Love in the Time of (Late-Stage) Capitalism

I've been thinking about capitalism lately. What is capitalism? As I understand it, capitalism is the market economy, which is dominated and controlled by competition between parties who have different controls on "capital", which is monetary means of production. Broadly speaking, capitalism is the way that money works in modern society, and money is, of course, a made-up thing. I think capitalism, or late-stage capitalism as we understand it is all of the components of the modern market economy--the insurances, the supermarkets, the groceries, Amazon, Netflix, Chime, Morgan Freeman (??), JP Morgan, music streaming, and iPhones. Pretty much everything that makes up our modern fabric of life can be described by...capitalism. Or maybe that's something Karl Marx would say. I need to re-read Capital (I read like the first third of it when I was in college, not to brag.)

But I've sort of been thinking about capitalism lately, re: medical services. Insurance, and the insurance system, is a large part of late-stage capitalism, and its functions have been highlighted especially recently with the Luigi Mangione incident. I won't go too into detail about that (see: upcoming Luigi Mangione fan fiction by yours truly), but suffice it to say that it made me think more about where my insurance is going and what it's paying for. 

Because of my spinal cord injury, I am currently going to physical therapy to help rehabilitate my spine. I can't move my feet because of my spine. Everything else on my legs is good, but I just can't move or feel my feet, which makes it difficult to walk. I also can't really stand up on my own without holding onto something, so I think maybe my hip muscles (?) are also out of wack. Something connecting my spine to my legs and feet is broken, the connection is severed, and I need help rehab'ing that back. 

So of course, I've been going to physical therapy, but I just always had the thought that--what is the purpose of this shit? Like, why am I doing these exercises? Basically what they have me do is BIG movements, 大动作, things like moving my hips/back up and down in a "bridge", putting a band around my legs and pushing the band out, and practicing walking with a walker. All of which is fine, but to me, it doesn't solve the actual problem, which is that my spine is disconnected from my feet. 

And then something that happened, and I don't know if this was because of the physical therapy, but I began to be able to move my left foot up and down, which is not something that I could do. It was really surprising and exciting guys, and I was like showing my mom that I could do it and shit. I could like move my foot up and down with my brain, which must mean that something in between my spine and my foot like, clicked. 

But I just don't know if it had to do with my physical therapy. I feel like it had more to do with me sending messages down from my brain to my feet, like trying to tell it to move. When I did that before, I could kind of feel like a nascent movement in my foot, kind of like my foot was asleep or something, but I could never actually move it. But this time, meaning a few days ago, I could actually move it!!! But again, I just don't know if it was physical therapy. 

Which just made me think, I feel like maybe the physical therapy is helpful, but also if I'm going to physical therapy, it's not like I can just sit there and "send messages to my feet" from my brain, because that would look like I was just sitting there and doing, well, basically nothing. Under capitalism, and under the insurance-sanctioned services, it would be difficult to justify me just sending there sending messages to my feet, and just talking to the physical "therapist", which is what I verily want to do. I want to just sit there and think about moving my feet and talk to the therapist. They are a form of therapist after all. But instead, we have to go through the whole hoop and chain of using resistance bands, which I can barely even resist, and walking around with a walker, which I can also barely do. Maybe I'm just lazy, and I'm griping with the fact that I have to actually be physical in physical therapy. 

But I really think it's more just sending the electrical signal from my brain to my foot that eventually causes it to move. I don't believe any of the 大动作 big movements that I was doing in physical therapy was the reason for that change. I might just be ignorant. 

Another example of capitalism enforcing itself in medical spaces is in group therapy. Now, don't get me wrong, I love group therapy. But it basically goes something like this: we check in at the beginning of the group, which is the only time we really get to share about our lives, and then we spend the next half of the group typically going over a handout, reading it, sharing our thoughts on it, etc. 

Now, this model is fine, but in my mind, group therapy is something that is a bit more interactive. And I think that with time, and with the same group of people going to the group for a period of time has made it a bit more malleable and a little less controlled by the handouts. In my mind, group therapy should be a place where people are breaking down and crying, holding each other's hands, and sharing their deeper innermost secrets. And it's all super dramatic and everyone gets to know each other on a deep level in the end. 

But the way that capitalism operates, first of all, it limits the amount of time that we get to interact with each other. It's only an hour, and every time, I feel like it's being cut short a little bit. (One good feature of one of the group members is that we set up time to go to Starbucks afterwards on Fridays). But because of capitalism's exports, we can't just have an open discussion, because it's possible that one person can dominate the conversation, and the rest of us wouldn't get our insurance-sanctioned worth. We also can't have a more open-discussion, because this would lead to gaps in the time, and empty time is a no-go in late-stage capitalism. So, we have to resort to using handouts in the second half of our sessions, which is fine, but I feel like can get a little repetitive. But who knows, maybe open discussion could get a little tiring as well. 

*edit: I think the physical therapy is working after all, and maybe the group therapy just those moments of connection are the point and enough.

What I was also going to say was something about love in the time of late-stage capitalism. Something about how we are conditioned to let go of relationships before their expiry-date because of consumption and capitalism. But really there was a person I needed to let go of who I wasn't wanting to, and I was trying to find a long convoluted way to justify it. So yeah.