Rowan Huang

Capitalism Serves The Parts of Us We Dislike

March 8, 2025

There’s a particular strain of criticism against capitalism that I find interesting. It claims that capitalism erodes human well-being through producing harmful products. Big Tech gave us ADHD. Big Clothing gave us fast fashion. Big Cereal gave us diabetes. It’s true the people seek out these products, but these critics argue such desire is artificial: it’s created by the producer through glittery Leprechaun ads; its enforced through sugar molecules refined beyond what we would’ve experience in the ancestral environment; its facilitated by capitalism’s lust for profits.

But it seems to me that saying the desire is artificial misses the point. It doesn’t matter where it comes from – we act on it all the same. The reason we want to disavow this desire is because it serves a part of us we dislike. And it fights against those desires that serve part of us we like, those desires to become kinder and smarter and fitter; the desires to become whole in some ambiguous “good life” kind of way.

The truth is, God or evolution or whoever you serve have made it hard to read “The Second Sex” and easy to snort cocaine. And yet they’ve also made the rewards to understanding the roots of feminist philosophy deeper than the rewards to having your dopamine receptors surged. This glaring design flaw is why capitalism feels bad 1. It’s easier for Jeffrey P. Bezos to fulfill your Lucky Charms order than it is for him to fix your relationship with your dad. Capitalism does genuinely serve the consumer. It just serves the part of the consumer that the consumer doesn’t like 2.

People working a 9-5 being paid a 6 figure salary have told me they aren’t able to read the books they want or finish the passion projects they started because of capitalism. But I think to claim to be a victim of capitalism in this respect punts the core question of what it means to be human, what it means to find purpose in life. The truth is we are the victim of our own warring desires.

  1. I’ve treated the term capitalism (in scare quotes) quite loosely across this essay. By capitalism (in scare quotes), I mean to refer to the free market that runs on competition and self interest. Implicitly, I rely on the fact that this free market will result in individuals pursuing avenues of profit wherever they appear and it just happens that some of the easiest profits to be reaped are against the consumer’s “good life” interests. But I don’t think this refinery is actually necessary. I think the people who make the criticism in the first paragraph use capitalism to refer generally to a system with incentives misaligned to our “good life” interests. My claim is that such systems do exist, but it is not useful to blame these systems when we follow the incentives they set out. In fact, the entire human venture is to find meaning and purpose in the mist such systems create. ↩

  2. To be clear, this doesn’t mean that Bezos would stop forcing workers to piss themselves on factory floors if he could make a I-love-you-just-as-you-are-sweetie serum. There are obviously problems about capitalism and incentive design and world inequality that go beyond this issue. I’m not interested in discussing here who should own the means of production and how much CEOs should get paid and whether it’s fair that Elon Musk controls the US government. ↩