Give your uncompensated labor to the people you love

Permission to waste your time

If I’ve been having any substantive thoughts about community lately you wouldn’t be able to tell from the dazed, foolish look that has been perpetually on my face for the past few weeks in response to the amount of work required to sustain a life embedded in meaningful relationships with other people, which, despite the inescapability of internet discourse parsing the emotional and physical labors of motherhood or the number of canonical literary works depicting the absurdity of negotiating your existence within dysfunctional, bureaucratic institutions, still surprises me regularly, as if I am always confronting it for the first time. 

I have not been doing anything special, and my household has no exceptional needs that make tending to it particularly difficult, which is why it continues to amaze me that I can fill my entire day with nothing but making phone calls to my insurance provider in order to care for my family’s bodily needs or unclogging the sink drain after my children have washed our rice cooker in the bathroom and still go to bed feeling totally expended. It also amazes me how much time I can spend hashing out a misunderstanding with a relative or planning the logistics for a camping trip with friends that turns out to be only half as long as the time spent preparing for it, and how in the end, I usually feel that I still could had invested a few more hours in these conversations. 

The amount of work it takes to sustain a household, and a household connected to community, has been recently clarified for me because my husband and I work in education and we both took a summer vacation this year, which theoretically gave us unlimited time to do whatever we wanted. In previous summers one or both of us had taught summer school, or we had been in jobs that didn’t adhere to the academic calendar, so it felt unpleasant but natural to view the tasks of daily life—sifting through medical bills, making phone calls to relatives, babysitting the neighbor’s grandchildren, buying wedding gifts for friends—as harried afterthoughts to the real work of the day, which happened in our places of employment, and for which we were compensated. 

There’s no way to talk about relationships, work, and households without talking about how accustomed most of us are to seeing money as the most indisputable validation that we have used our time well. Our educations are worthwhile because they are investments into our future, by which we mean they can help us meet a baseline level of employability so that we can someday get paid. Our vocations are meaningful, hopefully, but we wouldn’t devote so many hours to them if we were doing them for free. Even those of us who regularly give time to activities we love, such as writing, and net close to zero dollars, probably experience a surge of relief whenever we get a piece commissioned because the labor we perform seems most real and legitimate when it yields cash. 

This is why I have looked surprised all summer. No one pays you to live alongside your friends and family, but being with them can feel identical to being at work. I don’t think this is always a function of problematic gender roles or toxic expectations. Even members of an egalitarian household blessed with the healthiest relational dynamics can still get entangled in a six hour long call with an insurance company about an alleged error in the paperwork they completed on behalf of a family member that they must now correct through a Byzantine procedure facilitated via phone tree. I think caring about other people, and living together within unwieldy human institutions, is innately laborious, and this fact is only surprising because these activities are not classified as tasks we get paid for, but still require a comparable level of attentiveness and effort. 

If there is a Public Enemy No. 1 operating to sabotage human intimacy, my bet is on capitalism. I’ll be frank: there are days when it feels like a straight up affront to realize how many unpaid hours I have spent ensuring that we can exist as a group of people who are sheltered, who are recipients of adequate medical care, and who are spending a reasonable amount of time with our friends and relatives. Even without the deserved critiques of capitalism’s effect on the institutions that make communal life possible, the microcosm of my own mind already testifies to the corrosiveness of a system centered around the acquisition of money. If the activity is effortful, if it requires ingenuity, if it feels, in telling phrases, “taxing” or “expensive,” something must be wrong if I am doing it for free. It is not always evident, but whenever I am with people I love and feeling a twinge of irritation, if I trace the feeling back to its source it is usually springing from the fear that our time together is not accomplishing anything, by which I mean our time is not helping us generate the things capitalism requires us to. 

I’ve been looking at recent critiques of capitalism that focus on the ways it constrains our imaginations, and consequently our decision making and communal behaviors. Berkeley sociologist Carolyn Chen’s Work Pray Code argues that Silicon Valley tech giants, by co-opting the language and practices of religious devotion, have created a sea change in how people approach their jobs. Words like “purpose,” “calling,” “values aligned,” which were used almost exclusively in spiritual contexts a few generations ago, have become de rigueur in how people describe their workplace, and predictive of how much they will sacrifice on its behalf. Disciplines like meditation, or practices like silent retreats, have become funded by corporations with the intention of honing their employees' focus, not towards an intangible ideal, but towards the kind of mental acuity that can produce revenue. 

In The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff, the academic and activist, describes our most urgent battle as a fight against tech firms attempting to monetize the “surplus” of our future choices: now that the competition for physical resources has drawn to a close, the next frontier of capitalism is a competition for human behavior, in which corporations like Google and Meta will survive based on their ability to harvest information about their users and shape, via algorithm, what these users will desire and consume. What intrigues and troubles me about both texts is how accurately they describe my individual experience of the systemic problems they study. I do feel the compulsion to sacrifice on behalf of work that I am not only compensated for, but associate with purposefulness. I do sense the horizon of my imagination narrowing over time, as I am funneled into suggested stories and product recommendations that seem, when I am not vigilant, as ideas and objects worth laboring for. 

To create resistance on a small scale, which does not negate the need for systemic change but is still meaningful, and experienced on a visceral level by the people around me, I think about a conversation I had with my brother in law when we were in that embryonic phase of inventing ourselves as office workers after years spent pinging around college campuses. People always say they are going to work hard now so they can earn enough money to enjoy life with their friends and family later, he said, probably in response to my fretting about needing to get more work done, but you already have a life with your friends and family. If you want, you can enjoy them right now. I mentally revisit this conversation whenever I need to remember that the services I perform for free are the ones I am supposedly working for the right to administer, and that applying myself to the tasks involved in shoring up a household, an extended family, a network of friends is the labor I most want to do, which, when I am clearheaded, I experience as a pleasure.

The opposite of a colonized imagination telescoping towards a future of endless acquisition and consumption is, arguably, full attention given to the people in front of you. Absorption in the conversation. Responsiveness to the question. Givenness to the sensation. Excessive care to what will produce nothing of apparent value. Willful ignorance of the demands that you sense but do not surrender to. Days, hours, poured out as luxuries, gifts. Labor given to people who can never pay you back. An understanding that these tasks have an immeasurable value that will not register on any market. Summer vacation is over tomorrow, and when people ask what I did with my time off I will probably say “nothing” and mean it as a boast.