The Demand for Consistency
Can we imagine value outside of productivity?
In many modern institutions, consistency is treated as a moral imperative. The expectation is simple, one must show up every day, at the same time, in the same state of focus, emotional neutrality, and productivity. This routine is so deeply normalised that it often escapes critique. It is considered the hallmark of professionalism.
But when this expectation is applied universally and rigidly, (without space for fluctuating energy, mental health, neurodivergence, or chronic illness) it’s a mechanism of structural ableism. The demand for consistency becomes a demand for bodily and cognitive conformity, one that punishes those whose realities do not align with the myth of the “ideal worker.”
Within ableist systems, the mind and body are presumed to be:
Predictable
Emotionally regulated
Energetic
Always available for labour
These assumptions erase the lived experience of people whose capacity fluctuates. Rather than responding with understanding or accommodation, institutions often interpret inconsistency as a moral failing:
“She’s unreliable.”
“He lacks discipline.”
“They’re too emotional.”
As disability theorist Lennard Davis argues, the concept of the “normal” body is not natural or eternal, it is historical. It emerged alongside industrial capitalism, which required bodies that were punctual, regular, and efficient. Factories required bodies that could synchronise with machines: regular, punctual, capable of repeating the same motion without interruption. Today’s fixation on “normal” and “consistent” bodies descends from that industrial logic.
But human beings are not machines. Our capacities are shaped by grief, hormones, caregiving, economic precarity, sensory environments, medical conditions, social expectations.
Consistency, when demanded without compassion, becomes coercion. When weaponised, it creates systems that exclude and punish those who need care, fluidity, and rest.
Capitalism fears stillness. Stillness does not generate profit. It cannot be monetised or measured. A person lying in bed, grieving, healing, caring for a loved one, or simply being, these states are threatening to a system that depends on endless motion and measurable output.
To live in a human body is to fluctuate. Some days we are tired. Some days we are alert. Our capacities expand and contract. This is not dysfunction; it is life.
The system insists that we stabilise ourselves for its benefit, that we discipline our grief, mask our pain, regulate our emotions, and smooth our differences so that production can continue uninterrupted.
The violence of capitalism lies not only in exploitation of labour, but in the narrowing of what counts as valuable existence. It isolates us from our own embodied truths.
In our communities, we don’t measure success by profit margins or productivity charts. Success is when no one disappears. It is when people are still breathing, still held, still sustained under the neglect of the state and the violence of systems built to exploit and discard.
We resist the erasure imposed by systems that value bodies only for what they produce, systems that render some lives disposable, systems that withhold recognition, care, and life itself.
We have always known how to survive beyond capitalism’s terms, through mutual aid, collective care, flexible time, shared responsibility.
A world organised around human variability would not treat bodies as units of production. It would design systems that bend toward people, It would measure success by whether people are fed, housed, supported, and free. We do not need more disciplined bodies. We need liberated ones.