Honey What's Wrong? You've Barely Touched Your Bean Soup
A breakdown on individualism in America because of capitalism and social media
Individualism
noun
Possessive individualism thrives in a world of ubiquitous assertions about individual rights.
a social theory favoring freedom of action for individuals over collective or state control.
I’m a fan of beans. I’m not an anemic girly that would find a collection of them swimming in a pot of broth and spinach particularly appetizing, but I’m a fan.
If I was to ever come across a recipe for bean soup on my socials that didn’t particularly meet my standards of what a good soup would be, I’d scroll.
Apparently this isn’t the reality for many.
Bean soup theory. What started out as a harmless video trying to help out the low iron girlies of the world, soon would become viral. Not because anemics everywhere were crying tears of joy for some relief in their iron deficiency. No. It was because people didn’t like beans, and half the world needed to express that in this one woman’s comment section, in a video where she showed them how to make bean soup.
This video was where I first started to understand the phenomena that is individualization. I’d spend the next 2 years coming across more and more posts that seemed to build on what bean soup theory had introduced to me about individualization: the ‘what about me’ effect.
In a country built culturally on the backs of everyone thinking about their own individual success, we’re seeing the pitfalls of our society in real time. The political socio-economic reality of capitalism, and the completely individualized algorithms of our phones, that we spend increasingly more time on, have only worsened the reality of this individualized hellscape we’ve created for ourselves.
On Capitalism and the Individual
Capitalism
noun
an economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit.
Being a born and raised American, I’ve never known a life without the concept of the ‘American dream’ shoved down my throat. Visions of white picket fences, a corporate job climb, and having one or two incomes be enough to sustain a nuclear family dream all the way through retirement.
Well, it’s 2025. That dream is technically dead. However, we as a society are still subconsciously fueled by it in many ways.
Capitalism is an inherently individual system. A system where “both parties to a voluntary exchange transaction have their own interest in the outcome, but neither can obtain what he or she wants without addressing what the other wants.”
You have to be self interested in order to get what you want in a capitalist society. In theory, whatever prosperity or suffering you experience should technically be ‘your fault’ based on how you decided to achieve your financial gain.
However, this goes beyond finances doesn’t it? If money makes the world go round, then of course it affects the way we interact with each other. Self interest in your finances creates self interest in your way of life. “Possessive individualism thrives in a world of ubiquitous assertions about individual rights.” Essentially, the reason we can thrive economically in capitalist America, is because we have no choice but to think about ourselves most of the time.
I wouldn’t say individualism is inherently wrong. However, the constant push and encouragement for people to ‘chase their individual dream’ in America has its downfalls. It’s bred it’s own form of people seceding from community because they want what they want. Again, I see this as more of a cultural difference than an inherent evil in society. I see value in the individual. I see value in my own individuality, and I love seeing that same concept spread amongst friends, classmates, acquaintances, etc. Of course, there’s bias there because I was born in raised in it.
While this isn’t an essay that is meant to dismantle the financial corruption of American capitalism and how it’s poorly effected anything remotely middle class or below, it’s important to the overall conversation to talk about our economic state. We as a society are built on the concept of the individual.
As a collective, I’ve noticed many people scratching their heads about where community has gone. Why aren’t people helping each other out of human goodness? Why don’t we feel the urge to give freely, without any benefit?
Where does the basis of this collective hatred for being inconvenienced, stressed, or decentering ourselves from day to life come from? It starts with an economic system that trained us to think about ourselves as the center of success in the first place.
This goes beyond the billionaire that doesn’t share their wealth and prosperity with the globe. Or the rich voting for taxation that benefits their finances over a collective lower bracket that has to live paycheck to paycheck on what used to be standard, comfortable, living wages. This is the middle class 20 something that cut off her entire friend group because their emotions weren’t ‘serving a purpose in her life’. The guy that takes to social media to complain of his confusion on how free lunch for kids in school benefits him in any way.
The basis of the American living wage has changed. That individualized nature hasn’t. As we continue to head into economic regress, the individualized mentality of the ‘standard’ American, is only going to strengthen because this is now survival. Everything costs something. Money, time, social standing, mental energy. We are taught that everything is worth something. So of course it makes sense why we spend so much time worrying about how much every little interaction costs.
A birthday dinner you don’t want to go to. The $40 uber you have to split with friends to go out. The FaceTime call from your bestie about their failed situationship. The meeting that could have been an email. The friend that can no longer go on that group trip because she’s pregnant. We live in a country where we are the center of our lives, and basis of our own survival. Anything that inconveniences that, stresses that, is a threat. It has a cost. And, right now, most of the time, it appears to be too expensive.
It’s why social media is as successful as it is in keeping us the way that we are.
On Social Media and the Individual
Jealousy is a powerful tool.
Social media is an addictive one.
Together, they have formed a tight alliance, chaining our thumbs to an infinite scroll, doomed to feel our chests sink into despair as we watch people flaunt what we don’t have.
Everything that we see online is meant to be internalized. What once could have been seen as a means to share with your friends what your up to has turned into a popularity contest where everyone jumps up and down, frantically waving their designer hands, begging for someone to look at them.
Attention has always been a currency. I’m a writer and a filmmaker. I know I make money off of people having their eyes on me. However, social media takes that just one step further than the theaters ever did.
You can go out to the movies and buy a ticket based on what you know your preferences to be. Doesn’t mean you’re guaranteed to like the movie, but you’ll still give it your attention.
Social media takes the guessing out of the attention. It’s algorithm is designed to never let you go. It takes every like, comment, repeated watch, share, and it molds that information into post after post designed specifically for you. It tries to guess what will keep you coming back, what might make you get your wallet out later down the road.
It doesn’t just control our wallets. It controls our votes. Our knowledge. Our understanding of the greater world. It shows us what we like, and what we want to see more of, and because we spend at least 2 hours a day on social media, it’s fused into our daily lives.
On my own instagram timelines and the news headlines I’m fed in my day to day, I see examples of people losing touch with how to decenter themselves from the daily goings of everyday life. The parasitic relationships people seem to have with influencers. The control people think they have the right to on celebrity lives. How we’ve begun to interact with others in our day to day lives based on what we know they consume or what they post. It’s connected to the ads we see, the shows we’re recommended, the new people we should start following. We’re so used to engaging in things that are so tailored to us, we are slowly losing the ability to know what to do when we have to interact with the world outside of our own personal interest.
Bean soup theory was more than just an unappetizing looking soup recipe. It started a conversation. In a country where everything has to be about us to survive, with platforms that have the goal of making us feel like everything is about us, we need everything to apply to our exact situation. The current market for everything right now, thrives on being applied to everyone’s exact situation.
Nuance and the Individual
Nuance
noun
a subtle difference in or shade of meaning, expression, or sound.
verb
give nuances to.
Nuance. An understanding that there are multiple layers to any certain situation or topic. Something that is lost because the extreme individualization of American culture has made it increasingly impossible for the consumers to see beyond their own personal view of how the world should work and benefit them.
Social media is not only influential, but divisive.
Once upon a time, in a post long ago, I wrote about my experience growing up mixed. In that post, I told a story about 1661. The year racial mixing became illegal. The introduction of racial binaries, with the hope that it would stop community among poor Black and poor White people. A plan birthed from the fear of white plantation owners, and the idea that together, poor plantation workers would overthrow those in power.
The rich and powerful need social media to continue to be divisive. They need us to lack nuance. They need us to cling to our apparent knowledge, and stubborn cultural nature, because without it, how are we supposed to ban together to thrive? To even the playing field into something that’s actually ethical? This is not to say this was always the goal in creating social media. However, the present lack of nuance consumers are experiencing is more dangerous than we’re allowing ourselves to even fathom.
Where there is knowledge, there is an abuse of power. Politics are now a battle of morals. Therapy speech and self care is a means to refuse discomfort. Isolation is idolized. Working ourselves into the ground romanticized. Doing it all on our own, on our terms, without anyone that doesn’t ‘serve us’ holding us back? Well, that’s the new American dream isn’t it?
We don’t allow ourselves to build layered understandings of topics flying across our eyes as we scroll for minutes to hours, consuming words, opinions, knowledge, currency. To put energy towards understanding something that doesn’t center us costs too much.
So instead, we divide ourselves. We scream our problems from the rooftops, begging for the attention to fall on us, and hope that the people coming to our aid understand us all the way down to our for you pages. Our opinions are heard and understood completely, in increasingly smaller, niche, spaces, where there is little hope of banding together to succeed in reaching a common good or understanding on a larger scale.
How Much Are You Worth?
We’ve become currency in the same space that strips us of every kind we have. We have become numbers in a place where we used to have faces and names. I think that half of the beauty of the human race, is that we cannot all be the same. Yet, we’ve put price tags on those differences.
Community
noun
a group of people living in the same place or having a particular characteristic in common.
a feeling of fellowship with others, as a result of sharing common attitudes, interests, and goals.
A simple word, much like many that I’ve shared in this piece. A word that has strayed in the eyes of many from its original definition.
To be a part of community is to be uncomfortable. To spend our wide array of currencies with the world without expecting anything in return. No one likes the feeling of being poor, but if you really want to internalize what it is to live under capitalism, maybe we’ve been looking at it wrong. Maybe it is our fault that we lack this financial gain.
The fickle, finite, nature of spending currency makes us want to hoard whatever it is we have. Financially, socially, spiritually, mentally. But, maybe it’s an investment. You spend the little currency you have now. Pour it into those around you. Have that hard conversation instead of dropping your friend. Following through with those plans instead of laying in bed. Giving your sibling the money—even if you might be broke yourself—without expecting anything in return. Building up those around you one expensive step at a time. What people don’t seem to understand about community, is that it takes time to build. It takes time, and our weakened attention spans give us little bandwidth to be patient enough to wait for it. We want to be catered to without having to cough up the initial cost.
Community is expensive in more ways than one. It costs time out of our day. Mental energy we’d rather use for ourselves. It forces us to question whether we are a good people, because the reaction to inconvenience is not always pleasant when we feel it towards those we love. It teaches us to decenter ourselves. We must learn the right amount of push to pull. Be a little less judgemental. Learn to be ok with disagreeing. Spend what we don’t always have, on those who might not always pay us back.
However, it is this investment that will allow us to see the most gain. When we all do our part to give each other the resources we need in times as trying as now might feel for so many, we will see that gain. People find ways to pay back kindness. To give more than what they gave. Some call it gratitude, or God, or good karma.
Call it what you will, but if you want to feel it, it will cost you.
If my name is be replaced with a price tag, I know I, for one, would rather not be considered cheap.