As a writer Eula Biss has two great gifts. The first is her ability to reveal to the reader what has, all along, been hidden in plain sight. She did this in Notes from No Man’s Land, her collection of essays that ruminate on the pervasiveness of racism in everyday life in America. In the opening essay she tells of how, in the late 1800s, white Americans complained about telegraph poles being put up in their neighbourhoods – until they found an inventive new use for them, as gibbets on which to lynch black men. Her other talent is for laying bare our submerged fears. In her 2015 book On Immunity, Biss traces the history of vaccinations and the fear many Americans have of inoculation, and connects them to the anxieties of modern motherhood.

In Having and Being Had, both gifts are on display. Biss traces the roots of our assumptions about wealth, work and property, and reveals the ways in which capitalism is inculcated and internalised – how we subscribe to its demands from the moment we are born. We have been saturated in it for so long we no longer feel it, in the way that fish don’t know that water is wet. If you are over 40 and ever wondered what exactly happened to your life, Biss puts her finger on it, and then presses hard.

In 2014 she bought her first house, with her husband John. This should have made her happy; instead it made her uncomfortable in a way that she couldn’t describe, so she bought a diary and, as writers do, tried to figure it out on the page. That diary eventually became this book, which takes the form of a collection of vignettes that capture her work as a writer and teacher, and her role as a wife and mother – all viewed through the lens of capitalism.

She reads books, she talks to people – everyone from her own mother, who has rarely had money, to economists. For Biss, money was once something she saved in order to buy time, specifically time to write. She travelled light. Suddenly she found herself locked into a game she couldn’t escape. She must furnish the house, she must maintain the house, which is not just a house but an asset. “Middle age is really all about maintenance,” her mother once told her. Her area is gentrifying. An older black woman, who is being evicted from the house her grandfather built because she can’t afford the soaring property tax, orders Biss off her lawn. A bank regulator, who owns a house on the same street, somehow manages to arrange the eviction of boys who live in a house to which the police have been called. “He’s not concerned about his safety,” John says to Biss. “He’s concerned about his property.”

To keep the house, she must keep her job. Working for the Man, she has less time to write. She sees a financial adviser about retirement planning. The financial instruments are impossibly complicated and replete with moral hazards – a company she might invest in may treat its workers well, but endanger the environment. None of them seems truly ethical. “I ask him if he can imagine this system of investment coming to an end. No, he says, your money is safe. But that’s not what I’m asking. I’m asking if there is any way out of this.”

The pervasiveness of consumer capitalism once seen cannot be unseen. Her son starts trading Pokémon cards at school and a squabble breaks out between the kids over their value. The cards are only worth what someone will pay for them, much like a Picasso. In Paris before the second world war Peggy Guggenheim (whose father went down with the Titanic), bought paintings from then unknown artists with her inheritance. “Ten Picassos, forty Ernsts, eight Mirós, three Dalís and one Chagall. As the Germans advanced on Paris she was buying paintings from artists desperate to leave the country.” Many years later a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation for a book makes it possible for Biss to put a down payment on her house.

The interdependent relationship between work and art vexes. How to create without first having money, how to keep creating when art makes so little money? Virginia Woolf wrote that a woman needed a room of her own – and an income the equivalent of £75,000 in today’s terms, as well as a housekeeper. Woolf treated her cook, Nellie Boxall, poorly, underpaying her and firing her after Boxall was hospitalised. For a few decades after the second world war, regulations were enacted to protect workers from this kind of treatment. No more.

Biss watches Scooby-Doo with her son. The gang are on the track of villains trying to scare people with phoney ghosts so they can get their grasping hands on riches. A father in the playground says the show is “about dysfunctional capitalism, right? Capitalism gone wrong. People who are trying to game the system.” But, Biss thinks, isn’t that just capitalism? Capitalism in America has never been fair, it has always been stacked in favour of white men; it has always limited the right of other groups – women, black people – to own property.

Biss doesn’t so much prescribe as describe. There have been rebellions against capitalism, though none ultimately successful. Communism, of course, but also gift economies. The Diggers arose in England in the mid-17th century after the English civil war: “Their plan was to give the food away to anyone who worked with them, and to forge a new economy – not feudalism and not capitalism either.” Ultimately the Diggers fled England – to America, where their ideas have been forgotten.

“If a person is not a liberal when he is 20, he has no heart; if he is not a conservative when he is 40, he has no head,” goes the saying, ascribed to Churchill and also John Adams. And if you are not deeply discomfited by the time you finish reading On Having and Being Had, you have no conscience.

• Having and Being Had is published by Faber (RRP £15.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.