“Capital is an abstract parasite, an insatiable vampire and zombie-maker; but the living flesh it converts into dead labor is ours, and the zombies it makes are us.”
Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism
Our wounds are invisible. They devour and lay waste to us. Consumerism’s death-drive creates a deadening of affect; there’s no room for human feelings in its ideology of materialism, competition, and envy. Consumerist-societies create a shared fantasy of fulfilment synonymous with luxury products; real or fake, and available to everyone. Inanimate objects act as dead signifiers of our desires. Fixated on them, we lose our identity and connection to others, yet our greatest desire is to be recognised, to be seen by another human being; to be loved. Artificial wealth conceals artificial scarcity, and social relations become hollowed out; as a result, one third of the world’s population has mental illnesses. We’re murdering each other’s empathy. Yet within ourselves is the highest value, the simple fact of being. No expensive facade will give meaning to our lives.
