Childhood is anti-Capitalism

I had realization the other day when I reflected on my childhood, specifically times outside with family. These memories brought up a distinct feeling, the kind that brought a wave of nostalgia and an ache in my heart. I was trying to pinpoint the feeling, what was it that I missed so dearly? What was this feeling that spanned so many years and moments in my childhood? Then it hit me. I felt free. Blissful. Happy.

I have a string of vivid memories attached to that free feeling. One was while water-skiing. I was on a kneeboard behind my uncle’s ski boat, sliding across the glassy-smooth water inches away from the wetland grass at the shoreline, wind and sun on my face. I held on to the rope with one hand (or maybe I copied my uncle and put the handle in the nook of my bent elbow), and trailed my other hand along the side, fingers just below the surface of the water, creating mini waves behind me. Another time, I was on the tree-swing in my back yard. My hair was wild and curly around my face, my fingers dirty and rough from digging and holding on to the weathered rope. I had only one goal: to swing higher and higher to reach that holly branch. I swung higher and higher, time was mine, the earth and sky were mine. I finally touched the branch with the tip of my toe and smiled in victory, enjoying the falling sensation as I swung back the other way. Another memory: dancing. I remember taking my boombox, putting in a cassette tape, cranking up the volume and losing myself in the music, running, twirling, gyrating around the large family room with no one in sight. Just me, my music, and my body. I remember floating in the ocean, the sounds of the beach muted with my hearing aids out. I could hear the screech of a seagull if it was close enough, but otherwise it was just a soft hum of indiscriminate noise, making me feel like everything and everyone was a faded background and all that mattered or existed was me, floating. I remember walking in the forest, looking up at the tree canopy and staring at the way the light sparkles and shimmers as it trickles through the leaves moving with the wind, reflecting and letting in light in an organic rhythm of their own.

Free. I felt free. Time and space: open.

After getting lost in nostalgia, I thought about why I don’t have these feelings as often anymore. In fact, I feel like I chase the opportunities down with fervor, and not as much success. Why is it when I am trying to find these moments, that they seem so elusive? Prepare to roll your eyes, but, the reason why is mostly: capitalism.

Capitalism makes us pay for our existence with production. We’ve created a system in which it feels normal to demand someone’s life in service of making or producing something. We have only one gorgeous life to live, and we have convinced ourselves that it is OK, no- NECESSARY for us to spend the bulk of it in labor – even if it costs our health (physical or mental). In fact, we praise people for pushing that cost higher without complaint. As long as the result makes money. The benefit of the product itself is negligible.

Capitalism has grown like a hungry weed past the confines of an economic system and into our cultural and domestic lives. It is so pervasive that children as young as 3 and at the very least 13 are trained to orient their education toward gaining the best chance of financial production for themselves. They are instructed to choose activities for the sole purpose of appealing to higher educational institutes or at least higher paying industries. STEM is a big push in education right now, and for good reason: the field is expanding and lucrative, and they need more producers. Capitalism reaches its thorny tendrils into the education system, into the psyche of children, and constricts them until there is only one path: to the belly of a hungry and greedy economic system.

The romanticized “blissful” childhood is the only time that we allow humans to exist without needing to produce for our consumption. We mock it saying how nice it is to have “no responsibility” but children are responsible for plenty: physical, mental, spiritual growth. They learn an entire language, a mode of transportation (walking), social norms, ethics, and more. They don’t often get any choice in what and how they learn it, either. But those responsibilities are for their own benefit. Lack of responsibility isn’t the reason why childhood is often so blissful. What is blissful is that the responsibilities are beneficial, matched to the child’s abilities in such a way that is challenging but not suffocating. It helps them grow, and is a blessing to society around them. No for consumption, but for community. Some children struggle because the responsibilities are not matched, and for those we should be re-calibrating, but we don’t always see this. We try to force them to catch up (to what?!). We forget that they need to practice being human and we need to practice embracing all of humanity.

Thanks to capitalism’s invasive spread, children (for myriad reasons) have been given less and less freedom, more and more responsibilities (and I’m not talking chores), and more narrow and restrictive paths. There’s not an easy way around it. Parents know that things like a livable wage, retirement income, health care, even as simple as housing and food, are becoming harder to attain. There is no way to avoid the capitalism kudzu, you either play the game or get swallowed whole. So we all play the game.

Adults fantasize about returning to childhood. But it isn’t the lack of responsibility we miss. Certainly not the restricted freedoms and limitations embedded in childhood. We miss being free to be human. We miss not being expected to produce something palatable, desirable, profitable. We fantasize about dancing without an audience. Singing without a judge. Being clothed without measurements mattering. Spending our days exploring, learning, tasting, seeing.

I don’t know what my final point is other than that we must have grace: for children struggling with capitalism kudzu, for adults who long to be human without so many requirements of monetization, for ourselves for letting capitalism steal our joy. I don’t know how to get rid of kudzu. I do know that when I feel depressed, trapped, or discouraged, I’m going to try to remember that the standards in front of us are not real. Joy is found in floating in an ocean or watching for shooting stars. If I have to steal those moments, so be it. The worst thing is to stop trying at all.

So let your kids be weird and dance and sing and make weird noises while they play video games. Let them get dirty and forget to brush their hair. It’s these memories that will sustain them as adults when they need a path back to their humanity. At the rate the kudzu is growing, they’ll be desperate for it.