GoKawiilContent Note: This essay includes discussion of disability, financial precarity, poverty, and distress related to inability to work.
I’m 38 years old and I just had to ask my mom if I could borrow money. Writing that email was enough to send me into a sobbing panic spiral about potentially spending the next 50 years without stable income.
“Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.”
― Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor
Rousse (La Toilette) - Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec - 1889
There’s a strange grief in no longer being economically useful. It’s one I became acquainted with quite young. But I didn’t learn its name until my disability fully overtook my life 5 years ago, and I stopped being able to work consistently.
A note comes across my substack feed about mindset and discipline. “I have severe back pain and anemia. Made myself get up and go to the gym. Always feel better after,” Maureen comments. Mahima adds: “So true, discipline is the highest form of self-love.”
The Gospel of Productivity
We’ve been using our productivity as proof of our worth for too long now. I don’t think it’s accidental that so many of us experience unemployment or disability as a kind of moral failure.
Much of modern Western culture, particularly in the United States, was shaped by what sociologist Max Weber called the Protestant work ethic: the belief that hard work, discipline, frugality, and productivity were signs of virtue. In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Weber argued that Calvinist and Protestant beliefs helped shape the cultural mindset that made modern capitalism feel like something morally good and necessary. Work was no longer simply something one did to survive.
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