I try not to be the type of person who divides things into two categories. Still, it is possible to categorize articles giving advice on care work into two categories:
ones I can read without rolling my eyes, and
ones I can't read without rolling my eyes.
Reading about smarm and snark in a Gawker article, Tom Scocca happens to clarify the two types of articles:
"He was giving instruction to aspiring writers—as Eggers had given instruction to literary-minded college students—that was itself aspirational, a guide to the feelings that a person ought to have about being a writer. A writer, the writerer proclaimed, ought to take an interest in ordinary people. I was describing what he actually did."
The connection isn't entirely clear outside of the article and my brain. In essence, smarm is telling us how the world should be, what someone should aspire to. Snark and criticism describes how the world actually is.
Reading about caregiving as "the hardest job I've ever loved" feels a little bit like reading about the exhilaration of running an ultramarathon. I don't run. I do know that extreme runners regularly lose control of their bodily functions from pushing themselves beyond their physical limits.
There's type two fun, the fun that's unpleasant at the time and ultimately gratifying because it pushes you outside of your comfort zone. Then there's pushing yourself way past your comfort zone and past the limits of your body.
I'm sure running an ultramarathon is exhilarating. I don't think anyone is lying to me about it. I just suspect it's one of those instances where it's safer to get those chemicals into your bloodstream by taking drugs rather than the natural way. There are a lot of ways to get high.
There are a lot of ways to learn about yourself and give life meaning that are less likely to lead to financial ruin, destroy relationships, and demolish your sense of self than caregiving.
I describe care work as one of the most essential parts of being human. Still, does it need to be as challenging as it is?
Caregiving, paid or not, obviously doesn't meet David Graeber's criteria of a bullshit job. Aspects of it do. For informal caregivers:
The forms we fill out ahead of appointments, only to fill them out again in the waiting room, only to be asked the same questions by the nurse practitioner, only to do this again for each visit with each medical provider.
Appointment scheduling that regularly causes waits of multiple hours, despite decades of data on the length of time needed for each appointment and machine learning tools (as well as common sense) that could allocate appropriate amounts of time.
Being responsible for obtaining medical test results and distributing them to each individual medical provider, often on a physical CD that needs to be picked up and delivered in person or via fax machine, even in the age of electronic medical records.
Insurance paperwork. Everything about it. I have not filled out an insurance form or dealt with an insurance claim or had to obtain preapproval for anything or paid a medical bill since I moved to Canada. I have not had to call to dispute a claim that was denied after it was preapproved. The countless hours I spent on insurance paperwork in the US were entirely unnecessary.
None of these are type two fun. These aspects of care work are simply pointless obstacles. Sometimes they are the result of a system designed for the ease of what matters (EMRs originated as billing systems and the medical stuff was added on as an afterthought) or by sheer happenstance. Other times this friction was intentionally added in to discourage "overuse" of the system.
The articles on how meaningful care work is that make me roll my eyes tend to focus on the hand holding, the loving whispers, the wisdom shared, the closure. The bullshit parts of the job are erased from the story or twisted into opportunities for heartwarming lessons.
These show up in our support groups when people re-share shared fictional stories: The insurance agent who turns out to be from the same hometown and thus decides to waive a fee and approve a procedure. The town that pulls together to pay for a life saving surgery. The child who makes his friend a wheelchair out of PVC pipe. The person you meet in a waiting room who changes your life forever by sharing a lesson just when you need it most.
These toxic narratives reframe unnecessary obstacles as a critical part of the moral process. We are no longer in a Kafka novel; now we're Job.
To complain, to even hint at the unfathomable awfulness of reality, is to prove ourselves unworthy of the challenge.
If you've ever swiped through a dating site, you'll know an eye rolling number of people claim sarcasm to be their native tongue.
When I was in third grade, my mother was called to meet my teacher to discuss my sarcasm. My mother's reply: "I have no idea where she got that from!"
By the time I was an adult, I had a better sense of when to be sarcastic. Still, I couldn't fully suppress it. It was as if snark seeped out of my pores.
A boss pulled me aside one day to tell me I needed to stop being so sarcastic. I was taken aback, having been so proud of myself for keeping it under wraps. I asked what I'd said. She said I hadn't said anything; I just had a snarky air about me.
I tended to do well so long as I was working under a supervisor whose eye I could catch to exchange a smirk. I needed to acknowledge that none of this mattered. Then I'd get to work.
Those of us who've worked in offices know Office Space and The Office are not farce so much as truth distilled. Snark is the response of the disposessed. It’s a way of pushing back at the ways we’re degraded by those thrilled with their own petty power over us.
I could not turn off my awareness of what aspects of my job mattered and which were bullshit, even if I dutifully checked the boxes and met the arbitrary deadlines and jumped through the hoops.
I wonder if my snark is ultimately a sign of a deep earnestness, a refusal to agree to a reality I don’t share.
I love when someone articulates just why something irks me so much. Scocca has done it for me here:
"The idea of success, or of successfulness, hangs over the whole subject of smarm. It is not true, after all, that the crisis of postmodernity has left us without any functioning system of shared values. What currently fills the space left by the waning or absence of traditional authority, for the most part, is the ideology and logic of the market.
Market reasoning is deeply, essentially smarmy. We live, it insists, in a world that is optimized by the invisible hand. The conditions under which we live have been created by rational needs and preferences, producing an economist Panglossianism: What thrives deserves to thrive, be it Nike or sprawl or the finance industry or Upworthy; what fails deserves to have failed.
We all live our lives, we're told, on these terms. If people really wanted a better world—what you might foolishly regard as a better world—they would have it already."
Living in Canada has shifted my personality so dramatically that there are people who have never heard me say anything sarcastic. Perhaps its the lack of insurance paperwork and the fact that I don't wait three months and then three hours to see my GP. Perhaps it's having a job without the bullshit. Perhaps it’s the discovery that there is another, different world. That there are lots of other, different worlds.
If I go on to develop dementia, it'll be interesting to see if I revert to sarcasm and snark, like immigrants who find themselves only able to communicate in their first language at the end of their life.
In 2018 my new years resolution was to embrace earnestness.
To let go of my protective shell of New York / New Jersey snark and do incredibly uncool things without pretending it was an anthropological experience. I said yes when people invited me to events in church basements and VFW halls. I hung out with people who unironically ate casseroles and learned what spaghetti pie is. I did not roll my eyes or make fun of them in my head or imagine myself to be a visitor from outerspace. I was just there, with them, one of them.
I tried to be open to game nights, even though I still don't understand the difference between games and doing your taxes other than that I actually have a reason to do one of those things.
I've seen the better world that supposedly failed. You don’t even have to cross a border to find it. It's all around us when you look for it.
I'm used to people being confused, and a little horrified, when I try to explain the modern gift economy. Servas predates AirBnB by 58 years, yet the thought of welcoming a stranger into your home for the sheer pleasure of hosting a guest still seems far more radical than renting out a spare bedroom.
When I explained how house sitting works — I stay in someone's home and take care of their pets and plants, no money changes hands — a guy scoffed.
"They should be paying you! You're working for free!"
"Do you feel like you're working when you're hanging out with your dog?"
"Well, then, if you’re not working you should be paying rent!"
"If I weren't staying there they'd need to hire a pet sitter and if they left their house empty their insurance policy would be invalid."
"I don't know which one of you is getting screwed, but one of you is getting screwed."
Ah, yes. The zero sum world. If you're not winning, you're losing. And yet so often people declare that money corrupts and thus care work needs to be a labor of love, unpaid.
Why are we competing, anyway? What does winning even look like?
Smarm is there to comfort the losers. It’s Tom Sawyer convincing us that whitewashing the fence is good for our souls.
Spending 90 minutes on hold with my insurance company, repeating all of someone else's personal information three times, being transferred, doing it again, getting my grandmother on the line to confirm I'm authorized to talk to them, and then getting disconnected. It's the hardest job I've ever loved. It's the duty of a good granddaughter. It's what we owe our elders.
Sure it is. Sure, that's what love in action looks like: the hardest endless series of pointless chores I've ever loved.
Donna just directed me to this piece from her archives on irony and caregiving, which is very much worth reading: https://www.donnathomson.com/2012/11/how-to-live-without-irony-just-ask.html
Cori, nothing sarcastic about this upcoming comment: "you are amazing" in your ability to dissect our world; our population; our perception of life and give them all a place in our beings on which to reflect.