Emotional Labor
Anna put up a post about emotional labor earlier today and reading it I had a response which was somewhat frustrated--on the one hand, the notion that emotional labor is real labor is SUPER OBVIOUS and the idea that it's distributed in gendered ways is also super obvious and a big problem. I want that labor to be acknowledged and reciprocated. However in a sense, I also want that labor to be economized. I'm not that good at emotional labor. I try to engage in it, and I can do things like pay and manage my bills, do laundry, cook, call my parents on their birthdays, remember my roommates' allergies, etc., but there are huge swaths that I struggle with. In particular something that bothers me (not just in this instance but largely in related instances) is that emotional labor usually isn't well documented. If I want to know how to take care of my life, there isn't a big master list of everything I need to take care of. This sort of thing especially bothers me in legal situations, since there are obviously big consequences but I have no idea where I would even find an ACTUALLY COMPLETE list of to-dos when starting a business, for example. But it primarily affects me in emotional labor contexts, where there are things like "keeping a well-stocked pantry" that I don't really understand how to understand, or setting up a well-furnished room (the importance of having trash cans in bathrooms, for example, wasn't something that really hit me until my latest place).
All that said, there's still a strong element of the obligatory nature of emotional labor that bothers me. I don't want Anna to decide what's for dinner, make dinner, and clean up afterward without me contributing. That's fucking terrible and a huge cost and she shouldn't have to bear that! But I also don't want for her to decide what's for dinner, start making it, then have the expectation that I will contribute in a certain way at a certain level, and to still feel that because I wasn't voluntarily involved in the process but brought in by her that I'm not contributing. In that situation, I feel like I'm being coerced into giving up my emotional labor in the same toxic process that she's caught up in all the time. One way out of this is to order take out or to go out more often, which actually I'm very happy with. When I was eating at work and getting 10+ catered meals per week I was ecstatic about the situation. And obviously there's emotional labor going on there, but the people doing it are getting paid for it and it's more efficient since there's less face-to-face interactions of pleasantness and cooking economies of scale. This doesn't interact well with the fact that service workers are grossly underpaid but that's one of the reasons that I support higher minimum wages (or much better yet basic income).
There's also a thread of debate regarding how necessary emotional labor is. The standard line on one side is that all of it is absolutely necessary and on the other side that all of it is optional. But these are both obviously false. Things like ordering out or hiring a cleaning service, or letting many smaller relationships go by the wayside, are all real possibilities. And depending on specific circumstances some points are more or less important. And people have very different preferences--for example, I have no issue living out of a suitcase in terms of clothing organization for months on end, whereas Anna unpacks carefully even for weekend-long hotel stays. And how often and to what level different areas of the house should be cleaned is very much a matter of preference. I'd love to see good tools for aggregating different people's preferences and distributing emotional labor more equitably, but this isn't really the core of the point I want to make here.
The point is that while I often feel that much unnecessary emotional labor has been pushed forward and that actually dropping these tasks is a part of a reasonable path to reform in terms of how we organize our society, there is a lot of emotional labor that can't be dropped.
I'm probably somewhat unusual in how little I care about my family. I'm not very close to them, despite the fact that I like my parents a lot, and I don't put that much effort into keeping in touch with them (though I do call them and interact with them mostly on my own; plus Anna has a weekly phone alarm to tell me to call my dad. I should move that to my phone actually.) And for the most part I take care of myself (see: paying bills and cooking and doing laundry myself above) and I trust them to take care of themselves. But... that's not entirely true. I definitely need more from them than I'm getting right now. And because I've been lax about putting in the effort to stay connected, I often don't feel close enough to ask them for the sort of help that I need navigating the bureaucracies of life.
And more important, there are a couple of people who could easily get left out of my life entirely if I let them. My dad and my grandmother in particular, are not great about staying forcefully in contact with me and I know they care a lot about hearing from me and miss me when I don't talk to them for a while. Because I'm an adult, I set up a repeating google calendar event to call my grandmother once a month. Hopefully that will help. It's frustrating, because it still feels like a cost I'm bearing which I have no option to duck out from--but I guess the answer is that I do have that option. It's just a shitty option. Because not being part of the emotional economy means the emotional world falling apart. And if I'm being honest, my emotional world HAS been falling apart.
This is frustrating for me because I know that I'm actually pretty good at emotional labor, given that I'm a dude. I do actually hit my friends up out of the blue. And then they don't respond. And it kind of kills me. And I just don't know what to do about it.
Having been out of work for a couple of weeks, I legitimately feel like I'm dying. Like my heart just feels like it's falling sometimes, like in falling dreams. It's terrible not seeing people.
This has turned much more rambly and less purposeful than it started, but I feel like it's been productive anyway. So I'm posting.
All that said, there's still a strong element of the obligatory nature of emotional labor that bothers me. I don't want Anna to decide what's for dinner, make dinner, and clean up afterward without me contributing. That's fucking terrible and a huge cost and she shouldn't have to bear that! But I also don't want for her to decide what's for dinner, start making it, then have the expectation that I will contribute in a certain way at a certain level, and to still feel that because I wasn't voluntarily involved in the process but brought in by her that I'm not contributing. In that situation, I feel like I'm being coerced into giving up my emotional labor in the same toxic process that she's caught up in all the time. One way out of this is to order take out or to go out more often, which actually I'm very happy with. When I was eating at work and getting 10+ catered meals per week I was ecstatic about the situation. And obviously there's emotional labor going on there, but the people doing it are getting paid for it and it's more efficient since there's less face-to-face interactions of pleasantness and cooking economies of scale. This doesn't interact well with the fact that service workers are grossly underpaid but that's one of the reasons that I support higher minimum wages (or much better yet basic income).
There's also a thread of debate regarding how necessary emotional labor is. The standard line on one side is that all of it is absolutely necessary and on the other side that all of it is optional. But these are both obviously false. Things like ordering out or hiring a cleaning service, or letting many smaller relationships go by the wayside, are all real possibilities. And depending on specific circumstances some points are more or less important. And people have very different preferences--for example, I have no issue living out of a suitcase in terms of clothing organization for months on end, whereas Anna unpacks carefully even for weekend-long hotel stays. And how often and to what level different areas of the house should be cleaned is very much a matter of preference. I'd love to see good tools for aggregating different people's preferences and distributing emotional labor more equitably, but this isn't really the core of the point I want to make here.
The point is that while I often feel that much unnecessary emotional labor has been pushed forward and that actually dropping these tasks is a part of a reasonable path to reform in terms of how we organize our society, there is a lot of emotional labor that can't be dropped.
I'm probably somewhat unusual in how little I care about my family. I'm not very close to them, despite the fact that I like my parents a lot, and I don't put that much effort into keeping in touch with them (though I do call them and interact with them mostly on my own; plus Anna has a weekly phone alarm to tell me to call my dad. I should move that to my phone actually.) And for the most part I take care of myself (see: paying bills and cooking and doing laundry myself above) and I trust them to take care of themselves. But... that's not entirely true. I definitely need more from them than I'm getting right now. And because I've been lax about putting in the effort to stay connected, I often don't feel close enough to ask them for the sort of help that I need navigating the bureaucracies of life.
And more important, there are a couple of people who could easily get left out of my life entirely if I let them. My dad and my grandmother in particular, are not great about staying forcefully in contact with me and I know they care a lot about hearing from me and miss me when I don't talk to them for a while. Because I'm an adult, I set up a repeating google calendar event to call my grandmother once a month. Hopefully that will help. It's frustrating, because it still feels like a cost I'm bearing which I have no option to duck out from--but I guess the answer is that I do have that option. It's just a shitty option. Because not being part of the emotional economy means the emotional world falling apart. And if I'm being honest, my emotional world HAS been falling apart.
This is frustrating for me because I know that I'm actually pretty good at emotional labor, given that I'm a dude. I do actually hit my friends up out of the blue. And then they don't respond. And it kind of kills me. And I just don't know what to do about it.
Having been out of work for a couple of weeks, I legitimately feel like I'm dying. Like my heart just feels like it's falling sometimes, like in falling dreams. It's terrible not seeing people.
This has turned much more rambly and less purposeful than it started, but I feel like it's been productive anyway. So I'm posting.