Normalizing the Absurd: Why We Accept the Unacceptable Because of Capitalism
Things Inherently Wrong but Normalized by Capitalism
Fair warning: This isn’t a quick scroll. If you make it to the end, you get… well, nothing. That’s capitalism! The funny thing is, this list is by no means exhaustive. I could have kept listing off items, but for my sanity’s sake, I stopped after identifying around 20 or so of the most egregious absurdities we have normalized due to capitalism.
In every direction we look, signs of capitalism are woven so deeply into daily life that many injustices slip past our notice. Advertising billboards litter the skyline, healthcare access depends on one’s bank balance, and even water, essential for life, is sold for profit. These are not natural facts of existence but products of a system where profit trumps human need. Still, these realities are so normalized that questioning them can seem naïve, or even radical.
Why do so many practices that harm individuals, communities, and the planet feel ordinary? How did we get to a place where such things are not just accepted, but expected? This article explores things inherently wrong but normalized by capitalism, examining how profit-driven logic has shaped not only our economy, but our everyday experience, our relationships, and even our moral intuitions.
The Power of Normalization: Why We Accept the Unacceptable
Capitalism’s greatest success may be in convincing us that there is no alternative. Normalization is the process by which repeated exposure to an idea or practice makes it seem unremarkable, even if it’s harmful. Over time, we stop questioning why the public park is full of ads or why life-saving medicine is priced out of reach. These injustices become just “the way things are.”
This normalization is not accidental. It is reinforced through cultural messages, media, laws, and even language. For example, referring to people as “consumers” rather than citizens subtly shifts focus from rights and community to transactions and markets. As generations grow up surrounded by these realities, outrage becomes apathy, and the abnormal becomes common sense.
Public Spaces for Sale: Advertising Billboards Everywhere
Once, public and natural spaces were meant for all to enjoy; a walk in the park, a scenic drive, or just gazing at the stars. Now, billboards and digital ads clutter the landscape, hijacking our attention and eroding beauty for private profit.
This commercialization isn’t just ugly; it reshapes our sense of what’s possible in public life. When public space is for sale, it sends a clear message: every aspect of life is available for exploitation. The quiet dignity of a landscape is replaced by the urgent call to consume. Whether on city streets or rural highways, the encroachment of advertising normalizes the idea that even our shared environment is a venue for profit.
Corporatization of Public Spaces
The same logic extends beyond billboards. Parks, transit systems, schools, and even prisons bear corporate logos and naming rights, slowly chipping away at the notion of the commons, a space for everyone, governed by public need rather than private gain. When a children’s playground or city library is branded by a corporation, our relationship to those places shifts subtly but profoundly.
Targeting the Young: Commercials and Children
Children are uniquely vulnerable to manipulation, their brains still developing a sense of self, desire, and critical thinking. Yet, corporations routinely target young audiences with advertisements designed to create not just brand loyalty, but lifelong consumption habits.
From fast food and sugary cereals to endless toys and digital content, children are bombarded with persuasive messages well before they can understand the implications. The ethics of targeting children in this way are rarely questioned; instead, it’s defended as “just business.” The consequence? Lifelong patterns of overconsumption and unhealthy habits, all for profit.
Health as a Profit Center: Medical Decisions & Insurance
Perhaps nowhere is the profit motive of capitalism more apparent, and more damaging, than in healthcare. In countries where medical care is privatized, insurance companies often override doctors’ expertise, refusing procedures or medications deemed too costly. The logic is not what’s best for the patient, but what’s cheapest for the insurer.
Under this system, healthcare is not a universal right but a privilege distributed by wealth. The ability to survive illness or injury is contingent upon one’s insurance status or savings. For those without, the consequences can be catastrophic, both medically and financially. The normalization of healthcare as a market commodity undermines trust, increases suffering, and leaves the most vulnerable behind.
Further compounding this is the practice of pharmaceutical price gouging. Companies set prices for life-saving drugs not based on research costs or public benefit, but on what the market will bear. Insulin, EpiPens, and cancer treatments can become unattainable luxuries. People are forced to ration medication or forgo treatment altogether, while corporations post record profits. This, too, has become ordinary, something we debate but rarely address at its root.
The Trap of Planned Obsolescence
Imagine buying a phone, only to have it slow down after a couple of years, batteries that can’t be replaced, or updates that render devices obsolete. Planned obsolescence, the intentional design of products to fail or become outdated, creates an endless cycle of buying, discarding, and rebuying.
While marketed as innovation or progress, the real motive is to maximize sales and profit. This not only burdens consumers but also fuels environmental destruction, filling landfills with toxic electronic waste. The normalization of disposable goods over durable, repairable ones shifts responsibility away from manufacturers and onto individuals and, ultimately, the planet.
Debt for Opportunity: Student Loans & Employment
Education is widely touted as a public good, the key to individual and collective prosperity. Yet, in America, access to higher education comes with a price tag so high that it can mean decades of debt. Student loans become the gateway to decent employment, turning what should be an investment in society into a profitable financial product for banks and lenders.
The normalization of lifelong student debt reinforces inequality and ensures that opportunity remains a function of family wealth rather than talent or effort. Those without means must mortgage their futures just to get a seat at the table. This burden is often justified as “personal responsibility,” but it is the direct result of treating education as a commodity.
The Struggle to Survive: Wage Labor as Necessity
Under capitalism, most people must sell their labor to survive, often in jobs that provide little meaning, security, or respect. The logic is simple: work, or go hungry. This system isn’t about fulfillment or social contribution; it’s about necessity.
For many, the jobs available are exploitative, unsafe, or degrading, yet the alternative is homelessness, hunger, or illness. The normalization of wage labor as the only means of survival masks the reality that work could, and should, be organized around human needs and aspirations rather than profit.
Gig Economy Instability
The rise of the gig economy is often praised for its flexibility and innovation. In reality, it shifts risk onto workers, stripping away benefits, protections, and job security. Drivers, delivery workers, and freelancers must constantly hustle for gigs, their livelihoods contingent on unpredictable algorithms and customer ratings. This “new normal” is simply precarity rebranded.
Justice for Sale: For-Profit Prisons
Perhaps one of the starkest examples of capitalism’s logic is the existence of for-profit prisons. When incarceration becomes a revenue stream, there is a perverse incentive to fill cells, not reduce crime. Policies and practices evolve to maximize occupancy, often targeting the poor and marginalized.
Instead of addressing the root causes of crime, poverty, lack of opportunity, and trauma, the system profits from punishment. The normalization of for-profit prisons means we tolerate, even encourage, human suffering for financial gain.
Privatizing Necessity: Water Ownership
Water is a basic necessity, vital for survival, health, and dignity. Yet, in many parts of the world, access to clean water is controlled by private companies that sell it for profit. In some cases, even public water sources are unsafe, forcing residents to buy bottled water or expensive filtration systems.
When water is treated as a commodity rather than a right, inequality deepens. The normalization of private water ownership makes it seem reasonable that some go thirsty while others profit from their need.
Shelter or Speculation: Housing as Investment
Housing, too, has been transformed from a basic need to an investment vehicle. Homes are bought and sold not primarily to provide shelter, but to generate profit through speculation. This inflates prices, creates bubbles, and locks entire populations out of stable housing.
As homelessness rises even in wealthy cities, the normalization of housing as a market asset is rarely questioned. The result is a society where empty condos sit beside crowded shelters, and where security is a privilege, not a right.
Working for Free: Unpaid Internships
Young people seeking to enter many industries are often expected to work for free, sometimes for months or even years. The justification is that they “gain experience,” but in practice, unpaid internships reinforce privilege, exclude those who can’t afford to work without pay, and entrench existing inequalities.
The normalization of unpaid labor as a rite of passage ensures that opportunity remains out of reach for those without family support. Industries benefit from free labor, while workers bear all the costs.
Monetizing Your Life: Data as a Commodity
In the digital age, your personal data, what you read, buy, like, and feel, has become a prized commodity. Tech giants collect, analyze, and sell this information, often without your meaningful consent.
The result is a world where privacy is an illusion, and our most intimate choices are used to target us with ads, influence elections, and maximize profits. The normalization of surveillance capitalism means most people accept, or simply ignore, the fact that their lives are for sale.
Information for the Few: Paywalls on Knowledge
A functioning democracy depends on informed citizens, yet news, research, and even basic information are increasingly locked behind paywalls. Those who can’t pay are left in the dark, widening the gap between the informed and the excluded.
The normalization of pay-to-access information undermines the idea of shared knowledge as a public good. It erodes democracy, deepens inequality, and ensures that the flow of ideas is governed by wealth.
Tipping Culture: Shifting Wage Responsibility
In many service industries, workers’ wages are so low that they depend on tips to survive. This practice shifts the responsibility for fair compensation from employers to customers, who are then pressured to subsidize low wages.
The normalization of tipping culture allows businesses to evade their obligations and perpetuates worker insecurity. It embeds inequality into the everyday act of eating out or getting a haircut.
Workplace Surveillance: The Cost of Productivity
Advances in technology have made it possible to monitor workers like never before. From keystroke trackers to constant video monitoring, employees are watched for every sign of “productivity.” The pressure to perform is relentless, and privacy is sacrificed in the name of efficiency and profit.
The normalization of surveillance in the workplace degrades trust, increases stress, and chips away at dignity. Workers are treated not as people, but as resources to be maximized.
Outsourcing Welfare: The Charity Industrial Complex
Where the state and market fail to meet basic needs, nonprofits and philanthropists step in. While charity is essential in the short term, overreliance on it allows both corporations and governments to avoid systemic change.
The normalization of the charity industrial complex means society accepts patchwork solutions and temporary fixes, rather than demanding the right to security and dignity for all.
Food Deserts: Profiting from Hunger
In many poor neighborhoods, healthy food is hard to find, while fast food and processed snacks are everywhere. This isn’t an accident; it’s the result of market logic that prioritizes profit over public health.
The normalization of food deserts means that nutrition, like everything else, is distributed by wealth. The result is higher rates of illness and shorter lifespans in the poorest communities.
The Legal Fiction: Corporate Personhood
In law, corporations are granted many of the rights and protections intended for human beings. This legal fiction allows them outsized influence over politics, policy, and public life, often to the detriment of actual people.
The normalization of corporate personhood means we accept that private interests can shape the very rules by which society operates.
The Invisible Workforce: Unpaid Caregiving
Childcare, eldercare, and domestic work are essential to society’s functioning, yet they remain largely unpaid and undervalued. This labor, overwhelmingly performed by women, is invisible in economic calculations and policy debates.
The normalization of unpaid caregiving perpetuates gender inequality and obscures the true costs of “productivity” and prosperity.
The Productivity Trap: Constant Pressure to Produce
Finally, capitalism normalizes the idea that every moment must be optimized, monetized, or spent in the pursuit of profit. Leisure and rest are dismissed as laziness; value is measured only in output.
The normalization of constant productivity creates a society of burned-out, anxious individuals, disconnected from joy, purpose, and each other.
FAQ: Capitalism’s Normalized Wrongs
1. Why do people accept these harmful capitalist practices as normal?
People accept them because they are surrounded by these practices from a young age, reinforced by media, culture, and law. Over time, repeated exposure leads to normalization and a sense that “there is no alternative.”
2. Are there societies that avoid these capitalist pitfalls?
Some countries prioritize public goods, regulate markets more strictly, or provide universal services like healthcare and education. No society is perfect, but examples exist where the harms of capitalism are less pronounced.
3. Can these issues be solved within capitalism, or is systemic change needed?
Some reforms, like stronger labor laws, universal healthcare, or campaign finance reform, can alleviate harm. However, critics argue that many problems are rooted in the logic of profit itself and require systemic change.
4. How does capitalism affect democracy?
The outsized influence of corporations, combined with paywalls on knowledge and commercialized public space, undermines informed citizenship and democratic participation.
5. Is all innovation bad under capitalism?
Not at all, capitalism can spur innovation. The problem arises when innovation serves profit at the expense of people or the planet, such as with planned obsolescence or addictive technologies.
6. What can individuals do to push back against these normalized harms?
Educate themselves and others, support policies and movements that prioritize people over profit, and challenge the assumption that things must be this way.
Imagining Alternatives
While the things inherently wrong but normalized by capitalism can seem overwhelming, recognizing them is the first step to imagining a different future. A society is not defined by its markets, but by its values; what it chooses to normalize, and what it refuses to accept.
Alternative models exist, and change is possible when enough people question the “normal” and demand better. As we rethink the role of profit, public good, and dignity, we open the door to systems that serve everyone, not just a fortunate few.