One of the things that’s stuck with me from my freshman year of high school was our guidance counselor, who must have been leading some sort of workshop, encouraging us to actively manage our emotions. A stout woman keen on plaid skirt suits, she stood in front of our class and told us about a friend of hers, someone we were clearly meant to emulate, who scheduled time in her day to cry.
I imagined a businesswoman, someone successful enough to have an office with actual walls, noting in her schedule that it was time to cry. Then, when her time was up, pulling herself back together and continuing with her day. It struck me as absurd that she could regulate her emotions so well and absurd to consider that a good thing.
I thought of this while reading about the daily routine videos that proliferate on TikTok.
The routines are both highly personal and one-size-fits-all, with an odd exchange between intimacy and impersonality; someone invites you into her day, but mostly to show you how yours might be lived better.
Those of us who aren’t on TikTok have surely seen our share of articles on the daily routines of people we’re supposed to want to be like. Business magazines offer up the morning routines of CEOs. Popular psychology books offer up details of the daily lives of successful people, implying that if we emulate their daily habits we’ll also become rich and powerful. We learn what scientists eat for breakfast, what time they wake up, and how they stay fit. My inbox suggests I might be the last woman on earth to not have a skincare routine and apparently this is something I desperately need to rectify.
Architecture isn’t inherently aspirational, but a lot of it is more aspirational than practical. Renderings depict an idealized world, complete with the types of people we imagine inhabiting it.
We don’t build housing for the 14% of Americans who have limited mobility. We build housing based on how architects, mortgage lenders, and government bureaucrats want us to live — and who they want us to be. The suburbs did not emerge through a grassroots effort based on the desires of the people. If the government had wanted us to live in modular highrises we would have gotten those.
Reston, Virginia was conceived by Robert E. Simon as a place where people could remain throughout their lives. It would do this by providing a range of home types in order to meet changing needs. Families grow, children leave home, people grow frail. Not every life follows this pattern. All of us face changes through our lives. Appropriate housing eases those shifts. That’s not how it was built because that was an idea too radical for the 1960s.
America does not like acknowledging that people have different needs and those needs change over time. By not building homes for people with disabilities, we push them to the fringes. Intentionally or by oversight, it’s what happens. It’s easy to become home bound in the types of housing common in North America. We could integrate universal design with the building code, but we do not. Instead, we rely on individuals to enforce the law.
It’s fun to imagine building an ideal community. I loved Sim City when I was in middle school. I wonder what city services are included in the plans these days. Who are we building these communities for? Who do we leave out?
I have to confess that I find mood boards depressing. I understand that other people find the notes they pin to the mirror and the fridge inspiring. They can also seem like physical manifestation of a quiet self loathing, of the belief that who they are now is not enough. It’s hard to see someone else having to pound it into their head through repetition that they’re deserving. It’s hard to see the struggle to force yourself into being someone else, being someone better.
Striving for continual improvement, perpetual discontent. Potayto, potahto.
Of course, we all straddle that paradox. To both accept ourselves exactly as we are and seek to be better. To celebrate this reality as we try to change the world we live in.
These routines we’re sold seem aspirational. They don’t even try to convince us that this is really the way other people live. The photos are so obviously staged, the suggestions so clearly preposterous.
An article I read the other day advised me to “throw a handful of frozen spinach” into an omlette to add vegetables to my diet, making it clear the author (and editor!) had never encountered actual frozen spinach. And of course, because celebrities have personal assistants, personal chefs, housekeepers, and social media managers taking care of these details. What works for them has no relevance to my life.
I wondered if anyone schedules their lives down to the minute. Maybe astronauts?
It was Mary Roach’s writing that made me realize how regimented life in space was. Do astronauts actually carry out those impossible seeming schedules that NASA assigns them? Does it work well enough that they live like that at home? Why are we so enamored of the idea of scheduling our lives so strictly?
I reached out to my go-to NASA historian, Frank O’Brien, who confirmed that yes, NASA originally scheduled things down to the minute. However, “That didn’t work so well.”
Tasks are now given general time allocations and information about their priority. Certain measurements and photographs might need to happen at a very specific moment in time. Other things can happen when they happen.
If you’ve worked as as a health aid or personal care attendant for a corporation, you’ve been scheduled down to the minute. Perhaps you weren’t assigned a schedule for the day. Instead there are time values assigned for each type of task — transfers, bathing someone, clipping toe nails, preparing meals, feeding someone — and any time you spend beyond this amount is the equivalent of volunteering because you aren’t paid for it. Kindness is a job requirement, but it’s to be done on your own time.
I asked two high school classmates if they remembered our guidance counselor’s advice. I didn’t reach out to poll people, which would have been easy enough with social media. I just asked the two people I already talk to on most days, who are subjected to whatever is bouncing around my brain.
The one who remembered agreed that it was a bit dystopian. However, it was also helpful advice for the reality we were being prepared for. Men with big feelings are passionate. Women with big feelings are ill equipped for the workforce.
We were being given instructions on how to survive in a world that demands we turn our emotions off. Emotions can’t be turned off, though. So instead she suggested we schedule them.
The more anxious I am, the neater my apartment becomes and the more strictly I adhere to a routine. I don’t think I’m unique in imposing the will of a dictator in my kitchen when key aspects of my life feel out of my control. As Sophie Haigney writes:
It is hard not to think of these routines, performed in isolation for a wide audience, as people’s attempts to manage anxiety by bending time to their will. They reflect a desire for a world in which we can impose the perfect routine with permanence.
The Walrus has a beautiful peace on the romance of interdependence.
If you’ve been meaning to read No Bad Parts and haven’t gotten around to it, Heather Havrilesky sums it up for you.
I’ve described attention as a resource and made economic arguments for the importance of care plenty of times, so this reminder from LM Sacasas was a helpful nudge to see how capitalism has skewed my view of the world.
I’ve often described our library as a “longform for care work,” so I’m sad to see that longform is no longer going to be curating articles from around the web. I appreciate the work they’ve done over the years and how much they’ve inspired me.
I know not many of us are making introductions these days. I’m still passing along this advice from the Better Allies newsletter:
Introduce people by their expertise
Earlier this week on Twitter, I spotted this tip from Aubrey Blanche, who leads Equitable Design, Product & People at CultureAmp:
“#Equity at work tip. Always introduce marginalized people by what they lead and not what they do.Ex: I’d love to introduce my teammate NAME, who leads [organizing applications | ERG operations | new business development | etc.]. They can help you with THING.”
What a respectful way to help reinforce someone’s credibility. And if you’re introducing someone who doesn’t have lead responsibility, describe their expertise instead. All it takes is a simple “I’m introducing you to NAME, who is the expert on that topic.”
One of the things I like about reference systems is the nudge it gives me to put into words what I appreciate about someone else. I like the idea of viewing each introduction I make as an opportunity to appreciate how brilliant and generous the people in my life are. It’s even better to be able to share that with other people. Introductions are a tiny way to shift the framework.