Last weekend, I went to a farm. A friend and I picked apples, chillies, peppers, cauliflower, raspberries, and tomatoes, popping berries into our mouths and crunching down on the waxy skins of apples along the way. After a few hours, we had our hand-selected produce weighed, paid what was due, and exited back out to the entrance of the property. I smoked a cigarette whilst my friend took out the croissants, soup-in-thermos, cheese and ham we had prepared for lunch and, given that there were no tables or chairs in the farm car park, we slurped on the warm soup and munched on our ham and cheese croissants standing up. It was a good day.

Two days later, I'm back at work. I'm in the office going through the emails that have stacked up after the long weekend, running through my to-do list with a mechanic efficiency and almost automatised, brainless approach that I have mastered after almost a decade of working in start-ups. In the back of my mind, I'm simultaneously thinking about the articles, newsletters, exhibitions, websites, and various other projects that I am working on in my free time that need to get done - things I do after work both to earn some extra money and because each of these additional tasks quench a creative part of my brain that my day job cannot always fulfil. But it's a lot. Suddenly, a sharp pain whizzes through my body and I only just realise that I've been biting incessantly at my fingers for the whole 9 hours I've been in the office. I've just bitten my little finger down to blood. For the rest of the day, I suck on it, hoping the bleeding will stopper up soon.

That evening, back at home, I'm sat at this very Macbook trying to begin an essay for an art magazine. I'm drawing up blanks and it's stressing me out. I think of my little finger. The skin of my chest feels like it's tightening around my rib cage. I take a deep breath, make myself a cup of tea, open the window to let the chilling late-autumn air in and smoke a cigarette.

The next day, I am ill. Funny, I think to myself, how your mental state can destroy your physical body so quickly.

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The contraposition of my day at the farm and the next few days at work are striking to me. How could it be possible that I had such an incredibly wholesome weekend, where I felt closer to whatever life is 'supposed to be about' and sleeping soundly and restfully for a good thirteen hours afterwards, to being so stressed and mentally fraught that I had made myself ill just a couple of days later?

These days, the creeping feeling that I've had in recent months is becoming more prominent, that my body is viscerally rejecting how I am currently living my life, as if kicking and crying out against my societally-conditioned and homogenous brain in a desperate fight for survival: CAPITALISM IS KILLING YOU.

Of course, this statement is true for everyone, every living being on the planet. Capitalism is killing all of us. But the reality of what this means has descended from a cerebral concept that I might debate about with friends over a pint on a Parisian terrace, and has now taken bodily and mental effects upon me. I am a consumer, and the Capitalism I have been force-fed has slipped into my stomach, darkened it with poison, it pools and becomes sticky, heavy, my feet are dragging, I am tired and bloated with the weight of carrying it around.

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The day on the farm was just a brief panacea to this chronic illness that I can only describe as a mental, corporal and spiritual un-belonging to this world. The disjointedness between my body as a vessel (passive, without or with very little agency) in the incessant whirring machine of Late Capitalism, and my mind/spirit's longing for a deeper purpose beyond monetary gain and 'society's' (what does 'society' even look like these days in a world that is so splintered?) perception of 'success' is becoming untenable. But the farm was not the first instance in which I felt a closeness to what I think I would like my life to be. The other handful of times I felt this way this year was:

1) On a road trip to the Highlands in Scotland. I stayed in a very small cabin that looked upon a loch. With no Wifi and no 4G, there was nothing to do there except play board games and drink tea. At night, the clouds covered the moon and stars; the air was consequently so thick and black that you could barely see your hand if you stuck it out in front of you. It was scary and beautiful; something I would describe as one of my closest Kantian experiences of the Sublime. Sadly, this experience lasted only one night before it was time to go back to Edinburgh.

2) Spending three days in the Pyrénées in the South of France. I went on a multi-day hike with some friends, but the group was unfortunately split up and towards sunset a thick fog began to settle in the mountains. After realising we could not proceed to the refuge where we hoped to be staying that night, we tried to find shelter elsewhere but were rejected by the only other refuge in the vicinity (they were not open until the next day). I sobbed insufferably, convinced that we had no other option but to sleep outside in freezing temperatures. Luckily, we managed to find an abandoned cabin, within which we found the other half of our estranged party, who had worried about where we had gone off to.

3) On the Tour du Mont Blanc. This 8-day hike around the Mont Blanc was one of the most breathtaking and terrifying things I have ever done.

And so I guess I need to go to the mountains. When I was in my early twenties, I mused about buying a small house in the Scottish mountains one day, which would be my secondary abode where I would flee to unwind and disconnect from what I imagined would be a very intensive but lavishly successful career (à la millennial Girlboss era of the mid 2010s). Now that I have just entered my 30s, I still want this small house in the mountains, except now I want it to escape any notion of a Girlboss career whatsover. In fact, I want to abscond from Capitalism altogether.

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It's fair to say that my increasing sense of dissatisfaction has been compounded by recent political affairs. Here are some things I've been reading:

In 'Trump's Election, the End of the World Order as We Know It, & Where We Go From Here', Jesse Damiani, for his Urgent Futures podcast, writes about how the re-election of Trump may profoundly change how we operate in the world. More specifically, it may change the way in which we imagine or perceive how our future could be, as our future planning or projections for our lives will likely vastly change under a 'new world order' that he calls the MAGA Axis, a new conglomerate of world leaders that would involve Trump, Putin, Netanyahu, Erdoğan and others. One line that struck me in his newsletter as an action response to this crisis is the following:

Perhaps in the shattering of one world order there are opportunities to build bottom-up communities of care and cyborg forms of innovation aligned with the processes of nature—and do so powerfully before the MAGA Axis solidifies. Perhaps this opens up new avenues for finding meaning and purpose in life.

I'm not sure of what my role looks like in this vision just yet, but I know that's the direction I want to go in. This is the kind of 'meaning and purpose in life' I am currently looking for.

Tangentially, I was reminded of this interview that I read on Willa Köerner's blog, Dark Properties, between Köerner and Cortney Cassidy, who quit her tech job to become a full-time gardener. There were multiple excerpts of this conversation that really hit home from me. Here are a few:

I like to work and I have a strong will to follow through, and that part of me got really abused within the tech ecosystem. I was always a tool for something I didn’t believe in. I was there to help the company earn a profit and nothing more. Even when I tried to make a meaningful impact within that system, like building a design ethics framework or joining the union, it never felt radical enough because I was still participating in an industry that manipulated my well-intentioned contributions for profit.

Cassidy's solution?

Leaving was the only way for me to successfully resist.

Reading this interview was maybe the first instance where I realised that my resistance against capitalism also probably resembles a form of escapism. And although I realise I cannot escape the system in which I was born completely, estranging myself from it as much as possible by no longer working for companies that are for-profit and only exist to make wealthy investors even wealthier, seems like a feasible strategy to me. But not right away.

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This blog post is the first time I have published something so personal since my early days of blogging in the early 2010s. I feel vulnerable posting it (a feeling that I do not like and do not embrace) and its ending feels truncated and incomplete, but that's probably because the story isn't over. Maybe a few months, or years, from now, there will be a part two.