Don't Believe the Hype

FOMO, Capitalism & Craft

Business news publications and tv channels love to sell you the story of the "side hustle that makes you rich." Maybe it's the story of the woman who sells used clothing to pay for her mortgage, or the couple who retired early by buying rental properties, or the woman who pulls down six figures by giving financial advice on YouTube. The message that has emerged from all the stories like this is the same: you too, can be fabulously wealthy, or at the very least financially comfortable, if you just find the right side hustle and work it.

An influencer on the beach. Photo by nightunter

America has always had a pretty jacked up relationship with the idea of work. It starts with the Puritans. The Puritans, who at the time they established their colony in what is now Massachusetts, were considered an outlying sect of Protestantism, and dealt in an extreme theology about the relationship between mercy and justice. They believed they were part of God’s elect, chosen for a salvation that was personal to them, predestined, and irrefutable. While they technically rejected the idea that their salvation was based on their actions, in practice they created in their society a relentless need to demonstrate that they were part of God’s chosen by their external holiness. If you weren’t acting like one of the saved, then maybe you weren’t really one of God’s elect. And that included being relentlessly productive, rejecting pleasure and ease as being evidence that you were, in fact, pursuing evil ends.

Over the years, this worship of hard work turned into the idolization of capitalism, an economic doctrine first coined by Adam Smith around the time of the industrial revolution. Capitalism at its core is the belief that the economic drivers of a country ought to be held in private hands, and that market-based forces of supply and demand should be the only regulating factors on economic activity. The underlying belief was that if one was succeeding in this system, it was because they had worked hard and been smart enough to navigate the waters of the marketplace. And if you were not successful, it is because you were either not working hard enough, or simply not skilled enough to succeed. 

The idea of capitalism of course held great appeal to a nation that had been weaned on the idea that hard work was an ennobling thing. And both ideas created a convenient means by which groups of people (usually white, wealthy men) could claim moral superiority by calling other groups of people (usually Black people and Indigenous people) "lazy," and by which they could ignore basic issues of equity by blaming poverty on the poor, and not a system that favored those who were already privileged.

And now we live in the time where we idolize billionaires. We look at their bank accounts and the businesses they run and presume that they must be a better class of human, simply by virtue of their wealth. The presumption is that they "worked hard for their money" and therefore have "earned" their status and influence. If you aren't wealthy, it must be because you are somehow deficient, and probably lazy.

The message is clear -- work hard and you'll "make it" and then you too can live the good life. And if you don't "make it," we can presume it is because there is something wrong with you, that you are probably morally deficient in some way that absolves the need for us to have compassion for your poverty.

The dirty little secret in all this is that when it comes to wealth, there is a lot of smoke and mirrors bullshit going on.

Let's start with that feel-good story about the woman who sells used clothes to buy her house. They gloss over the fact that this "side hustle" consumes at least 20-40 hours of her time. That's not a side hustle, that's an actual job. They ignore the fact that the reason this woman can find time to have such a demanding "side hustle" is because she has a spouse whose salary pays for her basic living needs, and therefore also has the basic startup capital and resources to build and keep an inventory of 1100 garments and effectively run an online business.

It's not that this woman hasn't worked hard or earned her income. She has, and that's great for her. What's problematic is the subtext of the story, which says if she can do it, you can too. That simply isn't the case. A single mother with two kids and a mountain of debt in a 600 square foot studio apartment is not going to be able to muster the time or the startup cash to do this "side hustle." But yet that's what her neighbors will suggest to her when she finds it hard to pay her bills.

And then there's the issue of billionaires. As we've seen repeatedly, the concentration of that much wealth and power in an individual often lends itself to the belief that one is more capable and less accountable in all things. Studies actually show that increasing wealth correlates with a decrease in compassion for others. But there is a tendency some have to confer "genius" upon people whose only claim to the title is that once upon a time they had a really big success that netted them a lot of cash, meaning billionaires often are overestimated.

Our capitalistic, materialist mentality sells us on the notion that if you aren't the richest person on your block, you just haven't worked hard enough, and you should be ashamed of yourself for not wanting more for yourself. Everyone else is buying houses and cars and clothes and electronics, and you should want those things too. The world is about competing with your neighbors, the thinking goes, and if you can't keep up, then you are a loser.

Public Enemy put it best: don't believe the hype.

Yeah, I get it, you say. But I'm a witch. What does all this have to do with my Craft?

As much as our Craft is actually a repudiation of Puritanism and jacked up capitalistic work ethic and materialism, it's easy as American witches to fall into the trap that says that we have to demonstrate our status as a practitioner of the Craft by showing how witchy we are on a day to day basis, and if we don't have a life that is filled with magical outcomes from spells we've cast or magical work we've done, we must not be much of a witch. We have only ourselves to blame if our witch life isn't living up to our wildest fantasies.

I know you see all those Instagram witches with their fancy altars and tarot decks who are telling you about their latest candle magic that they're doing to find a new lover or a new job or a new apartment. They're blogging about all the spells they are casting, and their listcicles about how to use the herbs you surely MUST be planting in your garden, or at the very least buying from that fabulous witchy herb shop that your community certainly has. Because we all live in a cute cottage that is both in the middle of a wooded glade and yet close to all kinds of easily accessible shopping, don’t we?  We all have gobs of time to spend moonbathing and not only observing all the Sabbats, but doing appropriate workings for all the phases of the moon, right? And we not only do our daily devotionals in our specially appointed altar in our dedicated temple room, we also keep up an ancestor altar, do kitchen witchery every time we cook, and cleanse our spaces and our tools every six months like clockwork with appropriately sourced cleansing smoke, don’t we?

No, we don't. Not even fucking close.

It’s easy to look at the lives of "witchfluencers" on social media channels and feel inadequate. Most of the best ones will be honest about the fact that even they don't live up to the expectations their social feeds might encourage. You can be a noted author and fall into a hole of depression and need to take a break from your Craft while you recover. You can be someone whose professional life is built around being a magical practitioner and still find that you don't have time to do all the Craft you really want to do. You can find that your partner gets a new job and you need to move from your comfy homestead to an apartment in a city, and that uproots a lot of what you used to do for your Craft. Look for the folks who are not just telling you how great their witch life is, but who are being honest about the times when they get derailed by the realities of their non-witch life. Because it happens to all of us.

Unfortunately, however, it's still remarkably easy to fall into the FOMO trap, where you think that everyone else's practice is somehow "witchier" or more integrated with their lives than yours. As if somehow that makes them a "better" witch than you. And then there's the trap of Instagram altars and fancy tchotchkes from witch shops and influencers and others trying to cash in on the witch aesthetic. If you have this candle, or this crsytal, or this spell kit, your Craft will become unstoppable! All you need is $19.99 and the amazing power of this handcrafted wand can be yours!! To be fair, there are a lot of beautiful objects that people make that can be used as tools for Craft that are totally worth that $19.99 plus shipping and handling (although I've never been terribly clear on why one needs to pay for handling.....). It's hard to resist the lure of a beautiful object that you know is chock full of gorgeous magical energy. And when you've been steeped in the miasma of capitalist culture, that lure gets mighty powerful and hard to resist.

Don't. Believe. The hype.

Look for the "witchfluencers" who acknowledge the diversity of circumstances in our community. Not all of us has a dedicated space to practice in. Some of us are trying to work out how to put an altar discretely on a bookcase in an apartment they may share with several roommates. Some of us are barely scraping by with enough money for food, and their "local witch shop" is actually the dollar store. Some of us live in an area that has more concrete than greenspace. Some of us are juggling two jobs and two kids, and can't do a full moon ritual next Tuesday because that's the night of their kid's soccer game. Witches come in all shapes and sizes, from all kinds of communities, and with all kinds of limitations. And no matter what your circumstances are, you are still a witch. And you can be a damn fine witch, too.

You've heard me say before that you don't need anyone's permission to do witchcraft. And that also means that no one can tell you that you aren't a witch if that's what you are determined to be. There is no prize for being the "best" witch. The Craft is not a competitive sport. This is not the Olympics, and no one is giving out medals. If your Craft is sufficient for you, that's all that matters.

Your Craft doesn't have to be "better" than anyone else's. There are no "joneses" to keep up with. Your Craft doesn't need to be measured or compared, ever. While one of the great joys of the Craft is that you can spend a lifetime learning and bettering your skills, there is no "Craft police" who's going to require it of you. You are always "enough" as a witch. Any impulse that you have to compare your Craft to anyone else's is you internalizing toxic notions of status that do not serve you, and don't belong in the Craft.