Capitalism Dies in Your 30s

Capitalism, as an ideological reality, dies in your 30s.

It doesn’t just fade or wane—the bitch dies. And not quietly, but with a slow, painful unravelling.

In your early 20s, when you are impressionable and susceptible to the seductive promises of Capitalism, it feels liberating. University is its peak, where you are sold the idea that if you work hard enough, climb high enough, and push yourself beyond reason, you will make it.

And making it is always defined in monetary terms: wealth, status, the ability to travel at will, to have that dream flat or house, to drive that luxury car, and to experience life without constraints. You believe it because, at that age, before your prefrontal cortex fully develops, you are supposed to.

But here’s the part they don’t tell you: having money requires the full force of your energy. And the kind of money you dream of – the kind that lets you move freely and exist effortlessly – demands an unfathomable number of hours of work. Especially for those of us who haven’t reaped the benefits of the Bank of Mum and Dad.

So, while you imagine yourself jetting off to see the world, meeting interesting people, and collecting experiences, the reality is far less romantic. You have 28 days of holiday a year if you’re lucky. Most of those days are spent recovering from the sheer exhaustion of trying to prove yourself within a system that is, for many of us, twenty times harder to navigate if you are Black, brown, or anything other than white.

Then something happens in your 30s. I know because it is happening to me and many of my friends right now. You wake up one day and realise: This is some bullshit.

You no longer desire to work yourself to the bone for the mirage of freedom. You no longer believe that sacrificing your mental and physical well-being for a wage—one that disappears almost as soon as it arrives—is a fair exchange. You start to question how it became socially acceptable to spend most of your waking hours making someone else richer or being away from your family and the things you enjoy, all the while struggling to keep up with rent, bills, and the ever-rising cost of simply existing.

London, my home, like many major cities, is a pressure cooker. The cost of living is astronomical, a word I have found myself using more and more in recent months. The weight of it is suffocating. It feels insane that we continue to live like this, running on empty, chasing our tails, while the price of everything climbs and our wages remain stagnant. It is unliveable. And yet, it feels like we have no choice.

But being in your 30s comes with a strange kind of liberation: the realisation that maybe you do have a choice. Not an easy one, but a choice nonetheless.

More and more of us are disconnecting from Capitalism, not in the sense of quitting jobs and going off the grid (though some are doing that too), but in rejecting the idea that this is the only way to live. I can no longer justify exchanging so much of my time for so little in return.

In our quest for financial freedom, I have watched millennials turn to content creation through various mediums—from becoming food critics and other online personalities, influencers, and self-made entrepreneurs—all of which seem, to me, extremely exhausting and at times morally compromising.

We find ourselves doing things devoid of real passion or desire, driven instead by financial incentives. And it shows. The content feels hollow, the joy seems manufactured, and the pursuit itself becomes another kind of labour-one where success is measured not in fulfilment, but in engagement metrics and monetisation. It is disheartening to witness because I am sure so many started out believing they could carve out a space to express themselves authentically, only to realise they are still trapped in a system that demands constant output, performance, and profitability.

And then we are all surprised by the surge of mental health issues that afflict our generation. There are so many of us suffering from anxiety. So many of us are depressed. So many of us feel like we are faking it to make it—because that is exactly what is happening. We are caught in this cogwheel, this ever-turning, churning machine that expects and demands everything.

The art of being successful becomes almost performative. You have to become an other to yourself, suppressing a lot of who you really are to conform to what the system requires. And it is exhausting. It is mentally draining and physically and emotionally impossible to sustain. I applaud those who can do it. Hell, I am even envious to some degree. Perhaps within this system, the real marker of success is not just how much you achieve, but how much of yourself you can compromise and give away without feeling like something is amiss.

And then there is community-something Capitalism erodes without us even realising.

Community requires presence. It requires time, energy, and attentiveness. But how do you build community when your mental health is hanging by a thread? When every ounce of your being is spent just trying to survive?

This is how the system isolates us: by keeping us too exhausted, too worried, and too busy to show up for each other properly.

So, I am checking out.

Not in the sense of giving up, but I’m looking for an alternative. A different way to make a living. A different place to call home. A different approach to life-one where success is not measured by how much of a workhorse you are, but by how much you actually get to live. Because this? This cannot be it. This cannot be the dream.

From childhood, we have been sold an idea: work ourselves to death just to scrape together enough to enjoy stolen moments of freedom. And alas, by 68, we will have amassed enough to finally enjoy the "rest of our lives." Along the line, some of us will claw our way onto the housing ladder, spending decades paying off a mortgage. Others will simply hope their boomer parents leave them something to inherit. But for those of us building from scratch, there is no safety net – only exhaustion.

I don’t know exactly what is next, but I do know I can’t keep doing this.

And I know I’m not alone.