The US is a nation of people immiserated by the stress of late-stage neoliberal capitalism. People aren’t just worried about money, or work, or health. They are worried about all of them, all at once, all the time, according to a new report from Murmuration, The Stress That Stays.

Why is everyone in the US so stressed? Because of the extreme wealth inequality caused by neoliberalism, where technological gains favour the ultra-wealthy, and policies support endless capital accumulation instead of the needs of everyday people.

The way we earn our money decides how we think, how we vote, how we hate, and why we are stressed. The stress described by over 150,000 people in the US is not an abstract emotional state but a direct physiological reaction to the real, physical contradictions of US plutocracy.

The quote from the report, “the math does not math”, is a layperson’s articulation of the falling rate of profit and the increasingly vicious extraction of surplus value by corporate America, where the worker cannot purchase the means of their own survival with the wages provided.

The data reveals the stark bifurcation of reality in the USA into two distinct worlds where the real, lived experiences of the struggling and prosperous are utterly separated. For the 61 percent of “struggling” Americans, stress is defined by “financial strain”, a relentless, physiological reaction to the neoliberal market’s inability to provide the means of survival. For the “prosperous” (the top 7 percent), financial strain is negligible; their stress is displaced onto abstract “global and national concerns”.

This is what I wrote about in my earlier post, Demobilised:

The people most actively protesting are often the ones with the most cultural capital, while the most precarious are too busy struggling for basic dignity to stage a meaningful uprising.

This is the symptom of a “demobilised class society”, where class divides are raging, yet the collective political engines of the working class has been systematically undermined and degraded. Where we are too exhausted by survival and paying the rent to band together and fight back.

This explains why a struggling tradie might be more angry at a dole bludger, queue jumping immigrant or a disruptive climate protester than a CEO who steals millions in wages or charges fees to dead people. The CEO is distant, abstract, and untouchable. But the “rule breaker” down the street? They are a visible insult to the sacrifices the tradie makes every day to keep their head above water.

The report says that those struggling are focused on “daily pressures” rather than politics. This uninterest in politics is an absence of freedom, which is a privilege reserved for capital holders. The working class is “unfree” because their entire cognitive bandwidth is colonised and expropriated by the imperative of survival. Workers and the precariat are prevented from engaging in civic life because they are exhausted by the discipline of wage labour or unemployment.

The divergence in stress triggers is particularly revealing regarding the “immigration enforcement” anxiety. For the “prosperous”, the professional managerial classes, and the petit-bourgeoisie this stress likely reflects a fear of disorder and loss aversion, which feeds into the “Merchant Right’s” manufactured fear-mongering over border control, immigrants or the disruption of cheap labour flows.

However, for the working class and the poor, the reality of the last six months of Trump-regime ICE raids, including the shooting of US citizens and violence in immigrant communities, is not a headline or a policy debate. It is state violence functioning as another cost of living. Just as inflation expropriates their wages, the security state expropriates their safety and deports immigrant family wage-earners.

The “instability” that stresses the rich is a threat to their portfolio; the “instability” that stresses the poor is a financial, and often real, boot on the neck.

State repression and far-right terror groups share the same underlying material cause, whether they are theological death-cults like ISIS, neo-Nazis marching through the streets, or rogue state-sanctioned murder squads like ICE. They offering a vehicle for the rage of the “disinherited” and “demobilised”. They appeal to (primarily young) men who, recoiling from the alienating cycle of consumerism, seek to destroy it.

The report concludes with a liberal plea for a “baseline of empathy”.

The solution to a system where “the math does not math” is not empathy; it is the decommodification of survival and confrontation with the people who create, maintain and benefit from the system: the billionaire and oligarch class.

The US does not need institutions to “design participation” for stressed workers; it needs a redistribution of power and wealth.