Also suggests burnout only "counts" if you're parenting. And normalizes burnout for parents. Briggs' How All Politics Became Reproductive Politics on this trap. twitter.com/annehelen/stat
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Care work doesn't begin and end with parenting either. As a 37yo millennial not parenting, I still have non-waged kinkeeping that is chronically time-starved.
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Off the top of my head, kinkeeping activities beyond parenting:
*Remembering/celebrating family & friends' birthdays, holidays, etc.
*Caring for an ill spouse
*Caring for an ill parent or sibling
*Caring for companion animals
*Feeding, exercising, caring for your own body
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*Writing letters, emails, to long-distance friends and family
*Meeting friends and family for coffee dates
*Participating in community life (church, neighborhood, volunteer orgs.)
*Participating in political life
*Creative pursuits that make the world a more beautiful place
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+ Feminist activists have been pointing out at least since the mid-20th century that when people who previously did unpaid kinkeeping labor (women, teenage daughters, spinsters, elders) are pushed into wagework the need for that labor doesn't disappear. +
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+ You either have to pay someone to do this work, or you do it yourself as "second shift" work (burnout), or -- because of burnout and a literal lack of time -- it doesn't get done.
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Just read 's newsletter on writing the burnout piece, which is all I could face today (So much irony in feeling too burned out to read about burnout...). Some lateral thoughts that bubbled up. +
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In the newsletter she quotes someone citing Chomsky on "efficiency" for business = extra labor for customers. I haven't read the Chomsky analysis but I recall a great example of this presented in terms of retirement and pensions vs. 401(k) model. +
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Pensions make the work of investing the responsibility of the company rather than the employee. You work, you retire, you get a set amount from your employer. You don't need to make many complex high stakes choices to ensure the money is there for you. +
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In the 401(k) model, the employee is responsible for ongoing, complex financial management. Most of us do not have expertise in this area, or money to pay independent experts, but WE are responsible and shoulder the risk even when we struggle to be "good" savers. +
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This shouldering of responsibility and risk -- packaged for us as freedom of choice across many areas of life -- means in practice that human rights become contingent on our ability to become experts in navigating countless complex systems. +
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If we don't have money to outsource the labor of making informed, meaningful choices we are in practice held responsible for "choices" that were not, in fact, in our ability to actively make. +
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(*inserts obvious all caps footnote that along every vector the existing inequalities of race, class, gender, health, education, immigration status, disability, etc both create and amplify this responsibility trap*)
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On a less meta level than the risk/responsibility trap and its violation of fundamental human rights (YOU HEARD ME) and I experience decision fatigue so frequently we have a short-hand for it: "ferret shock". +
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If we're out running errands or standing in the grocery aisle and one of us asks the other to make a decision, that person often says "I"m ferret shocking" and the asker knows exactly what they're talking about and we go home. +
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Another thing the burnout discussion is reminding me of it 's Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters (2007), my own reaction to it at the time of its publication, and the limits of countercultural lifeways.
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For those who haven't read it, the nutshell argument was/is that for (white, middle-class, aspirational) women of my age cohort (b. 1981) had learned we could/should strive for perfection and it was killing us. When I read it, I didn't see myself in this narrative. +
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I *knew* the narrative, sure, but I had also been insulated from it in a variety of ways leading from my parents' own countercultural decision to let me opt out of formal schooling until college, and do college extremely part-time as a commuter. +
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Because I never socialized intensely with my cohort or with people drilling aspirational messaging into my cohort, I had some measure of distance from that narrative. I didn't feel like a failure for opting out of many things my peers felt were obligatory. +
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(There's a complicated side narrative here connected to queer identity, chronic illness, and religious subcultures but that's for another thread.) +
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But the thing about structurally-created burnout is that you CANNOT opt out as a single person or even, in many cases, as a subculture or community of crunchy-granola-hippie types (I'm speaking of myself here, with a mixture of mild self-parody and entirely sincere commitment). +
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The same year Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters came out I moved to Boston for grad school and was structurally forced into a number of systems (graduate school, student loan debt, resume building, the cost of living where I attended school and worked etc.) that create burnout. +
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For a lot of that first year, I felt like an extreme failure for having been unable to find a countercultural alternative to the cross country move --> graduate school --> librarianship path to adulting. +
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I knew that aspects of the systems I was becoming embedded within were actively toxic to me. In the past (through social privilege and intensely positive family support) I had been able to create loopholes for myself. +
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But loopholes don't create long-term structural change; they don't fix the problem that created the need for the loophole. And even for the people (like me) who had the resources to create them, they are typically temporary. +
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What I'm groping toward here is that burnout gets spun as an individual mental-health, self-help problem, when burnout is a collective and structural problem. It's been baked into a system that capitalizes (literally!) our burnout.
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That doesn't mean subcultural attempts to address and assuage burnout are pointless -- I would argue based on my own experience and my historical research that such subcultural attempts are vital in demonstrating that burnout is historically created and change is possible.
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It occurred to me over dinner how deeply my reflections here are shaped by a reproductive justice framework, esp. about the human rights problems created by "choice" rhetoric. So a shout out to those scholars. Go read this intro:
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I woke up this morning thinking that Freeman's The Tyranny of Structurelessness is also informative here: jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny
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The essay's basic point is all groups have a structure. Either the structure is explicit, rulebound, with pathways of power and accountability or the structure is denied, shadowy, with no accountability for those who gain power. (Sound familiar?)
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The language of libertarian freedom of choice so beloved by the GOP and many on left too becomes the tyranny of structurelessness. We technically all have "choices" ... But we don't all have the power to meaningfully take advantage of those choices.
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