🎭 The Stress of the Season: A Vulnerable Look
The transition into the holiday season, often meant to be a time of joy and gratitude, frequently triggers feelings of stress, anxiety, and inadequacy for many people. This sentiment is often rooted in the extractive nature of the holidays, driven by an expectation of overspending, complicated family dynamics, and a desire to meet external societal expectations. Sharing this vulnerability is crucial, as it models a necessary intimacy and encourages open conversation about deeply felt, yet often repressed, struggles.
Many feel “less than” when they don’t meet traditional markers of success projected during this time—being a homeowner, married, or having children. This is an acknowledgment of the pervasive pressure to conform to an idealized, often traditional, picture of life.
⚙️ The Capitalist Cog: Why We’re All on a Treadmill
The pervasive feeling of being stressed and overwhelmed during the holidays is not an accident; it’s a direct consequence of a capitalist system that demands constant growth and consumption.
Forced Consumption: The holiday season, spanning from Thanksgiving to Christmas, is intentionally and unnaturally stretched, evidenced by major sales (like Black Friday) starting earlier and earlier. This expansion is necessary because the economy requires consumers to overspend to meet and continuously increase corporate profit baselines.
Debt for a Bottom Line: Individuals are effectively expected to go into debt to supplement what corporations need. This relentless cycle means the holiday season grows in size and financial demand, not organically out of joy, but as a reaction to something being pushed on us.
The Minus One Mentality: Capitalism is inherently an irrational system that tells people there’s something fundamentally “wrong” with them—that they are “minus one.” We are conditioned to believe we must constantly buy and acquire things to fill this internal void and reach “zero” or a state of base-level acceptance. This hole, however, can never be filled by possessions.
The result is that people are not truly experiencing the holidays; they are performing them in a manner necessary for corporate profit, cheapening the authentic feeling of the season.
🖼️ The Performance vs. Reality: The Illusion of Perfection
The performance of the holidays is heavily amplified by social media, turning individuals into “stars in their own reality show.” Platforms like Instagram demand a picture-perfect meal, flawless decorations, and an overall display of an ideal, successful life, effectively advertising one’s “brand” to others.
This environment is particularly damaging to those who don’t have that perfect reality, leading to feelings of being inadequate and encouraging them to buy more, do more, and perform more in a desperate attempt to keep up.
The Desire for Authenticity
Many people feel a distinct loss of the holidays’ shine and sentimentality. The emotional void left by this performance is often met with a push to fill it with “stuff”—renovating, decorating, and running up huge bills to showcase a perfect image. The pushback against this is a yearning for simple, communal gatherings focused on authentic connection, conversation, and rest, rather than the “pomp and circumstance.”
The COVID-19 pandemic momentarily exposed this illusion. During the period when large gatherings were restricted, many experienced the relief of having the pressure removed, enjoying the simple acts of rest and dinner without the burden of an elaborate, performative event. This small glimpse of authenticity was quickly shuttered as society rushed back to the old performance, demanding everyone “pretend you didn’t see the man behind the curtain.”
💡 Living Awake: Fighting Numbing and Gaslighting
Living authentically in an unreal situation creates discomfort and friction, which the dominant culture and market forces desperately try to eliminate. Industries and media are designed to incentivize people to numb themselves from this discomfort. The promotion of constant entertainment (like multiple football games on Thanksgiving), the prioritization of alcohol and even the legalization of cannabis, can be seen as ways to keep the masses quiet, suppressed, and distracted as systemic issues worsen.
The economy is crumbling, evidenced by factors like rampant layoffs, debt saturation, and people defaulting on essential utilities. Yet, the system continues to gaslight individuals into believing their struggle is a personal failure.
The Gaslight: When someone feels distressed about not owning a home or struggling financially, they are told they are a failure when, in reality, they are fighting against engineered economic forces like large corporations buying up housing stock to create perpetual renters.
The Inner Critic: Many people hold themselves captive by internalizing the judgments of society or past traumatic figures. A “voice” is installed in their head by capitalism and society, urging them to conform and not expect more.
The critical choice is between increasing the amount of numbing behavior as reality declines or actively choosing to lean into the discomfort and demand something better. To be truly awake is to live in an environment that is most incentivized for us to be asleep, and to fight the chorus of voices that demand we stay silent and simply “play our role.”
True enjoyment, therefore, is found not in make-believe or material displays, but in authentic connections, conversations with gravitas, and the bravery to be real, even if that reality isn’t always shiny and fun.
