Surviving the casino world
Published on 2025-01-19
We live in market capitalism; ergo we’re trapped in a candy store. Cash rules everything around me. They don’t have our best interests in mind when they sell this stuff.
"Intentional weight loss" (idiomdrottning.org)
I visited family over the winter break—family who watch a lot of news. I read the news sometimes from some sources, but you couldn't force me to use a web browser without an ad blocker today and it's easy to forget how it feels the gaze into the pulsating mass of commercialism that is most media today.
One thing that stood out to me, something I'm convinced is much worse than it was even a few years ago, is the gambling ads.
It was non-stop, flashing lights, coins flying everywhere, annoying music, abstract tokens of fortune and wealth… Images of people leading normal lives before they pull out their phone and are immediately enveloped in this fantasy realm of riches and prestige, as though online gambling isn't the deeply depressing thing you've been (rightfully) lead to believe it is.
Genuinely I don't even know how to describe it, but if you still watch cable television you probably know what I'm talking about. It's a parody of itself. I think of the people in my orbit who've suffered from gambling addiction and I wonder how it could possibly be legal to advertise this shit in this way.
Sandra described market capitalism as a candy store a while back and that metaphor has a lot of staying power in my mind. It's like, garden variety communist critique to observe that a lot of this stuff only makes sense if you keep buying things, and when you already have everything you need, there's a manufactured imperative to buy things you don't, but I'll make that critique anyway.
It feels a lot like we're living in an online casino ad. Maybe it'd be different if I lived in one of those towns in the north where they harvest trees, or if I worked pumping Albertan lithium brine into evaporation pools, but instead I live in a city where I can't help but notice that it's never really clear on a micro-level why any of this is here in the first place. When I describe my city to family, I tell them it's a tourist town, and that's probably mostly right: on a macro-level, this stuff exists in service to people who pass through it. It's a large-scale entertainment venue. But on a micro-level—on the scale of a single person… Once upon a time, people lived here because it gave them reliable access to fish, among a few other material reasons. Now, it's not so clear.
I've been thinking a lot about temperance lately. I'm not a particularly temperate person; it's something I've been working on. I'm very lucky to have never had issues with gambling or drugs myself, but I deal with all the woes of candy store capitalism I'd expect anyone else to. For a long time, my framework for how to be a "temperate person" has been to avoid temptation at all cost. That seems to be the conventional wisdom: don't create opportunities to succumb to the casino world. But the thing is, we're living in the casino world. If you're going to learn how to be temperate, it'd be a lot easier to learn how to survive in the casino world, rather than to seek to live entirely outside of it.
I was hugely addicted to social media when I was in high school. I tried to quit so many times, but it took being force fed a meme that featured a horrific act of violence against a queer person to really be done with it. And I guess that's what I was missing all those times before: I always knew it was bad, but it took feeling on a very essential level that this was a harmful place to give me the conviction to never turn back.
Many years later, I joined Instagram again for a few months. I even wrote about it last year:
But about a month or so after I wrote that article, I deleted my account again. As I wrote then, it just didn't feel the same as it used to. At least, I want to frame it as "me growing out of it". That's all I can really hope for. That's all I can hope for with the related candy shop capitalist facades I deal with today, but growth takes work, and a deep conviction about the need for change.
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