, meaning ‘the owner of capital’. The basic concept is an economy driven by corporate ownership of the means of production. Essentially, everything which builds the economy is capital.

The capitalist concept really was an evolution of the “survival of the fittest” maxim which had driven the evolution of humanity to one of the dominant species on planet earth.

Capitalism favours those who have the most, those the most able (mentally and physically), and harms and pushes down those who have least, the disabled and marginalised. It’s designed to ensure the survival of the fittest. It’s birthed from a less evolved state of human consciousness and at its core, it dehumanises human bodies and turns them into capital.

There’s even a term in general use today, ‘human capital’, which really nails down our role in this system.

According to the 'Human Capital Project’ (yes, that’s a real thing), the definition of human capital is:

“Human capital consists of the knowledge, skills, and health that people invest in and accumulate throughout their lives, enabling them to realise their potential as productive members of society.”

• WorldBank.org

Essentially, this defines the value of a human being by what we have (skills, knowledge, money, connections, abilities), and what we do (being productive in society).

This essentially boils down human beings to machines. Machines to serve a system.

The things I would argue make us truly human - complex emotion, compassion, humour, culture, background, race, gender, our inherent value, our unique bodies, and above all our mortality…aren’t even mentioned in this definition.

It essentially dehumanises us. Our humanity is almost meaningless, like an annoying side issue, or just something else to be commodified. Humans only have value in what we produce, what we can do and how much we can contribute to society. Like machines. Companies even have ‘human resources’ to ‘resource’ our humanity like its’ a product or annoying side issue.

So what does this have to do with grief? Well, grief is a complex human condition (it’s way more than an emotion) which almost all of us experience. Anyone who’s lost a loved one knows, a three-week break to go to a funeral and get away from it all, is not remotely enough to process all the complexities of grief.

Yet as I mentioned at the start, capitalism wants to act like this isn’t a major issue. Like its a mild annoyance to be tolerated. That’s certainly how my boss in 2000 felt about it. .

What this treatment I got back then told me, was grief and trauma was something to be dealt with quickly, and then you just get on with your life like it never happens. Capitalism encourages us to be strong and to numb any pain or discomfort. This is the point we often self-medicate, and its how damaging habits and even addiction (which is a separate disease) can begin.

I buried my grief, I tried to numb it with overeating, but eventually the anger of grief - a very unique type of anger - began to consume me. Because back then therapy wasn’t really a thing, and I just got on with my life. It took me 16 years to finally get the help I needed.

Western society has no rituals for grief anymore. No time is given to properly honour and process our feelings. It’s not made a priority. Our humanity is neglected over our worth as capital.

To capitalism, we and our bodies are just capital.

This is the world we live in. Now.

So what about social media, and more specifically, twitter?

The Twitter algorithm is essentially capitalist, built on keeping you on the app/site as long as possible to get revenue up. Of course, what’s one of the best ways to keep people engaged? Keep them interested.

Get them emotionally connected and co-dependent.

Get them addicted.

Get them angry.

The algorithm presents tweets to us which will keep us on the platform, keep us scrolling, and get us sharing. Often they will be provocative tweets or tweets which pick up on our google searches to keep us engaged. I mean, how many times have you searched for something on google or Amazon, and then an advert or tweet related to it “magically” appeared on your timeline, right?

The twitter algorithm trains our brains to get a dopamine hit from likes, retweets, shares and engagement. It also trains our brains to become addicted to reactivity and outrage, because those things keep us on the platform and makes them money. If you spend enough time there, you become subconsciously addicted to reacting to everything, and being outraged by anything.

I’ve seen it happen many times, and it used to happen to me.

I had a period several years ago where I was completely addicted to twitter, and unknowingly, addicted to outrage. Twitter addiction successfully wound me up and got me angry and reactive on a daily basis. In my head it often felt like justified anger too.

But this anger was different.

Uncontrolled.

Unfiltered.

Raw.

So unfortunately, I unintentionally caused harm to a several people. I said things I still regret. As a result, I was blocked by a few people I cared about. I lost friendships. I didn’t blame them either. I reflected back for a long time, and wondered what the hell had happened to make me act so out of character.

I soon began to understand, the anger was a combination of what the twitter algorithm did to me, and my then unprocessed grief and trauma.

And that’s a toxic mix. A mix which you can see played out by hundreds of people on twitter even today.

For me, my grief was all stored up in my body with nowhere to go. So it came out at anyone who threatened this false security I built up for myself. It came up when people questioned my rightness about certain topics, and in trying to build a platform to make up for the loss of my mother.

Twitter is a great place to go self-medicate when we’re in pain. We can escape into doom scrolling, even to find community, but what happens if we’re not doing the healing work and not paying attention, is we’re much more vulnerable to the algorithm. If we get drawn in by the algorithm, we can start getting outraged about anything, anytime, and causing harm - to ourselves, our bodies, and to others.

When something awful in the world happens - like whats happening now in the middle-east - the justified anger can then become something more. It can become hatred.

The news broke about whats happening in the middle east, broke just after my incident in the hospital. So with this in mind, when it happened, I set some boundaries with myself.

• I didn’t tweet much initially, either about the news or the issues around it, other than to express sympathy and compassion.

• I educated myself on the issues.

• I took time to process how I was feeling about it, and chose not to react out of raw anger and grief, but to make a measured, educated, rational response later on.

• I chose to listen to my body and how he was feeling. I knew he needed to slow down. I knew I needed to acknowledge what was showing up in my body. I needed to recognise my humanity, and the humanity in the situation.

• I set boundaries on the time I would spend reading and commenting on the situation, as well as what and how much I would expose myself to. To protect my humanity.

• I took time to properly grieve. I allowed myself to scream, to cry, to vent my feelings about whats happening in the world. Privately.

This meant when I eventually responded publicly, it wasn’t a highly charged, angry, reactive response. Instead, it was more measured, educated and more nuanced perspective than I would have been able to had I reacted sooner. This served to help my body remain calm and rational. It kept my blood pressure down. I got more sleep. I also found I was far less snappy, and I had far less anger in my body.

Sadly what I saw in many others was the complete opposite. There was raw anger and hatred. I saw people taking the side of terrorists. I saw people attacking innocent Jews and blaming them for the actions of their government.

I saw hatred.

And it was clear to me, these were people who were reacting out of raw, unprocessed grief and anger. People thinking dualistically, in an either/or way, not a both/and way. Taking their anger at genuine injustice, violence and suffering out on innocent people on a social media platform who had done nothing wrong.

Even with the steps I took, when I finally began tweeting on the issue, after about a week or two, I noticed myself again getting a little sucked into reactive emotional responses. Eventually I said something which came across almost the opposite to how I intended.

Thankfully, because I’d done all the groundwork, because I had the awareness, I was able to notice it quickly and step back again.

The twitter algorithm will always be there ready to suck you in to its trap.

Both the algorithm and capitalism itself are set up to enable this kind of response, because they dehumanise us, commodify us, and don’t allow us time or space to process our grief, or engage with our bodies.

In short, capitalism doesn’t see us a human, and tries to dehumanise us to the extent we stop acting like humans, towards ourselves or others.

This is why war is so prevalent in capitalism. Nations react quickly, emotionally, out of anger, without thinking, and in the end harm is caused and mistakes are made. You get nations with historic trauma, causing immense, unjustified suffering to other nations, because they never dealt with their own.

Capitalism, in a sense, weaponises our grief and trauma and uses it to serve it’s own purposes, to the detriment of ourselves and other human bodies.

In 2016, we saw how the Twitter algorithm and unresolved grief, fear and trauma, when weaponised, has the power to sway elections.

So must be aware, be awake, and have our eyes open. This is all around us. We need to do the work of healing and loving ourselves. It literally changes the world.

So, why am I saying all this? I don’t have all the answers. We can’t just click our fingers and end capitalism right now.

I say it because at a time where we’re all carrying so much grief, so much pain, so much weight from what’s happening in the world and our own lives, it can be easy to forget how the world works and get caught up in it.

It can be easy to forget to listen to our bodies.

It can be easy to forget to love ourselves

Easy to forget we are human.

The only way we can survive these times in is to be intentional about all these things. To pause and take time for ourselves. Maybe this looks like the steps I shared above or something different.

But take time for yourself.

Take time to feel.

Take time to rest.

Take time to grieve.

I have learned we need to humanise ourselves, humanise others, to process our grief, listen to it, scream, vent, journal. Do the work of healing.

Only then can we break the cycle of reactivity, anger and harm, and live from our humanity and from love. We can be a loving, non-reactive presence in the world.

We also need healthy community. It’s what human bodies are designed for and where we thrive the most. Community. So many of us are on this journey, more than you’d think.

You’re not alone.

So, what happened with my annual leave when I lost my mum? Well, the thing was, my dad and the company he worked for, were responsible for giving contracts to the company I worked for. So he gave the chairman a discreet phone call. I have no idea to this day exactly what my dad said in the phone call, but suffice to say I was eventually given my compassionate leave.

Ironically, in an act of love and compassion towards his son, an act of deep humanity, my dad used capitalism against my bosses in order to honour my and my mothers humanity. There’s something kinda satisfying and even hopeful about that.

You see, there is hope.

We are in late stage capitalism. I believe we are not too far away from a big shift in consciousness towards connection, community and systems which centre our humanity.

As a certain level of consciousness birthed capitalism, a new tier of consciousness will birth something new.

For now, there will be challenging times ahead in this transition. But if we love ourselves, honour our humanity, feel our feelings and honour our grief, and do it in healthy community, we can find our way through.

Together.