#82: home as a care studio
organizing the metaphor
Good morning,
As I’ve been deep in the back-end of The Library, I’ve been finding new ways to approach writing about the subjects I care most about—both to anchor into themes and also to deepen my own understanding of the subject matter I’m curious about. I often write about care—but lately, I’ve been feeling like I need to define my thesis on the subject. Writing can become a bit circular if you don’t draw a map.
For me, that map begins at home.
As I work on a book that examines together my own fertility experience and the invisible work that happens during life’s liminal phases, again and again I have encountered texts and moments that draw me back to the power of home. Home is a site of so many things. And yet, we rarely talk about it.
I remember having a conversation with a friend once and asking her a string of questions about how she approached her home life—laundry, time management, relationships with extended family, sharing an office with a partner in a totally different industry, bringing children into political awareness. After engaging for a while, she paused and said, “Isn’t this just the stuff everyone just does? What’s there to talk about?”
Still new to the world of feminist economics, I wasn’t able to answer her except to say, It matters.
But then I began to understand what I was feeling: Even though the economic arguments for valuing domestic labor are increasingly clear, the cultural ones still feel a bit murky. It matters how we talk about home because the way we talk shapes the way we live.
And so, since then, I’ve been taking a lot of notes. It’s become kind of an obsession. On a personal level, examining the cultural impacts of care at home has helped me make thoughtful decisions about how I structure my days and my own home.
But as a journalist and writer, I’ve also realized I need a map of the world that starts somewhere inside—because every social system outside the home I know of is crumbling or confusing me.
Which brings me to today’s question.
What if we treated home not just as a site of invisible labor but as a studio?
If viewed as a studio, home is not just a backdrop to life. It’s a place of creation—something that runs on a system whose job is to produce work that affects other systems: cultural, emotional, economic, even political.
In this way, home is a place to design, a place begging for greater attention. A place from which the ripple effects of intention could (and have) built movements.
As I’ve been digging into the work of thinkers who have blown open incredible conversations about this way of seeing home, I’ve been collecting notes and insights that seem to organize themselves into a longer term study. Here are the themes I am most interested in:
Home as a site of resistance
Home as a site of recovery
Home as a site of self-trust
Home as a site of ritual and rhythm
Home as a site of creative work
Home as a site of emotional labor
Home as a site of cultural transmission
Home as a site of system design
Home as a site of civic preparation
Home as a site of social reproduction
aI’ve started to build research modules for each of these, which I’ll be publishing in The Library as I go. It’s a slow, nonlinear, very satisfying way to organize inquiry. I hope you’ll enjoy exploring this shelf with me.
For today, and in the spirit of Mother’s Day this past weekend, I’ll leave you with these words from Daisaku Ikeda, which offer a vision that reminds me of what I aspire to model at home:
“Children remember all their lives mothers who are always optimistic and generous towards society and the community and who live creatively. That kind of behavior provides the finest possible nourishment for learning how to build a happy home life.”
Happy Monday,
Jihii
P.S. This month, I’ve been doing a lot of creative housekeeping—pulling threads together into shelves, giving each inquiry its own room to breathe. Next week I’ll share the beginning of another shelf: Companion Machines, a series on how we build and think alongside tools that think with us. Most essays will remain free, but if you’d like to support this work, you can go paid here.