Lifelines
Claire got home from the vet clinic and said work felt good this morning. I said it did for me too. And then I started thinking about what work even is.
There’s the realm of sensation and feeling - that’s where mostly animals and plants live. Then there’s abstract thinking, which lets you do the thing we call work. Some sort of anti-entropy thing.
Work comes from family, I think. The most basic thing a family does is watchdog - one person freaks out, the others freak out, and you’re safe. Then there’s the food thing, the stable food systems. In the west it’s insane how it works - I’ve never had to think about where food was going to come from. That part of existence was just always there. Water too, especially if you’re somewhere without easy freshwater access.
So work is about staving off these types of entropy. The most valuable work saves a life, maybe.
But then there’s the other kind. If you have a big ego and you get a bunch of people to build you a pyramid, you take care of their food needs - beer and pizza every night - but you’re making a dead thing. Versus actual meaningful work, which helps everyone’s spirits keep going.
I’ve been thinking about this in terms of life-years. My mum and dad gave me a certain number of life-years by taking care of everything. Now I’m a grown-up, I give and take through consensual arrangements. Before I was 36, I was a slave. Me and Claire give it to each other for life now - we’re each other’s primary lifeline.
Maybe lifeline is better than life-years. A line of life flowing between people. With a topology that changes over your life:
- Childhood: Mostly receiving. Parents pour life-years into you. Simple topology - one or two sources flowing in.
- Slavery: Giving life-years to arrangements you didn’t consent to. The line is being extracted, not exchanged.
- Marriage: Mutual lifeline. Reciprocal. A loop.
- Work: You trade some life-years to an employer, get money, convert it to food and shelter. The question is whether the work also creates lifeline for others, or just extracts.
I love Graeber. Bullshit Jobs was life-changing for me, even though I kept doing bullshit jobs for probably a decade after reading it.
I wonder if anyone’s done an anthropological study of care-lifeline networks across different societies. Different ways of organizing. The griftiness of the western one would be fun to visualize:
- Nodes are people
- Edges are lifeline flows (food, shelter, attention, safety)
- Edge thickness = life-years flowing
- Color = consensual vs extracted
The western nuclear family + wage labor setup would look like isolated little dyads connected to big corporate nodes sucking life out. Almost no horizontal community connections. Versus something more webbed and distributed.
My new job helps the construction industry make houses out of wood. Houses help people not turn into mush. That feels like real lifeline work. Other jobs I’ve had have been more of a grift.
Thinking out loud on a Sunday afternoon while Claire’s in the shower.