Many people live by associating productivity with mental strength, and when it is difficult to do something productively as usual, we doubt that we have mental weaknesses, but I’d like to throw the questions about any process that makes us trust the average or the sense of normality. Is it possible to produce ‘as usual’? After all, it’s not even an assembly line in the factory, so is it possible to always produce a certain result on time? Where do the criteria come from to denigrate oneself as unproductive? Unproductivity is easily associated with depression or ADHD, and some people still feel depressed because they doubt their own diminished productivity, even though they produce more densely or productively in terms of time than others in the same field. So there is definitely social hypnosis here that feels like there are arbitrary and especially hypothetical norms in addition to medical norms.
Mark Fisher considered his chronic depression to be an internalized expression of the indirect intervention of class power and social pressure, not an ‘inner’ voice. He believed that he was not a real scholar, but that he had obtained the position of college instructor by deception, and that through his work he was taking jobs away from people who needed and deserved more than he did. Even when he was admitted to the psychiatric ward, he thought he was not really depressed, but was just copying the symptoms because he did not want to work. Even when qualifications or wealth are acquired through the acquired effort for people who have accepted themselves as nothing, the question for them is whether they are really ‘a person who can do it.’ This thought process goes from the search for the cause of depression in the existing psychoanalysis, to the family background, to the question of the position of acquiescence to a certain social language, that is, the hierarchy of depression in terms of class power.
As with David Smail’s claim in magical voluntarism, the belief that any individual can be whatever they want with their will has become the dominant ideology of the day, and “you can achieve anything if you try” is used as the most successful strategy of the ruling class. Mark Fisher’s reflections are essentially related to the social structural implications of having an invisible norm of ‘average’ and blaming oneself for not meeting certain work values or social ideals. I am also aware of the fact that the amount of capital or the social status of a given country is not proportional to the rights of the workers who produce that capital, and I feel the side effects of such ‘responsibility’. I have heard that young workers are often taken to the emergency room because of extra work and overwork time in South Korea, and I am appalled at the atmosphere in which they are praised as social role models for hard work without any discussion of the fair labor standards. Even if hard work is an individual’s will, what if there is no social protection in a country that idolizes overwork when it falls short of the average? The discourse of protection is considered to be ‘taking advantage without sufficient effort’, so average does not mean mediocre, but acts as a minimum limit that must be exceeded. In fact, a society in which no one wants average is characterized by meritocracy and elitism. I see the value of work becoming an instrument of passion and justice in some places and a convenient instrument of exploitation in others.