Gasping for life (literally!)

Western stability is something of the past, the downfall of our supposed developed countries has left us seeking decency of living, but at what cost?

It is not secret that life is getting harsher and harsher as the years pass. From a recession to another, more of us are struggling to just get by with regular life. Surges in grocery prices have turned TikTok food hauls into a luxury. Housing is becoming so unaffordable, we are resorting to moving back in our parents’ home. We are getting overworked, underpaid and unhappy. The West is not this safe haven we have been promised any more, and many of us desperately yearn to wake up from this nightmare.

Credit: collage by me

I grew up in Switzerland most of my life. Switzerland is a tiny country in the middle of Western Europe, populated by 8 million inhabitants, spread over four linguistic regions — Swiss German, French, Italian and Romantsch — within 26 cantons (states). Switzerland is known for its mountains, cheese, chocolate and banks. Never can you have a conversation without at least one of those four subjects being mentioned. Few people really know much about Switzerland. After all, this teeny tiny country likes the low-profile life. But there is one thing this country is super proud of : its financial prosperity.

Financial immorality made in Europe

Switzerland will never tell you that its financial prosperity involves money they made during the slave trade — Alfred Escher, the founding father of modern Switzerland, got extremely wealthy owning slaves in Cuba and partaking in the trading process. He is also the founder of one of the major bank in the country, Credit Suisse (now joint with UBS as it collapsed). Let’s not forget Nazi gold bullions and Jewish money looted by the same Nazis after being sent to concentration camps. Note that Swiss banks were the main bankers and financial brokers of the Nazis during the Holocaust. Swiss neutrality turns to hypocrisy when it comes to making money and profit off wars and atrocities against humanity so much so that forged declarations were used to bypass the neutrality obligations and allow Swiss-made weapons to be sold to parties in civil wars during the Cold War. Yes, financial prosperity also comes from arms sales, Swiss neutrality states that it should not sell arms to parties at war but the battlefields have proved otherwise.

I hope it is getting clearer that Swiss financial prosperity strongly relies on the existence of violence because Switzerland is a neoliberal highly capitalistic country and, like many of those countries, they can only prosper through atrocities. Capitalism requires conquest, settlement, bondage, migration, monopoly and extraction to function as intended. Karl Marx, in his analysis of capitalism, its functioning and limitations, stated that colonial slavery and plunder were a ‘primitive accumulation of capital’¹.

Back in 1992, Switzerland had to vote a referendum about being part of the European Union (EU). It was rejected by 50.3%. The membership application was then held on standby until the country decided to withdraw it in 2016. Switzerland does not want to be part of the EU but wants the benefits of it. Switzerland likes to brag about how lucky they are not to be part of the EU and have to deal with the euro currency and its constant fluctuation and insecurity. Somehow, the Swiss franc is a stronger and more stable currency and has been for the longest time, whereas the euro has been misappreciated and weakened. Even though, today the Swiss franc and the euro stall at a very close rate, I still hear my stepdad praising the luck we got from not getting ourselves into financial troubles especially after what happened in Greece in 2015. I was 21 at that time and was just starting to understand how the system works, and so I kept hearing people talk about the Greek financial crisis and blame it on its adhesion to the eurozone in 2001 and the downfall being exacerbated by the 2008 global financial crisis.

That Greek economic crisis shook up Europe and most of the West to this today. As Greece is struggling to recover², and I understand more and more how twisted the system is, I now understand why the general panic took place, even here in Switzerland.

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The downfall of western stability

You don’t need to be a finance bro to understand that when an indebted country falls, it affects a whole structure because countries have ties and treaties and agreements that strongly bind them to each other. Though Switzerland is not part of the EU and does not use the euro as a currency, it still has agreements as the country is surrounded by euro-members and is still part of the European continent. Those agreements grant me the freedom of movement within the EU, businesses to import/exports goods, regulate free trade within the continent and among countries. Because of those strong ties, if countries do well, this assures the system to do well too. The responsibility then lies on all countries to be doing great, leading them to financially help each other to keep each other afloat. The thing is, when one falls hard and was already on the brink of falling for a long time, the crash gets super disastrous. This is exactly what happened with Greece: years of French and German banks lending them money to survive for it to all go to waste and bring EU countries along on their downfall.

At the end of the day, financial decisions in this overly capitalistic system are never made for the greater good of the masses in mind. Capitalists, which are composed by the ruling class and the wealthy, just want a system that works for them and makes them a lot of money. Banks and corporations are bailing each other out, because this doomed economic order requires them to stay on top. There is a reason why our governments were making absurd choices during the pandemic, like bailing out airlines. Mind you, at a stage of the pandemic where nobody could even travel abroad because of the tight Covid restrictions. At the same time, hospitals were overcrowded and personnel were overworked because they were just not equipped at all after years of underfunding and lack of workforce.

Healthcare is not the only sector being neglected by our governments, many essential sectors such as education, social services and the creative/cultural field have been struggling for many years. In fact, every time cuts are being made, you know for sure those sectors are the ones getting hit and having to tighten the belt to get by. As someone who works in the creative industry, I lost count of the many times we were announced for the umpteenth time that they had to cut the budget once again. For that money to then be allocated to the military or some investements benefitting our elected officials and their capitalist friends.

Disillusioned and hopeless

The constant financial turmoil caused by not only a burning planet that is being sucked dry from its natural finite resources as well as a massive deadly pandemic (still ongoing, as a reminder, the Covid is still wreaking havoc, I beg be considerate!) has made it clearer where our governments interests lie, and it is not in ours.

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I don’t know about you, but life is not so easy out there. I am 29 years old, and my entire twenties basically resulted in banging my head left and right at the contradictions of this world or just draw dropping at the discovery that what was sold to me about the West and my future, was simply delusions (a nicer word than lies). Even though I have lived in Switzerland most of my life, as a creative, Switzerland does not invest in you. The creative field has suffered tremendously for many years, and it just got worse during the pandemic³. As SWISS, a now German-owned airline was getting government bailout from Switzerland, theatres and cinemas and all creative fields were getting let go and/or shut down. In the middle of Covid, a war happened which made the financial system more unbearable leading corporations and banks to rise up the prices of basic goods such as food, rent, healthcare and just everything we need to survive, because they just can? If you are lucky enough, you might have got a 5-20% pay raise, which is barely anything when the inflation is way higher than this. But you are supposed to be contempt with it, even though you keep struggling day to day.

When I was 12, I believed that by my big age, I would be living in a nice flat with a well paying job. Look, I have a master’s degree, I am a well-educated woman and I have been told my whole life that people like me doing well in school and academically are the future elites of the country. The brightest of this society and I wholeheartedly believed it. Especially when you look at the Swiss education system which is very segregated. I did really well in school and at Uni and was promised success and happiness but quite the opposite happened: I had to return living with my parents because my job was not paying well enough and I burned out as I could barely get by!

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Moving back in with your parents after years of being independent from them is a massive hit to your ego. Not going to lie, I did feel like a failure having to go back living with my parents at 27. Nearing my thirties and I am heading back to point A? If you found or find yourself in this situation as well, stay assured, in this day and age, moving back to your parents is way more common than you think. In fact, millenials and gen z are moving back to their parents’ at record highs! And if you are not moving back to mum and dad, well living in flatshares way past your thirties is also very common. I am moving away from my parents’ house this year and even though I would like to move in alone, I know the prospect of that being realisitic in this economy is relatively slim. I cannot rule out living with flatmates for the moment and I am hitting 30 this year… Anything to save a penny!

Coming to terms that our system is so rotten it can’t allow us to have everything we were told to have, is hard to cope. I am still very angry at our world right now because everything we are living through was easily avoidable if the focus of our wellbeing were taken seriously and not solely the profits aligning the rich and wealthy pockets. The world did not have to be like this, it was not supposed to be like this. Even though we might find some little joy here and there to alleviate the painful struggles we have to fight everyday to survive, living on a day-to-day basis is becoming mentally taxing. None of us are okay. Very few of us can even afford whatever help we can get to lift the mental strain and when we do, how effective are the changes when the mental health realm has been shaped around this twisted system just so you can cope it better?

I keep asking myself how can we really heal when the system itself is deeply sick? How can we really live when all we do is gasping for air at every corner to just get by? How far are we willing to go until we topple everything over and build a system that works for us all? Why are we ok with all of this when we are left to gasp for just a little life decency?

1. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), p. 915.

2. Maris, G., Sklias, P., & Maravegias, N. (2022). The political economy of the Greek economic crisis in 2020. European Politics and Society, 23(4), 447–467.

3. Karakioulafis, C. (2022). The COVID-19 pandemic as a catalyst of art workers mobilisation and unionisation: the case of Greek actors. RES. Revista Española de Sociología, 31(4), 2.