Avoiding My Capitalist Hellscape

On the Importance of Family and Friends

My reading and writing routine has been altered by the change of seasons. Spring is here and I’m eagerly preparing for summer—my favorite season. I tell you this to let you know that my posts will change; probably becoming more sparse and shorter in length. Until I settle back into my new routine this fall, I probably won’t have time to read or write as much as I did this winter.

This post marks the first of this new season.

Occasionally here on Substack I see unique individuals doing things differently. Recently I came across someone who described the place that she lives as a capitalist hellscape.

This got me thinking…

Hellscape is easy to define. The dictionary definition suffices:

hellscape - a harshly unpleasant place or environment

Defining capitalism is more unwieldy, but let’s try the dictionary again and modify a bit.

capitalism - A socio-economic system based primarily on private property rights, with social and economic decisions made largely through the operation of a market, unregulated by the state.

Notice that there’s no mention of the U.S. Constitution, or politics, or religion. No mention of war, violence, or criminal activity. No mention of right or wrong. No mention of respect. No mention of regulation, except to say that things are unregulated by the state.

The words “private property” and “market” are doing a lot of work in this definition.

In this post I want to focus on one aspect of capitalism: family.

What does capitalism do to families?

We can pretty much go in any direction we want with our answer to this question. The answer is up to us. We can allow the incentives of capitalism to push individual family members apart or we can create social institutions that bring these same family members together. We are free to create rules and traditions that keep our families tight-knit.

Geographically speaking, earth varies; thus it makes sense that people and economies will be distributed unevenly. Individual personalities vary as well. People may move away from their families in order to pursue their interests.

My dad was surprised when I didn’t return to the mountains after college. I stayed living in the San Francisco Bay Area. I settled in Silicon Valley, which has been described as a hellscape. My dad probably saw it that way.

I don’t want to get into the problems in Silicon Valley, other than to say that it became a bad place for my family. Silicon Valley started pushing my family members apart or would have, had we stayed. Fighting to come up with a plan to keep my family tight-knit there became an overwhelming burden.

For the past four years, we’ve been living in Idaho. Our reaction to being here has been relief. Idaho is no panacea, but our lives have been better here. But we are on the move again. This time across the country—in order to keep my family as tight-knit as I can make it.

Without family and friends I would probably view the place I live as a capitalist hellscape. But I don’t see it that way. Right now I feel really fortunate to live in America, but I haven’t always felt this way. I’ve never used the words capitalist hellscape before this post, but at times, looking back on various periods of my life in Silicon Valley, there were moments of hell. Most of these were of my own creation though. I don’t blame capitalism for that hell. I blame myself. Any capitalist hellscape that I’ve ever lived in was largely my own creation, mostly because I separated myself from family and friends. Without friends, and especially family, any place can turn into a hellscape, capitalist or not.