The Demand for Consistency
Can we imagine value outside of productivity?
In many modern institutions, consistency is treated not just as a virtue, but as a moral imperative. The expectation is simple, yet profound in its reach: 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, reliability, and maturity.
But when this expectation is applied universally and rigidly—without space for fluctuating energy, mental health, neurodivergence, or chronic illness—it reveals itself as 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—due to disability, trauma, or invisible pain. 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.”
But what is being judged here is not a lack of effort. It is the very variability of being human—especially in bodies that capitalist, colonial, and ableist systems never accounted for.
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. The rise of the factory system in the 19th century marked a shift: bodies were no longer valued for their wisdom, uniqueness, or adaptability, but for their utility within machines of production. Factories required workers who were regular, punctual, and physically able to perform repetitive tasks.
The modern obsession with "normal" and "consistent" bodies is a legacy of that era—a logic of extraction, not of care. It reflects a worldview designed to sort, control, and maximize productivity, not to sustain human life.
Human beings are not machines. Our capacities are shaped by grief, hormones, caregiving, economic precarity, sensory environments, medical conditions, and social expectations. For many disabled people, inconsistency is not a failure of discipline—it is the honest shape of their reality.
Consistency, when demanded without compassion, becomes coercion. When weaponised, it creates systems that exclude, punish, and erase 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.
But 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.
What if, instead of demanding that people prove they can be consistent, we asked how our systems might become more flexible? What if we built workplaces, schools, and communities that recognised variability not as failure, but as fact?