Monday: The start of the working week, for which people in employment (30.1 million of us- 75.5% of the UK population) spend the majority of their waking hours partaking in what can be likened to ‘slave labour…’

With the average working week being Monday to Friday, most people only have weekends off work, thus meaning that Saturday and Sunday is the only time they have to do what they genuinely want to do with their life, not what they have to do (as is the case from Monday when they are back in the role of employer as opposed to human)…

The problem with this is that the traditional Monday to Friday, 9–5 job (40 hour working week), when added up over the course of one’s lifetime, equates to 90,000 hours (just over 10 years). That’s a decade spent at work.

Where the average life expectancy (in the UK) is 80, 10 years might not seem excessive, but consider the hours that the average person works (9am to 5pm)- daytime hours. When the average person sleeps for 8 hours per night, with this equating, over a lifetime, to 26 years of being asleep, it’s easy to see just how little time we have left…

Finishing work at 5pm, by the time we get through the rush hour traffic back home, it’s nearly 6pm.
Cooking dinner, putting the kids to bed, getting a shower, by the time we properly sit down, it’s 9pm,
thus leaving us with one hour (if we’re lucky) ‘free’ time before we go to bed
(and, I say ‘free’ time, but we’re limited by what we can do at that time, especially when we’re up early for work the next day. It’s hardly the ideal time to dust off your old roller-skates to honour your new years resolution of taking up a ‘new hobby’, is it?)…

And so, the only time that we *actually* have ‘free’ is on the days when we’re not at work which, for most people, is Saturday and Sunday- this being just two days out of seven 
(quick maths).

After a stressful week at work though, people might not feel like doing anything on their days off, or they might have to catch up on chores/all the boring things that they didn’t have time to do during the week.

Is ‘free’ time ever really free when the weight of ‘just’ living comes with so much responsibility?

As is evident by the statistics highlighted above- where 8 hours a day at work turns into 40 hours a week at work turns into 10 years a lifetime at work, how we spend our days is how we spend our lives.

And, for most of us? Our days, our lives, are spent at work…

Where the average age of retirement in the UK is 66, and where there is an average of 52 weekends per year, the average person who starts work at 18 will have 2496 weekends (4992 days) in their lifetime. That equates to 13 years of ‘free’ time.
And, when the average life expectancy is 80 years, suddenly 13 years seems very very short… Yet, for people who work full-time, 13 years is all they end up having. Such a short amount of time for which we’re still not truly ‘free.’ Why? Because, unfortunately for us, as humans, ‘creatures of habit’, we tend to lean towards familiarity, meaning that how we spent yesterday and how we’re spending today will largely mirror how we spend tomorrow…

What greater (/sadder) juxtaposition is there than this ( ^ ) …

The fact that we spend our whole lives working in order to afford to stay alive, meanwhile, in the process, we sacrifice doing the things that make us feel alive, that make us want to be alive, therefore leaving us questioning;

‘What’s the point?’

Underappreciated, far too many of us work tirelessly for someone else, lining THEIR pockets with the profits that WE make (but, of course, never see), just so that we can get by/so that we can afford to stay alive…

Surely this provides all possible reasoning as to why Monday is such a dreaded day- back to the grind whereby our lives aren’t really ‘our’ lives at all… No freedom, no choice, dependent on a wage in order to stay alive, we have no choice BUT to work.

The reality of capitalism = the need to earn…

Where passion and purpose is what makes life worthwhile, without doing the things that make me feel alive, why would I work to stay alive? It makes no sense, hence why the two — work and ‘play’ — must go hand-in-hand…

Like living in a mansion on your own- no family or friends to call your own, no connection other than that of your mobile phone, no purpose, when you’re at home but simultaneously wanting to go home (‘this place doesn’t fall like home’), what use is money?…

What’s the point in spending your whole life working, generating money for which you run out of life to spend it?…Unable to take it with you, what a waste of a life.

I’d rather have no money and have a life that I don’t have to ‘endure’, but that I love, than loads of money in the bank with nothing to do,
nowhere to go,
no one to see
to spend it on.
For, where money does not equal happiness, in my happiness, I am far wealthier than the person living in the mansion on their own.

Find Your Purpose

When we spend so much of our lives working, we must prioritise finding a job that gives us a sense of purpose in life, 
that doesn’t make us dread Mondays, 
that doesn’t make us question the meaning (/futility) of life…

For, the fact is that time passes us by
so SO quickly,
sometimes, quite literally (or, so it seems) in the blink of an eye
and, before we know it, we’re on our deathbed saying goodbye,
questioning why we didn’t do all that we wanted to do when we still had the time.

There is so much more to life-
your one, precious life.
Don’t let it pass you by
amidst the mundanity of the daily grind-
don’t.

Don’t let it be you. 

You’re not a machine, you’re alive for a greater reason than to make profit for someone else.

FIND THAT REASON.

Class: something which no amount of watering can change.
Where the tree grows
the roots stay the same.

To the world, the tree is getting taller, but what you can’t see is that, no matter how much you water the tree, no matter how tall the tree grows, its roots will remain the same-
unchanged
forever.

And the same principle, I’d argue, is true of us.

No matter how much we go ‘up’ in the world,
no matter how much money we acquire,
who we are at our core,
who we have been since the day we were born
gets left unchanged,
growing
only in the space within which we were planted.

Class: something which no amount of watering can change.
Where the tree grows
the roots stay the same.

(it’s all pre-arranged).

If you’re working-class and you come into money (you buy a lottery ticket on Friday night, the numbers being drawn on Saturday night confirming that you are now a millionaire), do you become middle-class? 

Do you go from working-class to middle-class overnight?

And, likewise, if you’re middle-class, the founder of a multi-million pound business that goes into insolvency, leaving you bankrupt/forcing you onto the streets, do you become working-class? 

Do you go from middle-class to working-class overnight?

In other words: Is class solely based on money, or does it run deeper than that?…

Consider someone from a working-class family who finds themselves caught up in a world of drug dealing. Their friends are all working-class, as are their parents, but they have accumulated money. With several houses, they are living a stereotypically ‘middle-class’ lifestyle. Except they’re not [middle-class].

With different values being attached to different classes- attitudes, priorities, in some cases, morals, the fact is that coming into (or falling out of) money, cannot change what we have spent the entirety of our lives being socialised into. ..

I could marry into wealth, but would that take me away from my working-class roots and see me labelling myself as middle-class?

No.

For when I am a northerner, Doncaster born ‘n bred, when my Grandad worked down the pit, when I am a first-generation university student, when I am working-class, from the accent to the opportunities to, well, pretty much every facet of my life, suddenly becoming rich, whether through myself or someone else, wouldn’t take any of this away. I would still have all the same experiences etched into my psyche of the state comp school in Doncaster, rated ‘inadequate’ by OFSTED several years running, of the tales I heard my Grandad tell of the 80s- the miners strikes which, as a pit worker, put my Mums family on the breadline, all of these things would still exist.

Where our class is concerned, is our fate sealed/predetermined by the family within which we are born?

Social mobility is based on the narrowminded view that ‘if you work hard and apply yourself, you can achieve great things’, but fails to take into account all of the disadvantages of class, where people are defined by the class they were born into rather than by their achievements. 

Consider private schools, for example.

When private school admissions are based on parental wealth, (only those of us who are born into wealth will have the luxury of private schooling afforded to us), how can we say that we live in a meritocratic society? How can we say that we all have an equal footing when it comes to acquiring capital, this (capital/the acquisition of it) being something which goes hand-in-hand with private schooling- not just economic capital, but also cultural capital (the social assets of a person- education, intellect, style of speech, style of dress, etc), as well as social capital (networks/connections with others- who people know and the status of those people- friends, teachers etc- the age old trope of ‘it’s not what you know, it’s who you know’, summed up)…

Money= Wealth, Not Class

Unlike our economic capital which can increase or decrease depending on our job, our cultural and social capital will remain largely unchanged throughout our lives.

Why? Because, ultimately, class starts with upbringing. Whereas we can change our income based on how much we earn, we cannot change our upbringing (hence the argument for social mobility being a myth, because when our primary socialisation is what gives us cultural and social capital, if we are born into a working-class family, no matter how much wealth we acquire throughout our life, we will arguably stay working-class).

Born into it, class is inherited through family rather than ‘earnt’ through money.

SOCIAL MOBILITY IS A MYTH !

From education:
In 2017, more offers to Oxbridge universities were made to Home Counties pupils (students residing in counties surrounding London) than the whole of northern England combined, owing to pupils in the north being likelier to finish school with poorer grades than those in the south…

to life expectancy:
Life expectancy in the north in 2020 was 77.6, VS 80.6 in the south…

The north-south divide is evident throughout the entirety of our lives…

From the moment we’re born, to the moment we die, there’s no escaping the starkness of the inequality that exists. A government report published in 2021 highlights how 79% of adults across all regions consider there to be a large gap between social classes in Britain today. Furthermore, around three quarters (74%) of adults believe there to be a ‘very large difference’ in the opportunities available in different parts of Britain, a direct result of class differences…

How Class (Wrongfully) Determines Outcome

Overwhelmingly, the class we are born into dictates the class we will spend the rest of our lives within because, as a 258-page report by the Social Mobility Commission published this year found, social mobility is largely a myth.

The report highlights how, in 2017, four-fifths of students from England and Wales accepted at Oxbridge between 2010 and 2015 had parents with top professional and managerial jobs, and the numbers have been edging upwards since. 

Not just at Oxford and Cambridge either, but at all British universities, statistics highlight how people whose parents had degrees are far more likely — 64% against 18% — to get a degree than those whose parents had no qualifications. Furthermore, adults with working-class parents are about 3 times as likely — 30% against 11% — to be in a working-class occupation themselves compared with adults with higher professional parents.

Discussing class divide is not just people being pessimistic/viewing life from a ‘glass half empty’ perspective, but a genuine reality, whereby wealth is unevenly spread across the country, with the south east* being the wealthiest of all regions (median household total wealth= £503,400, over twice the amount of wealth in households in the north of England)…

*(The south-east which, by the way, despite being home to just one-third of the UK population, now accounts for 45% of Britain’s economy, and 42% of its wealth)…

Why Is Wealth So Disproportionately Spread Across The Country? 

Largely due to employment opportunities.

Unemployment in the north sits at 5% (as of 2022), compared to unemployment in the south, which sits at 3.2%. 

For those who are employed in the north, rates of pay are considerably lower than they are in the south (in 2018, the average household gross disposable income was £16,995 in the NE region, VS £24,318 in London).

People in London are much more likely to be of the belief that the opportunities to progress in their area are ‘good’ (74%), compared with people in the north (31%). 

It is this perceived lack of opportunities that sees the north losing graduates to the south- a report in the Guardian found that the north sees a net loss of around 75,000 graduates per decade to the south. This is reflected in the average age of people living in northern towns VS southern towns. More than one in five people living in inner London (23.1%), are aged between 25 and 34, compared to just 12.7% of those living in the rest of England…

Not Only Are People Earning More Money In The South, But People Are Being Given More Money, Too…

Despite, in 2020, making up only 14% of the total UK population, London is given disproportionate funding and opportunities compared to the rest of the UK. For example, levels of public investment in London and the south-east (2019–20) equate to £12,147 per person, VS public investment in the north which sits at considerably less- £8,125.

While there are some perceived ‘benefits’ of living up north, e.g., lower house prices (average price in 2021 for a house in the north= £143,129, VS average price in the south = £350,016), upon considering other factors such as the lack of employment opportunities, particularly in creative industries (a report found that for every job created in the north, just under three were created in the south), and the lower rate of pay (in work poverty has risen in the north from 3.4 million people in 2009/10 to 3.5 million in 2019/20), any perceived ‘upper-hand’ that the north has in terms of things being cheaper is illusionary. Things are cheaper because it’s all northerners can afford… If there were more employment opportunities/a better overall standard of living etc, then house prices would reflect this. Things wouldn’t be so much cheaper up here.

What Can We Do About It?

While the buck stops with the government- the north needs more funding from the government (more funding=more opportunities), as residents, we can do our bit too. Rather than putting ourselves down, looking around in dismay at the ‘state’ of it/listing everything that is ‘wrong’ with the north, we can focus on the positives. 

Every town/city has it’s better and worse off areas, including those in the South. In fact, our capital, London, has the highest inequality rate than anywhere else, with London overrepresented at both the bottom and the top of income distribution nationally. Measured after housing costs, 28% of Londoners live in poverty, compared with 22% across the UK as a whole.

If you’re a creative living up north, instead of upping and moving down south where there are ‘more opportunities for creatives’, why not stay and strive to change the perception of the north? Because, to use Doncaster as an example, there is nothing inherently ‘wrong’ with our city (at all). With some of the best transport links in the country, ample green spaces etc, Doncaster has so much going for it, what there is something wrong with, however, is the lack of opportunities that we have here. 

This though ( ^ ), this can be changed, for…

The more creatives that reside here, the more opportunities will arise here. 

The fact is that, when creatives leave in their flocks to move down south, all we are doing is reinforcing the perception that the north has few opportunities for creatives, and so the cycle will continue/the class divide will continue… 

Be proud of your roots, and do your bit to put your Northern hometown on the map for all the right reasons.

To be productive, according to the Oxford dictionary, is to 
‘​Produce large amounts of goods, crops, or other commodities.’

With so many of us basing our entire self-worth on how productive we’ve been (i.e., on how much we’ve produced- on how much we’ve produced yet they’ve benefitted from…), it really is no wonder then that so many of us, in turn, feel so devoid of hope in life…

How Productivity Upholds Capitalism (& Vice Versa)

Welcome To The Rat Race…

Productivity is a product of production- when we are in the ‘cycle’ of production, whether as the one doing the producing itself (the producer), or as the one consuming the production (the consumer), when we engage with it, we are contributing to the wholly unforgiving capitalist economy. Why? Because, when production is rooted in capitalism (in order to feel ‘productive enough’, we are told that we need to work more, this being the very thing [working] which keeps capitalism upheld), we remain stuck in a loop that keeps us, the workers, at the bottom of society, whilst they, the top 1%, are kept at the top…

Why don’t we ‘jump off’ the metaphorical ‘loop?’, because, under a capitalist system, we have no choice but to work to live- everything costs money, and so, we can’t not engage with it. 

It’s important to note here that productivity itself is not the problem (without being productive we wouldn’t be alive. We need to make food and exercise and engage in the things that we enjoy for our mental health, if for nothing else) the problem is the bartering that goes on that keeps us stuck in a rat race.

Even when we get sick, we can’t rest, not properly, for what’s the first thing that we have to think about? Work. Ringing in sick, getting a sick note so that we don’t lose our jobs. ‘Will I lose my job? I can’t lose my job. When can I go back to work?’ We are completely blindsided by the fact that, in many cases, it was work that got us into such a dire state in the first place… But don’t worry about that. You’ll be back at work in no time. Just take this tablet and the capitalist machine (i.e., you) will be revitalised and ready for round two!!’

In Plain Sight

Fortunately, in the UK we have a national health service which means that we don’t have to pay to receive health care, but in many other countries around the world, the US being the most notable example, if people get ill and can’t afford treatment, they are essentially left to die.

At least in the UK, the government tries to hide the fact that they prioritise money over human life (arguably, they don’t do a very good job at it, but points for trying I suppose). In the US, they don’t even try to hide it.

‘If you have money, you deserve to live, if you don’t, you deserve to die.’

Are We Our Own Worst Critic?

The fact that we are judged based on our productivity, not just by our bosses at work, but even by ourselves, at home, is a sure-fire signifier that capitalism really has seeped into every element of our lives…

What should be our ‘down time’, a time for us to do the things that we love for the sole reason that we love them, not because we love the monetary rewards that they give us, (you know, those things that were once known as ‘hobbies’), has become just another productivity seeking opportunity. A side hustle, maybe, a chore, definitely, all the things that we used to do to recharge ultimately end up depleting us even further.

Human Beings Are, Ironically, The Only Species That Refuses To Allow Themselves To Just ‘Be’…

Consider every other species on the planet besides humans. Looking out of my window right now as I write this, I can see three birds delicately balancing on a tree branch at the end of my garden.

What do birds do with their days? They spend them looking for food, looking for nest material (time of year dependent), just being. We are the only species that prioritises ‘doing’ over ‘being’, which is ironic really, when you think about it… We are human beings, yet we rarely, if ever, allow ourselves to just ‘be’.

How Can We Stop Prioritising Productivity Above All Else?

Unfortunately, it’s unlikely that we will ever go completely anti-capitalist. As much as I relish the idea of living in such a utopia, having been in place for hundreds of years, its removal would require an overhaul of literally everything we know, and when the people in power (i.e., the government) who can initiate such a move benefit from the system, it will never happen… What we can do, though, is recognise what capitalism is.

⦁ Focus on eradicating your internalised capitalism

We can learn to ‘cut ties’ with the association we make in our minds of our self worth being determinable by how ‘productive’ we have been, and lean in to our worth as human beings with nothing to prove, reminding ourselves that we are worthy of everything good in the world simply by virtue of us being alive.