Draft Of An Email Never To Be Sent

I started writing an email to my mother the other day. I have been having these thoughts about work and money and life and wanted to get them down. As often happens with writing, when it rains it pours, and I poured my heart out. Some of it is specifically aimed at things I've talked about with her, but much of it is simply an exploration of anti-capitalist thought and of my life experience. I don't claim a political label, but everything I've learned to name, I've learned from people who didn't have the privileged of being raised in (messy) simulation of White America's Dream. 

In many ways this message is at schoolmates - from boarding high school and from college. Folks who walked the corridors of old institutions built when white america was a different character and when whiteness was more secure - or at least what's what I've been told by white people. 

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There has always been this expectation, whether inferred, implied, or unconscious, that I do something great with my life. (of course great is subjective but that's allowed in this expectation, it just must be great by some standard) Being raised on dreams of 'you can be whatever you want' and 'go out and make the world a better place' - the people in my life from 0-20 taught me that I needed to do something. To start a company, to find a professional job, to DO something to be proud of. 

This is what I find toxic about capitalism today.