thesaddestchorusgirlintheworld:
The thing that always gets me is how we still frame the idea of trying to be a good caring person as a huge laborious inconvenient inherent sacrifice instead of deeply comforting and rewarding and beneficial to one’s own self and a fundamental human need. Like joke really is on us, the loneliness of modern life is not mysterious.
Emotional labour is laborious when you don’t get back what you put out into the world. Like yeah, “it is in your self-interest to find a way to be very tender“ and there are personal rewards to being a caring person. That doesn’t mean you can’t expect it back from other people. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be careful about spending your emotional energy on people who will do the same for you (and have bothered to equip themselves with the skills to care for you sensitively and deeply).
I’d love to live in a context where I could expect care from ALL the people around me as a fundamental human right. Until then, ‘emotional labour’ is a useful concept for me.
I don’t think OP is suggesting that you can’t or shouldn’t expect emotional labour back from others, nor should you exhaust yourself caring for others. I think they’re intervening in the discourse around emotional labour that constructs it in really transactional terms and therefore often ignores the personal (and community/social) benefits that emerge when we care for others.
Like, the idea that “it’s in your self-interest to find a way to very tender” is, to me, about the cost to the self when you close yourself off in various ways – to vulnerability, to receiving tenderness, to empathy, to being hurt etc.
When I close myself off to those things – and when I am closed off to the possibility of caring for others – it does damage to me. I lose something of who I want to be in those moments. Not only that, in closing myself off to pain and vulnerability, I reduce my capacity for experiencing love and joy. So yeah, I … like, obviously don’t subscribe to the idea that you should only help others when there is a benefit to the self, but these are some of my thoughts around that quote (and why I have it as my blog header!).
Obviously context is important, and obviously we don’t live in a perfect world. But sometimes, idk, it’s like … interesting to think about how we collectively have the ability to preconfigure the kind of world in which we want to live, in how we relate to each other. If I want to experience community, I have to build it. I build community by expending labour – and I don’t subscribe to a transactional understanding of reciprocity where output and input are measured or measurable.
You know how making music is fun, nourishing and something many of us do spontaneously because it brings us and others joy?
But making music in a restaurant every day to pay the rent is exhausting, annoying and can feel like selling your soul? And when you get home from work you don’t want to make any music anymore because work sucked the joy out of it?
Caring is just like that.
If it feels rewarding, it’s because we want to be doing it. If it feels like ‘labor’, it’s because it’s done out of pressure, coercion or social expectation and because we’re drained beyond the point where it feels good.
If all care feels like ‘emotional labor’ it is because you are so exploited that everything feels like too much. The system has sucked the joy out of your acts of caring the way it can suck the joy out of making music.
Also, all activities feel less fullfilling if we’re doing them after 8 hours of work because at that point we’re so exhausted that everything is too much.
That ‘inherently rewarding activity’ vs ‘draining activity that I need to be compensated for’ is what capitalism does to many activities, how it takes the joy out of our life and enstranges us from our own actions.
QueerAnarchism 