When reading “A Mushroom at the End of the World”, I was happy to see it covered a topic I was interested in, the connection between capitalism and the climate crisis. One of the reasons capitalism cannot work is because it is an economic system based on infinite growth with a world of finite resources. I feel like Tsing really exemplified this when she repeated how within capitalism it is a constant cycle of promise and ruin. Another idea that I really liked was her criticism’s on the term Anthropocene. One of the main tenets of capitalism is focusing on the individual rather than the community, that it is the individuals job to pull themselves up by the bootstraps and find a way to make it. As long as you work hard enough you’ll be able to get rich. Of course this is not true, there are so many barriers ingrained within our society that make it extremely difficult for one to improve their socioeconomic standing. The entire field of sociology exists to look into these structures that dictate and play an immense role in the way ones’ life will turn out. Thus, I really agree with her statement that it should be a name more focused on the system that lead these changes to happen, rather than the people who have no choice but to live in it.
The way Tsing ends the chapter with the realization that many people realized the “progress” that we are told to strive for and the lives we are told to live doesn’t make sense (or at least that’s how I interpreted it). I feel like this applies greatly to the sort of reckoning that occurred during the pandemic. Many people no longer want to spend the majority of their lives working a job they don’t like, getting paid way less than they should. The progress that we are supposed to make throughout the course of our lives in pursuit of the American dream, is not at all what its cut out to be. For the first time I think everyone really got a sense, that the world around us and the structures that the world consists of are beginning to fall apart.