#2: How the women would live
Good morning!
My husband is on the West Coast for work this week and in addition to working and seeing his parents, he’s texted me selfies of meetings he has had with 17 different peers, friends and strangers. Something I really respect about him is the effort he puts into meeting with new people, with no agenda other than to talk, learn from them and in many cases, offer support, ideas or introductions.
One of those meetings was with a humanities scholar (and dean at Sonoma State), and so he asked me if I had any advice on what to talk with her about. Given that my husband works in tech and is both an efficient learner and producer, I’ve often wondered what big problems he could be applying his whole self to over the next several decades outside of tech. Here were his takeaways (forgive his grammar 😒):
Meanwhile, at home in NYC, I’ve been having a deeply introspective week after finally getting some alone time post holidays and a business trip. I’ve been enacting my new year’s resolutions to chant abundantly with friends, try to do 2 hours of deep work every day (my gosh is it difficult and incredible) and optimize my “paid work” hours (since I mostly do contract work, I am trying to be really efficient within a set of hours that equates to my rate worth and try to prevent spill over into other time blocks). And I’m reading a lot.
“How the women would live”
While on Chapter 4 of Educated by Tara Westover last night, something really struck me. She shares a story her grandmother told her about how, after the U.S. Cavalry slaughtered a tribe of Apaches in Arizona, the tribe’s warriors ultimately charged off the face of a mountain in order to not suffer a humiliating defeat. When their bodies were found by the Apache women, the women’s tears turned to stone as they touched the earth.
“Like the sandstone altar on which they had died, the shape of their lives had been determined years before—before the horses began their gallop, their sorrel bodies arching for that final collision. Long before the warriors’ leap it was decided how the women would live and how they would die. By the warriors, by the women themselves. Decided. Choices, numberless grains of sand, had layered and compressed, coalescing into sediment, then into rock, until all was set in stone.” (pg 35)
For the past several years, I’ve been lingering on the idea that our lives are dictated entirely by how we choose to spend our time (thus this newsletter project). I often worry about what I’m passively accepting because it has been set in stone by the generations before me, and what I am setting in stone for the generations that will come after mine.
The questions I am living with
I really try to live my life by this advice from Rilke in Letters to a Young Poet:
…be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and… try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.
When I turned 30 last year and tried to think carefully about what I want to spend this new decade exploring, I noticed that suddenly, every decision, even every minute of my time, started to feel more consequential. In my twenties, there seemed to be a lot more room for trial and error, rumination and adventuring along with every odd idea that popped into my head.
So I decided to engage in a rigorous personal inquiry into the following questions, knowing my livable answers will eventually emerge: What is work, who gets to decide, and what is the best way to work? And how do I want to answer these questions for myself as I take on a new role of caretaker for a growing, aging family?
Here’s where I am in my inquiry so far
I was raised (by the society I participate in) to believe that work = spending my time on labor that contributes to the formal economy and gets me $$. But I kept wondering: Is care work? Is movement-building work? Is self-transformation work? Is raising children (the ultimate contribution to an economy and society) work?
Obviously I think these things are work, but what puzzles me is that for formal, labor-market work, we are required to be educated or trained to get a job. For all the other categories, no training is required. But aren’t they just as consequential to the future of our species, if not more so?
Then, in June, I started tracking exactly how I spend my time and found that it divides into the following categories:
work (in exchange for pay)
care for self (physical, mental and spiritual health)
care for family (physical and mental health)
care for others (through participating in community and nurturing friendships)
and a lot of administration (the thing that allows the other four to flow smoothly)
In order to implement a system in which I can do my best at each (i.e.: “train myself” to improve at other types of work), I started to seek a lot of help. I won’t get into it all here, but some examples include:
To improve my ability to care for my family members and friends, I learned from my therapist how to listen to and care for myself
To overcome many of life’s troubles, I learned from my family and friends how to accept people the way they are, instead of how I want them to be
To ensure my work in the media industry does not contribute to dangerous narratives, I learned from peers and colleagues how to develop values-based reporting skills
To efficiently administrate my time for all of the kinds of “work” I do, I learned to time-block, make effective decisions and focus better
To improve my participation in community, I am learning from my Buddhist mentor how to care for people deeply and effectively
I consider all of these things to build on and support each other, and yet, until I decided to invest time and money into improving each of these aspects of my life, I never learned how. For the last decade, I was only pursuing paid work that I was supposedly trained to do, and inefficiently at that.
So I continue to wonder: What is work? How can we value different kinds of work, especially those that don’t directly generate monetary income, but support our ability to do so well, and also generate other kinds of value?
Places I’ve gone exploring in the past couple of weeks + notes
A talk by Professor Anna Zachorowska-Mazurkiewicz from Jagiellonian University (Poland) at ASSA 2020 on her paper “Exchange, Redistribution and Reciprocity in the Context of Provisioning Care in Contemporary Economies”
When markets appear in new areas, aspects of the economy that were previously dominated by non-monetary relations seem to become more and more subordinate
Examples of above: Blood donations becoming a market, education changing from life preparation to the development of human capital, pollution fees shifting incentive from care/responsibility to affordability
Europe is experiencing a care crisis: fertility rates are not reaching replacement levels
Modes of exchange (market vs redistribution by state vs reciprocity/gift-giving) need to be brought into balance
Side note: I work for IAFFE, so this was one of our sessions put on in collaboration with URPE
A panel on the future of retirement @ The Wing feat. Rhian Horgan (Kindur), Lindsay Ullman (Umbrella), Jillian Williams (Anthemis), Christine Lagorio-Chafkin (WE ARE THE NERDS)
10,000 baby boomers are retiring every day and the tech industry is finally paying attention
Boomers are the fastest-growing digital adopters and they actually click-through and buy on Facebook ads to try out new products 🤯
Those in need of work are turning to the gig economy in a big way
Adult kids should ask their parents what they want their life to look like in retirement years because it’s really hard for them to ask their kids for help but they may need it (examples: social security is incredibly hard to understand; community is a huge need but hard to find in older age)
Government support is probably going to decrease over our lifetime to the point that anyone under 50 needs to plan to be self-sufficient in retirement
Divorce rates post 50 are going up
Women live longer than their husbands by 4-7 years
Something like 90% of women fire their financial advisor when their husband dies because they were only talking to the husband anyway
Added to reading list: Being Mortal by Atul Gawande (on the limitations and failures of medicine as human beings approach death)
Largest group of people leaving the workforce to take care of aging parents is women in their 50s but hidden cost is years of social security
Medicare doesn’t cover much home-care, so you’ll need cash
Which reminded me of this tidbit from a Quartz report:
"The US Bureau of Labor Statistics recently released their projections of which jobs will grow the fastest from 2016 to 2026. The Bureau expects the job of “personal-care aide” to grow faster than any other, with about 750,000 additional jobs; “home-health aide” is fourth on their list of fastest growers, adding an additional 425,000 jobs to the economy. Both jobs involve assisting people with diseases and disability, usually the elderly, as they continue to live their lives at home—the major difference being that home-health aides can legally offer some medical services. If the Bureau is correct, these jobs would go from 2.3 million of all US jobs in 2016 to about 3.4 million in 2026, accounting for 10% of all jobs created over the next decade.”
A panel on work/life balance in motherhood also @ The Wing, feat. Emma Fitzsimmons (NYT), Joyce Chang, (From the Get Go), Lizzie Skurnick (Writer), Jessica Grose (NYT Parenting)
Premise: Working millennials are remaking their work lives to fit their personal lives
Advice: don’t take yourself out of the running to climb the ladder at work after you become a mom if you don’t want to; this way of thinking is a product of scarcity mindset, which unfortunately plagues a lot of American moms because we have less structural protection in motherhood than moms in some other countries
Thing I noticed: panels & communities like this tend to exclude stay-at-home moms, which, if we valued their days as work, shouldn’t be the case
Other thing I noticed: those in the audience who are working moms + have spouse who is stay-at-home caretaker felt incredibly guilty about it
Side note: Here’s a chart of one woman’s time-spend in the first 6 months of motherhood
Tea with my journalist friend John, who was visiting from Germany
He graciously lent an ear to my tirade about the importance of care work, to which he highly recommended Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber
It’s a discussion of the existence and societal harm of meaningless jobs and has been added to my list
This was a long one! If you stuck around, thank you and please consider forwarding to any other crazies who might enjoy exploring this stuff along with me.
If you have a definition of work that you live by, I’d love to hear it.
And in the spirit of my energetic husband, I’m opening myself again to weekly blind coffee dates so if you want to chat, email me here :)
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Jihii