According to the most recent survey conducted by Gallup Polling about global workplace conditions in 2021, the Philippines ranked 1st among countries in the Southeast Asian region whose workers experienced a lot of stress. The report states that 50% of Filipinos suffer from this mental distress. Although the figure has gone down from 53%, it is still higher than the world average, which is 44%.
The current figure of 44% shows that it is above pre-pandemic levels, which are 43% in 2020, 38% in 2019, 37% in 2018, and 29% in 2017.
One of the highlights of the report was this: Do employees find their work meaningful and rewarding? Do they think their lives are going well? Do they feel hopeful about the future? The short answer is that most employees around the world would answer “no” to all three questions.
The effect of the pandemic is definitely a factor to consider when taking into account this finding from the survey. But it would also be a lie to think that this conclusion is anything new.
𝗦𝘁𝗿𝗲𝘀𝘀
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), stress is “a state of worry or mental tension caused by a difficult situation." Everyone has their fair share of it. Moreover, WHO emphasizes that “stress is a little bit good and can help us perform daily activities” as it pushes us to reach our goals. Stress only supposedly becomes a problem when it affects our mental and physical health by causing headaches, insomnia, and high blood pressure.
The argument that stress becomes a motivational opportunity further veers away from our contemporary state of perpetual distress so as to obfuscate the politics embedded in our labor relations. Even when defining mental health concerns, we are still roped into the productivity-industrial complex.
There is something elusive about this definition of stress. One that refuses to give it an antecedent beyond the usual malaise that passes away once we have acclimated to our surroundings or once we have nursed ourselves with our coping mechanisms. The obvious recourse when reading about stress is how to cope with it, as if it’s just an eerie, hovering entity that latches on people, and with luck, we may get easily rid of it.
There’s more to today’s stress than simply “tension caused by a difficult situation.” There is something amiss in the realization that a large number of people do not find their work meaningful and rewarding, that they no longer believe their lives are going well, and that there is no hope for the future. With this, it can be argued that stress is a depoliticized word for the deleterious effects of alienation at work and capitalism.
𝗣𝗿𝗶𝘃𝗮𝘁𝗶𝘇𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗼𝗳 𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗲𝘀𝘀
When the casualization of labor emerged under the imperative of neoliberalism, it created a giant pool of workers fighting for contractual jobs. The lack of job security and opportunities coupled with the rising cost of living facilitated a culture of competition so desired by neoliberals, which resulted in the destruction of solidarity among communities.
What it then creates is precarity, that the worker is a replaceable cog in the machine, and it takes knowing this in order for the worker to make itself always go beyond what is required of work. A rapacious cycle of self-flagellation for capital’s purposes.
It is an interesting contrast to see that half of Filipino workers feel stressed, but the Philippines ranked 1st when it came to workplace engagement in the entire Southeast Asian region. Could it be that the stress derived itself from the demands of the job? That this engagement is done at the expense of their own mental health?
The consequence of this precarity is an increased rate of people feeling anxious and depressed. And the cyclical nature of neoliberalism has allowed industries designed to personalize and therefore defang these mental health illnesses from their inherent politics into manageable feelings easily (and temporarily) cured by consumerism or substance abuse. Many scholars have noted the link between neoliberalism and stress.
Mark Fisher, a political and cultural theorist, expounds on the concept of the “privatization of stress” and how neoliberalism has atomized this malaise into individual distress. He says that, “The social and political causation of distress is neatly sidestepped at the same time as discontent is individualised and interiorised. It is clearly easier to prescribe a drug than a wholesale change in the way society is organised.”
Mental illnesses also become “entrepreneurial” perhaps as best exemplified by motivational gurus and influencers who make you want to buy their book, subscribe to their masterclasses on breathing, meditation, journaling, etc. It is important perhaps to make the distinction that oftentimes these people do not share the same precarity of lives that is the looming threat of homelessness, hunger, and destitution when we miss a day of work, which ultimately makes their attempts to guide us to their way of life hollow and at worst only indulgent of their own whims. It can be inferred that rich influencers take advantage of the discontent of the collective society by way of capitalizing this social malaise into monetizable opportunities but the act or the possibility of creating those content is reliant on our very own class differences.
Fisher makes an insightful point that the depoliticization of our distress destroys the concept of “public ― the very thing upon which [our] psychic well-being fundamentally depends.” He elucidates his point in his book Capitalist Realism where he characterizes depression for most UK teenagers as “depressive anhedonia.”
“[What] I’m referring to is constituted not by an inability to get pleasure so much as it by an inability to do anything else except pursue pleasure. There is a sense that 'something is missing' but no appreciation that this mysterious, missing enjoyment can only be accessed beyond the pleasure principle.”
It seems as if hedonism becomes the antidote if not the pursuit because ultimately life is bleak. The alienation from/at work, the moribund state of public spaces, the crisis in intimacy, the reduction of our collective attention span ― all of these send us into a spiral of perpetual existential anxiety.
I’ve been recently seeing memes of people enjoying leisurely activities like reading or watching films until they are reminded of their backlogs. These pleasurable activities after that realization are done with a manic quality. A negotiation between surviving the imperatives of harsh work (especially when there’s no longer any delineation to where work stops and begins) and the pleasure of relaxing. Fisher presciently critiques the work-at-home setup.
“Work and life become inseparable. Capital follows you when you dream. Time ceases to be linear, becomes chaotic, broken down into punctiform divisions. As production and distribution are restructured, so are nervous systems. To function effectively as a component of just-in-time production you must develop a capacity to respond to unforeseen events, you must learn to live in conditions of total instability.”
This preoccupation with work makes us less receptive in experiencing the pleasure of art. We pursue pleasure because time seems to always be beyond our grasp. Our metaphysical chains are no longer tied to any source, we now carry it wherever we go.
The privatization of stress stresses the fact that the onus of feeling this is on the individual. Fisher and several theorists argue that the “chemico-biologization” of mental illnesses ultimately serves capitalism. “You are sick because there’s something wrong with your brain chemistry.” What this means is that pharmaceutical companies make a fortune out of our collective mental illness. Fisher was adamant about the fact that while all mental illnesses are “neurologically instantiated” it fails to get into the roots of what causes it.
Meanwhile, in her study Mental Health Challenges Related to Neoliberal Capitalism in the United States, Anna Zeira, a psychiatry resident at the University of Maryland, links the effects of neoliberalism to the field of psychiatry.
“Around the same time as the cultural shifts of neoliberalism began, psychiatry moved to a biological approach and the scope of psychiatry expanded which worked to medicalize distress, shift cultural perception about what is 'normal' and what is 'abnormal,' and strengthen the idea that failure to succeed in the dominant society is an individual problem that must be corrected by individual treatment.”
Here’s where the sinister tentacle of neoliberalism takes place. The personalization of stress implies that self-management is the key to achieving your goals or being successful. The problem becomes you’re not managing your time enough. When you’re feeling stressed, you ought to find a wiggle room to make things work otherwise a domino of stress will come knocking on the door. Stability becomes a prize, the pursuit in a society where social welfare is wobbly. And when time management temporarily works, it replicates the politics that if you can’t manage yourself and therefore feel stressed, the problem is you.
𝗤𝘂𝗶𝗲𝘁-𝗾𝘂𝗶𝘁𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴
The phenomenon of quiet quitting is perhaps the best example of the alienation most people feel today about work. “Quiet quitting” is defined as “doing the minimum requirements of one’s job and putting no more time, effort, or enthusiasm than absolutely necessary.”
The outright refusal to define the phenomenon as a consequence of living under capitalism is perhaps what neoliberalism has ultimately perfected. Capital as the Unnamable thing, as Deleuze and Guattari put it. The isolation of these phenomena makes it seem as if they are disconnected and not the cracks in the face of late-stage capitalism.
In our country, 60% of employees have engaged in quiet-quitting according to Milieu Insight. Among the benefits that Filipino workers see when performing quiet-quitting is that there is less stress, they have better mental health, and there is a work-life balance.
𝗜𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗮𝗹𝗹 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝗶𝘀?
What our elders always remind us of is that life is unfair. The future is depressing. Perhaps this is exactly what we must fight against. We must regain the capability of reimagining a new world. It’s a conundrum where to draw the line between absolving ourselves of our actions under a capitalist regime because of its inescapability and fighting back but we can always remind ourselves, “There should be more to this”.
Mental health is reliant on our psycho-social well-being. The antidote to stress relies on the strengthening of the community. This means fighting for the reinstitution of social welfare. If stress is derived from the tenuous position of labor to the shackles of profit, there needs to be a radical reorganization of society, one that abolishes private property and wage labor.
In the pervasive era of the productivity-industrial complex, being always at work is an asset. We can never get left behind if we’re always ready. But it’s almost always at the expense of our well-being. It’s a privilege, to even have the capacity to think about this, but when it crosses our mind maybe it’s important to ask, is this all there is?
Article: Drex Le B. Jaena
Graphics: Lester Limpin
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