Riots Not Diets

Self-Discipline as a Gateway to Fascism

Morning Comrades.

Everywhere you look, there is someone trying to sell you salvation. Influencers whisper that your suffering is a scheduling problem. Bookshelves buckle under the weight of pastel-covered “life hacks” promising inner peace through five-minute morning routines and gratitude mantras. The treadmill of failure, shame, and hope is branded with hashtags like #growth and #wellness. And still, after the cold showers, the 4 a.m. wake-ups, the productivity planners and the tech detoxes you remain anxious, exhausted, atomised. You wonder if it’s your fault. That’s the trap.

The self-improvement industry is not just a grift. It’s not just snake oil for your burnout. It is the cultural soft power of capitalism weaponised against your own discontent. It is the ideology of individualism dressed up in yoga pants and bullet journals, designed not to free you but to pacify you. Every time you are told that your suffering can be solved by a better mindset, a more productive habit, a cleaner diet, you are being asked to internalise the failures of a brutal, inhuman system as personal moral defects. You are being told, explicitly and implicitly, that your pain is your fault.

Let me be clear: it is not.

To be clear, I work out, not as often as I would like but I do for all the obvious reasons and I know that a healthy approach to life is generally a good thing, but these are two very separate issues.

You do not need to meditate away your rage. You do not need to become more “resilient” to economic abuse. You do not need to optimise yourself to death. You are not a brand. You are not a project. You are a human being, and you live in a world that is structurally designed to exploit, exhaust, and erase you for profit.

Capitalism doesn’t want you to get better. It wants you to get quieter. The moment you start blaming the system instead of yourself, you become dangerous. That’s why every “self-help” manual is a muzzle. That’s why the cult of personal responsibility is the ideological prelude to fascism. When systemic violence becomes invisible, and your own suffering becomes your shame to bear, fascism walks in promising discipline, order, and greatness. The rot of neoliberalism hides behind scented candles and Fitbits, but the logic is the same as jackboots.

You don’t need a new morning routine. You need to burn this whole fucking system down.

Let’s get into it.