In a world where goods arrive at our doorstep with a click, culture is endlessly accessible, and life choices seem almost infinite—why do so many people feel exhausted, joyless, or depressed? At first glance, this may sound like a psychological or personal issue. But for the British philosopher and cultural critic Mark Fisher (1968–2017), it was primarily a political one. Fisher argued that the pervasive sense of unhappiness in our time is not a private failure, but a symptom of a social and economic order: late capitalism.
Depression as a social condition, not just an illness
In his influential book Capitalist Realism, Fisher described the atmosphere of our era as one of suffocating inevitability: the feeling that there is no real alternative to the current system. Depression, anxiety, and burnout, he claimed, are not minor glitches in an otherwise functioning society but direct results of it. Psychology and the pharmaceutical industry encourage us to view depression as a biological imbalance, a personal defect to be managed with medication. Yet Fisher insisted that its roots lie in our lived reality: the endless demands of flexible work, job insecurity, the culture of performance metrics, and the glorification of the entrepreneurial self who must constantly brand and sell themselves.
Seen this way, depression becomes political. It serves the system by isolating us. Instead of recognizing our despair as a natural response to impossible conditions, we internalize it as personal failure, thinking: the problem is me.
The politics of feelings
Fisher drew on a tradition from Marx to Michel Foucault to argue that private emotions are never entirely private. They are shaped by economic, social, and cultural forces. If Foucault spoke of “biopolitics”—the governance of life itself—Fisher pointed toward a kind of “psychopolitics”: the management of our moods by economic ideology.
This raises a disturbing possibility: perhaps the growing prevalence of sadness and despair signals that late capitalism can no longer deliver on its promises—not freedom, not prosperity, not even psychic comfort.
The struggle for imagination
For Fisher, hope was not merely an emotion but a political resource. If capitalism thrives on the belief that “there is no alternative,” then the urgent task is to liberate the collective imagination. To ask: what could replace it? How might we build a society where mental health is not privatized but understood as a shared responsibility?
He also highlighted the power of subcultures—music, film, art—as spaces where different futures can be imagined. Even dissatisfaction itself, the feeling that “something isn’t working,” could serve as the seed of resistance.
Why aren’t we happy?
Fisher’s answer was not that happiness has disappeared, but that it has been captured by an economic system that leaves no room for alternatives. The endless pursuit of instant gratification, relentless competition, and the idea that every failure is personal all create a reality in which depression becomes a “social epidemic.”
Yet within this epidemic lies an opening: if we learn to read depression not just as an individual symptom but as a collective demand for change, it could carry not only pain but also political potential. The question “Why aren’t we happy?” may then be less about individual therapy sessions—and more about imagining, together, a different kind of world.
