Comrade Tyler's Revolutionary Awakening: The Beet Fields Don't Care About Your Healing Journey
By Earl 'Red' Hutchins | Actual Life Under Communism
Tyler Marchetti, 28, formerly of Portland, Oregon, formerly of Instagram, formerly of a moderately successful Substack newsletter titled Unshackling Your Authentic Self From Late-Stage Capital, has blisters on both hands and mud on his face and absolutely nobody to process his feelings with.
Photo: Portland, Oregon, via wallpaperaccess.com
Welcome to the revolution, comrade. The quota is 400 kilograms of beets by sundown.
The Before Times
For those unfamiliar with Tyler's pre-collectivization portfolio, allow me to paint the picture. He was, by all accounts, a thriving member of the wellness-industrial complex — the very complex he was simultaneously trying to abolish, a contradiction he addressed at length in a 47-minute YouTube video that received 312 views. He offered something called "somatic liberation coaching," which cost $180 per hour and involved a great deal of intentional breathing and, quote, "confronting the capitalist architecture of your nervous system."
His TikTok presence was robust. Hammer-and-sickle thumbnails. Lengthy captions about seizing the means of production while posing in front of a tasteful gallery wall. A recurring series called Red Pill, Green Smoothie in which he discussed Marxist theory while preparing adaptogenic mushroom lattes. His most viral post — 340,000 views — was a thirty-second clip of him pointing at text on screen that read: "Imagine if we just... didn't do capitalism anymore." The comments were enthusiastic. The revolution, his followers agreed, was extremely close.
Tyler had a Notion board. It had seventeen databases. One of them was titled "Post-Revolutionary Role: Consciousness Architect / Community Healing Facilitator." He had color-coded it red.
The Committee Reviews Your Application
When the Central Planning Committee processed Tyler's skills assessment — and I have reviewed the actual paperwork, because this publication has sources — the conversation was reportedly brief.
"Somatic liberation?" said the assessor.
"It's a modality that—"
"Agricultural Division. Beet sector. Report Monday."
Tyler's diary entry from that first morning is something I will treasure until my own inevitable reassignment. He describes waking at 4:45 AM to a bell — "not a mindful bell, not a singing bowl, a bell bell" — and being handed rubber boots two sizes too large. He asked whether the collective had a morning intention-setting practice. The shift supervisor, a woman named Greta who has been farming since before Tyler was born and has no patience for this, told him to pick up the cart handle.
He picked up the cart handle.
Diary of a Consciousness Architect, Week Three
We present, lightly edited, selected entries from Tyler's field journal. He is still writing in it. Old habits.
Day 1: Asked Greta if we could establish some shared agreements for the team before beginning. She handed me a beet. I think that was the agreement.
Day 4: My hands hurt in a way that feels very unmetaphorical. I keep trying to reframe it as embodied praxis and it is not working.
Day 9: Proposed to the evening meal group that we go around the table and share one thing we're grateful for and one growing edge. Comrade Dmitri said his growing edge was that he wished I would stop talking. I think there's something there to unpack.
Day 14: Submitted a formal request to the Committee to redesign the beet sector's collective identity. Suggested we rebrand to something that honors the inherent dignity of root vegetables. Suggested "The Crimson Harvest Collective: Rooted in Solidarity." Request was denied. We are still just called Sector 7.
Day 17: I tried to explain shadow work to a horse today. The horse was more receptive than Greta.
The Ideological Reckoning
Now, here at Actual Life Under Communism, we are not without sympathy. Tyler believed in something. That counts for something, probably. The problem — and this is the editorial point I feel compelled to make with the gentle persistence of a beet being pulled from cold ground — is that Tyler believed in a version of communism that was essentially just his current life but with the rent removed.
His revolution had a kombucha bar. It had sliding-scale payment structures for his coaching services, which, under his imagined system, would still very much exist and would be considered essential infrastructure. It had, crucially, a role for him specifically — a role that involved talking, indoors, about feelings, at a pace he controlled.
The actual historical record of centrally planned economies suggests that the revolution has, at various points, needed miners, field workers, factory hands, and people willing to do difficult physical labor in poor conditions for the collective good. It has never, in any documented instance, posted a quota for Authentic Self Architects.
Tyler is learning this. One beet at a time.
What Tyler Has Learned
I spoke with him briefly during his fifteen-minute rest period on Day 19. He was sitting on an overturned crate, eating black bread, staring at the middle distance with the particular expression of a man whose Notion board has never felt further away.
"I think," he said slowly, "I may have had some romanticized notions."
I asked him to elaborate.
"I thought the revolution would be more... collaborative. More trauma-informed."
I told him the beets were, in a sense, very grounding.
He looked at me for a long moment. "I've been telling myself that," he said. "It's not helping anymore."
Greta rang the bell. Tyler stood up, pulled on his oversized boots, and walked back to the field without another word.
Somewhere, his Notion board sits open on a laptop he no longer has access to, seventeen databases glowing quietly in the dark, the "Post-Revolutionary Role" field still color-coded red.
The beets, at least, are thriving.
Earl 'Red' Hutchins is the founder and sole editorial staff of Actual Life Under Communism. He writes from an undisclosed location with adequate heating, for now.