Privatisation of Existence

Reclaiming the Possibility of Collective Action

Morning Comrades.

I think about stress a lot, stress nearly killed me 17 years ago. Back then, I had, for a number now logical but still stupid reasons, given into at the very least trying to fit. I got married, started a career that was by all normative standards successful, started a family and subscribed to all the markers that were expected of any young person. That didn’t last too long and 6 years into that journey the stress of maintaining that illusion for everyone including myself resulted in 6 back operations to “fix” a stress related back injury that stopped me from being able to walk, sit and furthermore resulted into a full blown pharmaceutical drug addiction and a highly destructive mental state. Some of you were part of that time, some of you were part of the time since then and for what it is worth I am still working my way out of that experience. Stress, as and when it returns, still triggers physical pain that resembles that period of time and I do my utmost to work around those triggers.

Initially, this piece started as an essay that would work around the fallacy of running any type of government as a business but I kept coming back to stress and ultimately, I returned to Mark Fisher and his work on Capitalist Realism. In this work he coined the idea of privatisation of stress and we are going to broaden that approach to a wider idea here today and how Capitalism privatises everything, including out mental health and what we can do about it.

Fisher argues that conditions like depression and anxiety, which have become widespread in neoliberal societies, are often treated as personal medical issues rather than as symptoms of an exploitative system. The response to these issues is often pharmaceutical—antidepressants, therapy, and mindfulness techniques—rather than structural change. While these treatments can be valuable, they ultimately place the burden of fixing stress on the individual rather than addressing the conditions that produce it. As Fisher puts it, “Instead of treating mental illness as a social problem, it is framed as if it were an individual fault.”

The privatisation of stress is deeply tied to capitalist realism, Fisher’s term for the ideological condition where capitalism is seen as the only viable economic system. Because neoliberal ideology denies the possibility of alternatives, people are left with no framework to challenge the conditions that make their lives stressful. Instead of organising for systemic change—such as demanding workplace protections, universal healthcare, or economic redistribution—individuals are encouraged to engage in self-optimisation: working harder, adopting “hustle culture” mentalities, or relying on self-care strategies that do not address the root cause of their distress.

This leads to what Fisher calls reflexive impotence—a widespread feeling that even though people recognise that something is wrong, they also believe there is nothing they can do about it. The privatisation of stress is an ideological mechanism that sustains this powerlessness. By making individuals feel personally responsible for their suffering, it prevents them from seeing their struggles as part of a broader collective experience that could be politically addressed.

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