I have an email job, which is why I decided putz a little, read this, and start working half an hour late today. There's some unavoidable ennui that comes with these jobs, but all in all, it could be a heck of a lot worse.
My current job is a pleasing mixture of email job and regular job, in a middle school dean's office.
I have been largely successful at work by establishing the persona of a guy willing to speedrun through the email chain-touching base-knock out this online training-action plan meeting side of things in order to focus on the nuts and bolts of the actual job of meeting with kids face to face and providing them with positive reinforcement.
My admin bosses are aware I find their world of high intensity/low impact meetings and crafting official guidance memos and using the right dialect to describe normal interactions to be silly and incomprehensible, but I make their lives easier across a broad spectrum of tasks so my cheerful "The inane bullshit guidance that district is pushing down to us is wishful thinking and documenting every single interaction with kids and their parents while I put it into effect is a pointless time sink, but if it helps flip slides from red to green, then fuck it I get paid the same" attitude is tolerated.
Gets you out of the house/apoartment and into a classroom where you learn where you socialize where you stumble andost importantly where you grow (up). It can help vyou find your way. It can lead you in so many directions. Post college you enter the world market place where you find your way thru life.
Enjoy the ride. The above also applies to trade schools.
That's true of anybody who doesn't live in their parents' basement.
A while ago I postulated a correlation between income and the likelihood of becoming a mass shooter. Why? Because holding down a job requires social skills for the vast majority of jobs, college educated or not. Failure to acquire and exercise those skills almost always ends up resulting in loss of work or confinement to lower paying professions and correlated with that is social isolation.
The concept of the email job helps me anchor a culturally unacceptable question that bugs me: why do women (and women seem to many/most? of these jobs) prioritize these kinds of jobs over staying home with children? I understand why someone with a burning passion for her work as a lawyer or doctor or rocket scientist really values the work and the intellectual challenge. And of course I understand that there are financial challenges for many: single mothers and breadwinners and caretakers of elderly parents and minimum wage earners etc cannot choose staying home over work. But many women working email jobs DO seem to derive their identity from *having* a job, even if the job itself is less satisfying than the alternative. As if sending emails and organizing calendars and attending meetings is somehow sticking it to the patriarchy.
Well, that's a very big question with long answers, but one thing I think is definitely true is that many women need to have the personal financial security to leave their boyfriend/husband to feel safe.
Yes, I should have added them to the middle section. And of course we can all derive satisfaction from earning money and being part of a team etc..
But I'm thinking about the many women who struggle enormously with the challenge of paying for day care and managing schedules and sick kids and doctor appointments and struggle with their feelings of conflict about *not wanting* to go back to work. Much of the conversation about all of this is driven by people with the kinds of jobs you opened this post with--people with creative, exciting work. Last week someone wrote in to Emily Oster's Substack asking for advice because she felt guilty that she was unhappy to return to work and leave her baby at home. I thought it was crazy to write to Oster about this! That woman has a fabulous career. Of course she wants to find a balance! What makes sense for HER perhaps does not make sense for the "email job" holders.
Yes and that leaves 40 weeks a year. And then decades as a stay at home mom with no kids.
It was much easier when families were larger and a woman not working was more the norm. There was a whole social world built around it. But that’s far less of the case these days and being an empty nester with no job and no prospects with decades left to life is very hard on a lot of women.
I also think we forget that people in the past lived much materially poorer lives than we do now. People lived in conditions that modern individuals wouldn't tolerate (not saying this is a bad thing at all, btw). A two-earner family allows you to have more money and nicer stuff. Women in the past may very well have jumped at the opportunity if they got the chance!
The standard economic explanation is that wage increases have drawn women into the workforce, such that some (but not all) stand to make more money with a job than they would save by staying home and performing the majority of childcare duties. Two-earner families afaik are disproportionately wealthier.
I can't speak for all women obviously, but I made the choice to stay home after kid #2 was born and we did the math and realized my net income would be about $200 per month after daycare, taxes, and the expense of a second car. I managed to gut it out for 3 years and fled back to the office--and yeah, my job wasn't that fun.
For me it was the constant interruptions and repetition involved in caring for very young children. It felt like I could never accomplish anything. Our oldest had been in daycare until the baby was born so was used to a much bigger stage than being at home with mom all day so that involved hunting down a playgroup or preschool so she could have fun. Even with a playgroup co-op there weren't many other people to socialize with during the day so it was quite lonely. I don't think many people have a big community that they can rely on if they do stay home with kids so it is quite isolating.
What if it's more about community than people realize? I noticed that people have babies in "waves" at the office. Probably because in any given workplace there is a group in their early '30's and those people are settling down and having kids. If you go back to work after you have a kid, there are maybe a half dozen people who are going through what you are going through. If you stay home, where are those people? They are all at work and even though everybody has good intent, nobody keeps in touch once you leave the workplace.
Whether you stay home after having a kid or go back to work, that first three years is a slog. You can pick the slog that offers continued income, 401K contributions etc. or the slog that offers more time with the baby but more social isolation.
How does having children equate to increased social isolation? That may the scenario now in certain demographic groups in the US but I don't think it's anywhere near the norm, either in the country or on the planet.
The rest of the planet isn't relevant--isolation is specific to the US and more specifically to the demographic being discussed here (people who have email jobs).
It is socially isolating to be at home without other adults for 10 hours a day. To find company, a caregiver has to pack up the kids and go somewhere--a park, a community center, a playgroup, etc.--or else somebody has to come over to the house and hang out. You also have to navigate a kid schedule--mealtimes, naps, later in the day fussiness---so that further limits the time you can use for socializing. In addition to the logistics, it's just less likely to have a tribe to hang out with because of other changes in the past 50 years.
My mother could just turn us loose and go over to the neighbor's and hang out--but that kind of neighborhood where there are a lot of stay at home parents and kids of similar ages living next to each other--is rare today, so you can't just assume it is available to the average stay at home parent.
Another older form of community--a church--would often have some kind of mom's group, but the people in the age band to be raising young kids are far less likely to be part of a church, and if they are--there aren't a lot of other 30-somethings at that same church and who are also home with kids.
Extended family--another traditional form of support for young parents. We are into at least generation 3 of small families. If the grandparents aren't retirement age, they are probably at work all day too, so who is around during the day to help out-even assuming a young family lives near parents, siblings and/or cousins.
Depending on the survey between a quarter to a third of all mothers do not work. It's not the majority but it's a substantial minority and I presume those numbers do not include those who only work part time or work from home. I presume they're still heading to the playground to chat with other moms while the kids frolic.
Second, do people really socialize with their co-workers? That I think is as fraught an assumption as the one that child rearing necessarily equates to child rearing.
This is a consequence of hyperindividualization. And the fact that social planning to incorporate structures like daycares is expensive and time-consuming, whereas dumping all the labor on women is cheap.
"But I'm thinking about the many women who struggle enormously with the challenge of paying for day care and managing schedules and sick kids and doctor appointments and struggle with their feelings of conflict about *not wanting* to go back to work."
To reiterate: because they are responsible human beings who understand that financial responsibility isn't something they can schlep on Dad.
It's not. In today's world you can't outsource financial responsibility. It doesn't matter whether Dad dies, gets fired, absconds with a new mate, or just gets sick. The kids will need money and a provider, and stepping away from the workforce is a risk.
Now, I know lots of women who do this (and some men). That's fine. Many of them have assessed the risk and decided it's worth it. But it's still a risk, and it's still an evasion of a fundamental parental responsibility.
The practice of family is bleak. How many women had to stay with abusive partners before they could sustain themselves in the labor market? Financial independence is also a defense mechanism.
I think even beyond an explicit women's "i need to be able to leave my husband" is a much broader fact that literally no one feels *secure* nowadays - of any gender. You can have a $150k/year job - I think that's roughly in the 89th percentile of income in the US - and it doesn't mean shit if you get laid off without warning tomorrow, lose your health insurance, and then get diagnosed with cancer. Dropping out the workforce is the only thing more precarious than being in the workforce.
I work in tech and make a decent living. In one year my significant other and myself were able to put six figures into a savings account because there was nothing to spend money on.
If I get laid off I'm going to yawn, then I'm going to take a few months off to find myself. Yes, there are plenty of desperate people in the US but there's also a significant contingent who are comfortable. And when it comes to people in my income bracket I don't detect a lot of desperation in the air. After all, even as inflation has sky rocketed consumer spending has kept pace largely because of high earners.
I get the point, but am confused by the "nowadays" qualifier. The vast majority of human history has involved people trying to scrounge together enough food and water to stay alive while fighting off marauding bands of pillagers. Compared to that, today is a cakewalk.
Not saying we can't all work to make the world a better place, but the notion that the people alive right now are suffering through some unusual and unfortunate historical moment seems to be divorced from the actual history of the world. Even with the insecurities we do have, it is worth acknowledging and being grateful for what we do have. It's an insult to those that came before us who experienced hardships the likes most of us can't even comprehend today to even suggest we're the ones who are the truly downtrodden. And, I should add, I'm not saying that's what you were trying to say. I just think it's important not to lose sight of how good we do have it, despite the flaws.
I think the nowadays is in relationship to what it was 60 years ago when you could go to work somewhere and be pretty sure you had a job 20 years later if you still wanted it. I think jobs are less certain than they used to be in the 50s to 80s.
However, I agree with you that it's important to appreciate what a wonderful, good life we live at this point in time in this place.
Nowadays, we expect a stable life. For most of human history, you got sick and died. A famine? Die. War? Die. People accepted that the world was a shitty place where the goal was to pop out a few kids, build a little, and pray to whatever gods you got to see it last. They found joy where they could.
If you get laid off tomorrow, you go to the ACA exchanges and get insurance. Or you keep your existing insurance for a few months (via COBRA) while you figure that part out.
That does require you to have some savings and not be living paycheck-to-paycheck, but if you're at the 89th percentile of income and living paycheck-to-paycheck, in almost all cases that is a result of choices that were very much under your control.
Could we have a better health care safety net? Absolutely. Not having things like health insurance, FSAs, etc tied to you employment would obviously be better. And if you replace $150k with $30k in your example, you would have much more of a point But for this specific example, at this specific income point, anyone with some basic financial prudence who does not already have some sort of medical condition with high ongoing management costs that eat up all of that income should be fine.
Also, for all the kvetching about work's little frustrations, they really don't compare to the relentless futility of teaching a baby how to use a goddamn fork.
With smaller families the percentage of ones life with small children at home is also getting smaller. One needs something to do with the decades before retirement. And in many cases leaving the workforce for a decade closes the door on being able to work a professional job.
This is restating the premise. The argument seems to be: if I don't keep doing this job I don't want to do for 10 years while my children are young I won't be able to keep doing it for another 30 years after they're grown.
Exactly - what is your plan for the 30 years once the kids are grown and flown? And that’s before we get into husbands leaving for younger pastures and the compounding of 30 years of retirement savings.
Why do you think women make "72 cents on the dollar" compared to men?
Correct for experience and years actually spent in the workforce and that disparity vanishes almost completely. Why the difference in experience/years working? Because women while they are raising children strongly prefer part time work or jobs with fewer critical responsibilities.
Quick, easy, partly true - perfect propaganda. And there is a related point "women's work" (in the home or professional) is less valued. Complexities make bad sound bites, though.
My wife does all the stuff that it doesn't make sense for a lawyer that bills people $1,700/hour to do. I think she has to run to the post office twice a day to return all the shit I buy online and then don't want, she sends nice thank you notes, makes apologies on my behalf for all the social conventions I violate, stands next to me and whispers the names of people I've met several times already. Honestly, it's a full time job, albeit one that leaves plenty of time to play tennis and go to the pool.
In addition to what Freddie said -- is it possible that the alternative isn't necessarily more satisfying and this is a revealed preferences thing? Taking care of, say, a 1 year old and 3 year old simultaneously 24/7 is probably extremely grating; a lot of diapers, tantrums, meal planning, mediating pointless arguments, picking up toys, etc.
Sure. But I'm talking about real people who are very unhappy to return to work and do it because they think that women should want to do both. Also, it's not as if working is an escape from all of that. It's still there when you get home from working 8-6 and commuting. But now you also have to do the grocery shopping, laundry, make dinner, do dishes, etc. And the kids are sick nearly all the time.
This will sound snarkier than I intend, but you must know different women than I do. My college-educated women friends all went back to work because they needed to save for college, or be prepared in case the husband bugs out, or to keep their hand in the game so they aren't unemployable later, or any of the reasons listed above by others. I don't know one single mother who felt like she was supposed to *want* to both work and raise the baby.
You sounded less snarky than I would have hahaha! My response would have been "it sounds like you think a lot of women only want to rejoin the workforce because they think they're supposed to" (we can throw in a "... because Feminism" if I want to be particularly ungenerous
I suspect that, as the thread goes on, the population we're talking about is getting smaller and smaller - because they're extrapolated from a letter to an advice columnist and a general vibe, not because they represent a large and coherent group of people. I'm sure many people feel conflicted about going back to work - and I suspect the main conflict is just "I want to be around my kids because I love them" vs "I need to make money and to have future prospects to make money".
Why be ungenerous? Isn't it kind of an interesting question? Of course the main conflict is what you describe. If I could rewrite my original comment it would be more along the lines of:
This post helps me articulate what I find frustrating about the conversation around women and the balance of work and life: it is mainly driven by women with exciting and challenging careers. Like that Facebook woman whose name I can't be bothered to look up. Besides the irritation of being told to Lean In by a woman with three nannies is the assumption that an email job is worth leaning in for.
Not an escape, no, but a break. But for the women who openly don't want to go back to work, I assume it's because a long break from working permanently depresses your wages.
Yes, and you miss out on a decade of social security credits and 401K contributions, plus the pay raises and advancement that you get during that decade. A break of 2-3 years in an email job type situation can be no big deal if you happen to be lucky enough to hit one of those "OMG we can't find enough workers" booms that come around every decade or so, but jumping back in can be tough in a recession.
Then, if you're a stay at home parent, there's the indignity of not being able to get a credit card in your own name. (My personal pet peeve.)
However, I chose to stay home and raise 6 kids...I did other things along the way as well, but that was the primary thing. The last 4 were easier than the first 2.
I got over caring whether I had company in the bathroom or whether my house was clean or whether the kids were fighting or not. They learned to take care of themselves and each other, I wasn't a doormat or anyone's servant.
I don't get this Patriarchy thing...did women forget everything about assertiveness and independence that was feminism of the 70s?
One other factor is that so many more jobs are fully or partially remote. With that kind of flexibility it’s easier to work childcare into the mix especially as the kids get older.
I suspect it's very common for women to switch to part time work or leave the workforce entirely after they have kids. Why? Because the oft quoted "72 cents on the dollar" that women supposedly make compared to men doesn't correct for experience or years spent actually employed. Factor in those variables and women's pay rises to about .96 to that of women.
However the narrative that is being pushed does not conform to reality. Women are supposed to "lean in", regardless of their ability to hire a nanny or their desire to actually spend less time with their children.
I hear this argument a lot, and this thread has led me to reflect on it. On one hand, women are being led by the culture to see it as shameful to want to work rather than raise kids full time. But on the other, they can't overcome their natural inclinations to raise children or choose less demanding fields, resulting in a lower salary--why hasn't the girlboss culture changed this?
I think the answer is pretty simple: yeah, work sucks, but people just like having money and being able to buy stuff, live in nicer houses, send their kids to better schools, etc. (Men are totally benefitting from this, btw, as women are able to spend more on their appearance.) Also, I posted this above, but it's *wealthier* families who are two-earners; poorer women (whose wages would not cover the cost of a nanny) are less likely to work and instead prefer to do the childcare duties themselves.
",,,it's *wealthier* families who are two-earners..."
Yeah, but which is the chicken and which is the egg? Plus how many of those high earning families can afford to hire a nanny to help out with child care?
Plus if the almighty dollar is so important why are so many women choosing to neglect their careers in favor of child raising? Again, "72 cents on the dollar".
Well, there seems to be a lot of agitating over this statistic and how bad it is that women make less, but people who are upset and want to change things (sometimes even private matters like the division of labor at home) are often derided for not understanding natural inclinations
I'm open to new information but I believe that parents (even mothers) spend more time today with their children than parents did in the past, and higher-educated mothers spend even *more* time than less-educated mothers.
So if women want to spend more time with their children they should get a college degree. (I'm kidding, I'm kidding!)
I'm guessing the argument is that if there's a tradeoff between earned income and childcare, it's reasonable to assume that women who work less are thus spending more time with their children, but it's important to note that it's been found (from what I've seen) that 1. higher educated (and even wealthier, but I cannot find the source on this) parents (even mothers) spend more time with their children than less-educated parents and 2. parents today (yes, even women!) spend more time with their kids than parents of the past.
Some of this is probably due to personality differences, but I wonder how much of it is the ability for wealthier people (and modern people are certainly wealthier) to buy time and labor saving devices.
As an alternative explanation higher earning families can more easily survive off a single paycheck. If the father is earning $200k a year there is much less pressure on the mother to hold down a job to provide extra income.
Higher earning _men_. Are women in higher earning families immune to the gender wage gap? Everything I've heard suggests that is not the case.
Plus working part time or taking on a lower paying job with fewer responsibilities while raising kids still qualifies as employed for the purposes of determining two income households.
Also, it is harder and harder to raise a litter of human kittens on one salary at anything resembling an acceptable middle class standard, unless you also happen to be a hedge fund billionaire or partnered to one.
Exactly. It's the two income trap. While fundamental human morality and justice requires us to allow both men and women to pursue their career ambitions, it should be well understood that such freedom comes with the downside of requiring many women to work, even if they don't want to, in order to compete financially with those who do want to.
A similar effect us observed in programs ostensibly intended to Make Homeowership More Affordable.
Mostly these programs had the effect of driving property prices up, such that two incomes and an neg-am mortgage is the only way you can get the kittens a yard to play in.
Around 1974, federal banking regulations were changed to allow two family incomes to be taken into account when allocating home mortgage credit. Before, an additional income was treated as temporary.
The upshot was that it became necessary for most families to have two incomes in order to be able to afford a home. Unless you were already rich, anything else was like bringing a knife to a gunfight. This change in regulation went unnoticed at the time, but it probably had more real-world impact on families than all the Supreme Court decisions ever handed down.
"The concept of the email job helps me anchor a culturally unacceptable question that bugs me: why do women (and women seem to many/most? of these jobs) prioritize these kinds of jobs over staying home with children?"
Because they aren't idiots and realize that providing financial security for their children can't be reliably outsourced, while childcare can?
Staying home with kids full time is difficult and can be quite isolating. Even though that's been my biggest job category, which has left me as a non-entity as far as society is concerned, I understand women wanting to get out of the house and have a job. I expect a lot, maybe even most women/parents would like to work part time and have time for both, a good balance. Then there's the financial security of being able to earn a living wage and not being dependent on your spouse. Marriage has a high failure rate.
Why do so many *men* working email jobs prioritize these jobs over staying home with children? This is not a uniquely female phenomenon.
Why does a substack readership of (I assume) mostly non-email jobs assume we can write off this type of work as unsatisfying or at least universally less satisfying than caring for children full time? If we did it about a factory job that would be read as pretty elitist/classist.
I assume good intent but I think we would do well to question some assumptions in this original post.
I think you're right, obviously, that not all people have email jobs, but I also think it's astounding how much our culture *assumes* everyone has an email job. This was most obvious, and polarizing, in the discussion around remote work during Covid ("why can't everyone just stay home??") but also - nothing is open outside of work hours. If you need to talk to your insurance company, or your bank, or a lawyer; if you need to visit a government office or sort out your taxes - our culture just seems to assume that at least one spouse in every family can take a pointless phone call for half an hour every few days. It's another hidden tax on the poor - I think if both parents work on an assembly line or something they must just have to take their lumps with whatever the insurance company rejects or denies, because they're just not able to spend 45 minutes on hold while door panels come down the assembly line.
"This was most obvious, and polarizing, in the discussion around remote work during Covid ("why can't everyone just stay home??")"
I found it interesting that I see more blue-collar types continuing to mask and otherwise treating COVID as a threat, long after the PMC has moved on to other concerns. This is probably because if Bob The Burgerflipper gets the 'VID, he doesn't get paid if he doesn't show up to work, and if he doesn't get paid, then neither does the rent.
EDIT: Bob The Burgerflipper also has much less trust in authority than does Robert Banker, ferinstance.
I've seen plenty of places where some employees were masked and others not, so I doubt that there was a directive, or if there was, it wasn't enforced.
Some people felt like masking kept other viruses, like the flu at bay and they like avoiding the inconvenience of being sick. I can see it if you live in crowded conditions.
No neither did I. However, I think a lot of us are more comfortable masking up than before. My daughter in NYC does in crowded situations because she hates getting laid up with various viruses. She's also a bit of a germaphobe. Not from me, I'm more of the philosophy its inevitable and makes you stronger. That wasn't true with COVID. Pre-vaccine I masked up and took precautions, especially because I took care of my 80 year old mother.
I've been masking up lately because of the smoke. It really does help.
I’m a postal mail handler who worked nights for several years before getting a position on days. It’s been over two years, but I’m still getting used to how much easier it is to get medical care now that I work from 8 am to 4:30 pm instead of heading home at 5 am.
Yeah. I have many Pandemic Inflicted Wounds *dramatically claps hand to forehead,* and probably the PIW that is most toxic to those around me is the deep resentment I have developed towards people who assume everyone has an e-mail job, people who have email jobs, and generally the concept of e-mail jobs altogether.
Covid left me with a profound and persistent sense of alienation from almost everyone who could “just stay home.” It starts to feel like we live in two separate worlds—the world where we have to get out and touch things and be present, and the world where we....don’t. The crack between those worlds probably always existed but was previously ignorable until the pandemic sort of levered it open into a chasm.
My wife has an email job. It allowed her to work from home during Covid, is unionized with great benefits, and her boss is a wonderful woman who encouraged her into training so that one day my wife can take over a new position: another email job. My wife tries to explain her job to me sometimes, but with all the obscure government jargon and acronyms I have a hard time following along. There is a lot of Excel spreadsheets, and a lot of phone calls and meetings. I don’t think an email job would be for me, but my wife is great at it, and has moved up quickly in her short time there. She’s also a thousand times happier than she was in her last job. Not everyone is suited to these types of jobs, as it is easy for people to coast and not participate from what I glean from the office chatter I overhear when my wife is working from home, but a world of email jobs seems a pretty fine one to me.
This kind of pitch -- proposing a new taxonomy that seems clear & useful enough for others to fill in further -- is really worthwhile, & I wish people tried it more; seems like the most fitting creative task in the era of big admin & big data. & it seems very complementary to AI: define a new pattern for it to match to, then let it run wild proposing new applications or datasets. After all, the reason we remember Euclid & Freud is that they did much the same thing: they gave their acolytes a clear set of rules & axioms & "win conditions" & set them loose to build up their abstract games into high-status disciplines; Pythagoras isn't seen as the founder of math because he built a politically powerful math cult, but Euclid is because he gave people a list of clear (albeit facially absurd) rules, eg: "ok imagine that lines are infinitely thin." &, fittingly, "email job" might be a good description for those people who apply these kinds of rules once they've been established: the people who decide that this company will begin every meeting with a land acknowledgment, & sign off every email with gender pronouns, & defer between identities in some particular way; those ways we're all softly conditioned at every moment, by the little skinner boxes of ideology who hover nicely over us in every meeting, or in every thread.
Thus maybe "email job" is an overly constrained term for what could more appropriately be called "the deep state" -- that thing which democracy-lovers define as democracy. As you point out, they often come from changes in litigation risk: eg when the civil rights enforcers decided that mere "disparate impact" on any "protected status" created massive liability; but now these decentralized petty enforcers are the ones in charge (the ones who apply this pressure on the public -- & the ones who have seized control of every major cultural institution, public & private).
I think in many ways I have an email job, and it’s really lovely. Great colleagues, on a university campus, incredible flexibility, and bandwidth at the end of the work day to do my own creative stuff. No complaints. Much happier in this situation than I think I would be either struggling to support myself in a purely creative fashion or working super hard to make a ton of money.
I don't know if this is real or not (obviously) but somebody on Twitter was talking about a competition where white collar professionals compared the number of hours they worked versus their salary.
The winner was somebody at Google who worked less than ten hours a week while pulling down $500k a year.
Ha! I've had a version of that conversation with friends. There's a whole secret world of work out there that isn't articulated publicly because no one wants to ruin it for everyone else.
I read about some human who outsourced his own job to India. Paid his ringer peanuts and goofed off at the office all day. He won awards for productivity and quality of work.
Now that, humans, THAT is an email job. Watch and learn, kids, watch and learn.
You've summarized it very well. There's obviously a bit of breathing room around impact - some will be completely nebulous, others may have occasional real-world ramifications - but the diffuse and in many ways fungible, non-specialized nature of it is a defining characteristic. It's also one I've not seen well-summarized prior to reading this piece, which is surprising, given that (as you say) millions of us have jobs like these.
The requirements for a college degree are half ass-covering and half interia. In my previous email job I was trying to hire another email jobber to report to me, but she didn't have a college degree. My boss was very skeptical; I pointed out how well she interviewed, how solid her resume was, and that the one referee I'd heard from had spoken in glowing terms. In the end she turned us down for a better-paying job elsewhere, and I'm happy for her. But that one exception aside, everyone I dealt with except the front-liners who actually went into the world and did the work had a degree. I think it's less that people are impressed by college or now assume that it "teaches you how to think" but more that it shows people can sit at a desk for a couple of years and occasionally write a paper without walking out and quitting.
The requirements for a college degree are, AFAICT, the ability to jump through hoops and perform tasks with little supervision.
During a remodeling, everyone on my floor got moved in a big group to the conference room.
I hated it. I felt like I was being watched all the time, I couldn't goof off or wash my ass without it being public knowledge, even though probably nobody was paying attention.
Then I wondered how the secretaries and cubicle workers do it? They're always in a Panopticon all day long, constantly observed and scrutinized, and they never get away until quitting time.
So why am I not in a cubicle? Then it occurred to me that I have a corner office to myself, because I don't need to be supervised. I am so well trained that I supervise myself. I am the voice in my own head telling me to stop reading Substack and get back to work.
They say the most effective prison is when the prisoner never knows he's in prison.
Wow, it's really convenient if you just leave out the part where I say that most lawyers do that and other things! Banned for 24 hours for extreme dishonesty.
Like I very explicitly said that some lawyer jobs are email jobs and very explicitly said that there are other legal functions that happen away from the courthouse, and you drop this comment, I'm sorry, I'm showing restraint by now issuing a longer ban.
The key to happiness in an email job is to automate as many tasks as possible, and spend the rest of the day on personally fulfilling activities (reading, writing, taking walks, etc).
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/please-just-fucking-tell-me-what
I have an email job, which is why I decided putz a little, read this, and start working half an hour late today. There's some unavoidable ennui that comes with these jobs, but all in all, it could be a heck of a lot worse.
My current job is a pleasing mixture of email job and regular job, in a middle school dean's office.
I have been largely successful at work by establishing the persona of a guy willing to speedrun through the email chain-touching base-knock out this online training-action plan meeting side of things in order to focus on the nuts and bolts of the actual job of meeting with kids face to face and providing them with positive reinforcement.
My admin bosses are aware I find their world of high intensity/low impact meetings and crafting official guidance memos and using the right dialect to describe normal interactions to be silly and incomprehensible, but I make their lives easier across a broad spectrum of tasks so my cheerful "The inane bullshit guidance that district is pushing down to us is wishful thinking and documenting every single interaction with kids and their parents while I put it into effect is a pointless time sink, but if it helps flip slides from red to green, then fuck it I get paid the same" attitude is tolerated.
College:
Gets you out of the house/apoartment and into a classroom where you learn where you socialize where you stumble andost importantly where you grow (up). It can help vyou find your way. It can lead you in so many directions. Post college you enter the world market place where you find your way thru life.
Enjoy the ride. The above also applies to trade schools.
That's true of anybody who doesn't live in their parents' basement.
A while ago I postulated a correlation between income and the likelihood of becoming a mass shooter. Why? Because holding down a job requires social skills for the vast majority of jobs, college educated or not. Failure to acquire and exercise those skills almost always ends up resulting in loss of work or confinement to lower paying professions and correlated with that is social isolation.
The concept of the email job helps me anchor a culturally unacceptable question that bugs me: why do women (and women seem to many/most? of these jobs) prioritize these kinds of jobs over staying home with children? I understand why someone with a burning passion for her work as a lawyer or doctor or rocket scientist really values the work and the intellectual challenge. And of course I understand that there are financial challenges for many: single mothers and breadwinners and caretakers of elderly parents and minimum wage earners etc cannot choose staying home over work. But many women working email jobs DO seem to derive their identity from *having* a job, even if the job itself is less satisfying than the alternative. As if sending emails and organizing calendars and attending meetings is somehow sticking it to the patriarchy.
Well, that's a very big question with long answers, but one thing I think is definitely true is that many women need to have the personal financial security to leave their boyfriend/husband to feel safe.
Yes, I should have added them to the middle section. And of course we can all derive satisfaction from earning money and being part of a team etc..
But I'm thinking about the many women who struggle enormously with the challenge of paying for day care and managing schedules and sick kids and doctor appointments and struggle with their feelings of conflict about *not wanting* to go back to work. Much of the conversation about all of this is driven by people with the kinds of jobs you opened this post with--people with creative, exciting work. Last week someone wrote in to Emily Oster's Substack asking for advice because she felt guilty that she was unhappy to return to work and leave her baby at home. I thought it was crazy to write to Oster about this! That woman has a fabulous career. Of course she wants to find a balance! What makes sense for HER perhaps does not make sense for the "email job" holders.
Paying for daycare is typically of most concern before the youngest starts kindergarten. That’s only a few years out of perhaps 50 in the workforce.
After day care comes years of trying to schedule 10 week-long camps to cover the summer and vacations.
Yes and that leaves 40 weeks a year. And then decades as a stay at home mom with no kids.
It was much easier when families were larger and a woman not working was more the norm. There was a whole social world built around it. But that’s far less of the case these days and being an empty nester with no job and no prospects with decades left to life is very hard on a lot of women.
So get the job AFTER the kids have left the house.
I also think we forget that people in the past lived much materially poorer lives than we do now. People lived in conditions that modern individuals wouldn't tolerate (not saying this is a bad thing at all, btw). A two-earner family allows you to have more money and nicer stuff. Women in the past may very well have jumped at the opportunity if they got the chance!
The standard economic explanation is that wage increases have drawn women into the workforce, such that some (but not all) stand to make more money with a job than they would save by staying home and performing the majority of childcare duties. Two-earner families afaik are disproportionately wealthier.
I can't speak for all women obviously, but I made the choice to stay home after kid #2 was born and we did the math and realized my net income would be about $200 per month after daycare, taxes, and the expense of a second car. I managed to gut it out for 3 years and fled back to the office--and yeah, my job wasn't that fun.
For me it was the constant interruptions and repetition involved in caring for very young children. It felt like I could never accomplish anything. Our oldest had been in daycare until the baby was born so was used to a much bigger stage than being at home with mom all day so that involved hunting down a playgroup or preschool so she could have fun. Even with a playgroup co-op there weren't many other people to socialize with during the day so it was quite lonely. I don't think many people have a big community that they can rely on if they do stay home with kids so it is quite isolating.
What if it's more about community than people realize? I noticed that people have babies in "waves" at the office. Probably because in any given workplace there is a group in their early '30's and those people are settling down and having kids. If you go back to work after you have a kid, there are maybe a half dozen people who are going through what you are going through. If you stay home, where are those people? They are all at work and even though everybody has good intent, nobody keeps in touch once you leave the workplace.
Whether you stay home after having a kid or go back to work, that first three years is a slog. You can pick the slog that offers continued income, 401K contributions etc. or the slog that offers more time with the baby but more social isolation.
How does having children equate to increased social isolation? That may the scenario now in certain demographic groups in the US but I don't think it's anywhere near the norm, either in the country or on the planet.
The rest of the planet isn't relevant--isolation is specific to the US and more specifically to the demographic being discussed here (people who have email jobs).
It is socially isolating to be at home without other adults for 10 hours a day. To find company, a caregiver has to pack up the kids and go somewhere--a park, a community center, a playgroup, etc.--or else somebody has to come over to the house and hang out. You also have to navigate a kid schedule--mealtimes, naps, later in the day fussiness---so that further limits the time you can use for socializing. In addition to the logistics, it's just less likely to have a tribe to hang out with because of other changes in the past 50 years.
My mother could just turn us loose and go over to the neighbor's and hang out--but that kind of neighborhood where there are a lot of stay at home parents and kids of similar ages living next to each other--is rare today, so you can't just assume it is available to the average stay at home parent.
Another older form of community--a church--would often have some kind of mom's group, but the people in the age band to be raising young kids are far less likely to be part of a church, and if they are--there aren't a lot of other 30-somethings at that same church and who are also home with kids.
Extended family--another traditional form of support for young parents. We are into at least generation 3 of small families. If the grandparents aren't retirement age, they are probably at work all day too, so who is around during the day to help out-even assuming a young family lives near parents, siblings and/or cousins.
Depending on the survey between a quarter to a third of all mothers do not work. It's not the majority but it's a substantial minority and I presume those numbers do not include those who only work part time or work from home. I presume they're still heading to the playground to chat with other moms while the kids frolic.
Second, do people really socialize with their co-workers? That I think is as fraught an assumption as the one that child rearing necessarily equates to child rearing.
Well this was (I think) Graeber’s ultimate determination about “bullshit jobs,” that most people stick with them for the socializing aspect.
This is a consequence of hyperindividualization. And the fact that social planning to incorporate structures like daycares is expensive and time-consuming, whereas dumping all the labor on women is cheap.
"But I'm thinking about the many women who struggle enormously with the challenge of paying for day care and managing schedules and sick kids and doctor appointments and struggle with their feelings of conflict about *not wanting* to go back to work."
To reiterate: because they are responsible human beings who understand that financial responsibility isn't something they can schlep on Dad.
This is a bleak vision of family.
It's not. In today's world you can't outsource financial responsibility. It doesn't matter whether Dad dies, gets fired, absconds with a new mate, or just gets sick. The kids will need money and a provider, and stepping away from the workforce is a risk.
Now, I know lots of women who do this (and some men). That's fine. Many of them have assessed the risk and decided it's worth it. But it's still a risk, and it's still an evasion of a fundamental parental responsibility.
It's a luxury that the rich can afford.
https://www.deseret.com/2019/1/24/20664077/rich-and-poor-married-moms-are-more-likely-to-stay-at-home-with-the-kids-but-for-entirely-different#:~:text=And%20just%20over%20a%20third,fourths%20in%20the%20labor%20force.
The practice of family is bleak. How many women had to stay with abusive partners before they could sustain themselves in the labor market? Financial independence is also a defense mechanism.
I think even beyond an explicit women's "i need to be able to leave my husband" is a much broader fact that literally no one feels *secure* nowadays - of any gender. You can have a $150k/year job - I think that's roughly in the 89th percentile of income in the US - and it doesn't mean shit if you get laid off without warning tomorrow, lose your health insurance, and then get diagnosed with cancer. Dropping out the workforce is the only thing more precarious than being in the workforce.
I work in tech and make a decent living. In one year my significant other and myself were able to put six figures into a savings account because there was nothing to spend money on.
If I get laid off I'm going to yawn, then I'm going to take a few months off to find myself. Yes, there are plenty of desperate people in the US but there's also a significant contingent who are comfortable. And when it comes to people in my income bracket I don't detect a lot of desperation in the air. After all, even as inflation has sky rocketed consumer spending has kept pace largely because of high earners.
I get the point, but am confused by the "nowadays" qualifier. The vast majority of human history has involved people trying to scrounge together enough food and water to stay alive while fighting off marauding bands of pillagers. Compared to that, today is a cakewalk.
Not saying we can't all work to make the world a better place, but the notion that the people alive right now are suffering through some unusual and unfortunate historical moment seems to be divorced from the actual history of the world. Even with the insecurities we do have, it is worth acknowledging and being grateful for what we do have. It's an insult to those that came before us who experienced hardships the likes most of us can't even comprehend today to even suggest we're the ones who are the truly downtrodden. And, I should add, I'm not saying that's what you were trying to say. I just think it's important not to lose sight of how good we do have it, despite the flaws.
I think the nowadays is in relationship to what it was 60 years ago when you could go to work somewhere and be pretty sure you had a job 20 years later if you still wanted it. I think jobs are less certain than they used to be in the 50s to 80s.
However, I agree with you that it's important to appreciate what a wonderful, good life we live at this point in time in this place.
Nowadays, we expect a stable life. For most of human history, you got sick and died. A famine? Die. War? Die. People accepted that the world was a shitty place where the goal was to pop out a few kids, build a little, and pray to whatever gods you got to see it last. They found joy where they could.
If you get laid off tomorrow, you go to the ACA exchanges and get insurance. Or you keep your existing insurance for a few months (via COBRA) while you figure that part out.
That does require you to have some savings and not be living paycheck-to-paycheck, but if you're at the 89th percentile of income and living paycheck-to-paycheck, in almost all cases that is a result of choices that were very much under your control.
Could we have a better health care safety net? Absolutely. Not having things like health insurance, FSAs, etc tied to you employment would obviously be better. And if you replace $150k with $30k in your example, you would have much more of a point But for this specific example, at this specific income point, anyone with some basic financial prudence who does not already have some sort of medical condition with high ongoing management costs that eat up all of that income should be fine.
Also, for all the kvetching about work's little frustrations, they really don't compare to the relentless futility of teaching a baby how to use a goddamn fork.
Ha! This is also admittedly my least favorite part.
Lots of answers but I think an overlooked one is genuinely how lonely it can be as a stay at home mom.
With smaller families the percentage of ones life with small children at home is also getting smaller. One needs something to do with the decades before retirement. And in many cases leaving the workforce for a decade closes the door on being able to work a professional job.
This is restating the premise. The argument seems to be: if I don't keep doing this job I don't want to do for 10 years while my children are young I won't be able to keep doing it for another 30 years after they're grown.
Exactly - what is your plan for the 30 years once the kids are grown and flown? And that’s before we get into husbands leaving for younger pastures and the compounding of 30 years of retirement savings.
Why do you think women make "72 cents on the dollar" compared to men?
Correct for experience and years actually spent in the workforce and that disparity vanishes almost completely. Why the difference in experience/years working? Because women while they are raising children strongly prefer part time work or jobs with fewer critical responsibilities.
That’s true. And they need to weigh those preferences against the long term impact of those presences.
Apparently enough women are doing it to drive down women's' earnings from about .96 compared to men to 0.72. That suggests to me it's widespread.
Yea, I don't know why this "72 cents on the dollar" factoid keeps being bandied about in the discourse when it has been disproved for a while.
Quick, easy, partly true - perfect propaganda. And there is a related point "women's work" (in the home or professional) is less valued. Complexities make bad sound bites, though.
My wife does all the stuff that it doesn't make sense for a lawyer that bills people $1,700/hour to do. I think she has to run to the post office twice a day to return all the shit I buy online and then don't want, she sends nice thank you notes, makes apologies on my behalf for all the social conventions I violate, stands next to me and whispers the names of people I've met several times already. Honestly, it's a full time job, albeit one that leaves plenty of time to play tennis and go to the pool.
In addition to what Freddie said -- is it possible that the alternative isn't necessarily more satisfying and this is a revealed preferences thing? Taking care of, say, a 1 year old and 3 year old simultaneously 24/7 is probably extremely grating; a lot of diapers, tantrums, meal planning, mediating pointless arguments, picking up toys, etc.
Sure. But I'm talking about real people who are very unhappy to return to work and do it because they think that women should want to do both. Also, it's not as if working is an escape from all of that. It's still there when you get home from working 8-6 and commuting. But now you also have to do the grocery shopping, laundry, make dinner, do dishes, etc. And the kids are sick nearly all the time.
This will sound snarkier than I intend, but you must know different women than I do. My college-educated women friends all went back to work because they needed to save for college, or be prepared in case the husband bugs out, or to keep their hand in the game so they aren't unemployable later, or any of the reasons listed above by others. I don't know one single mother who felt like she was supposed to *want* to both work and raise the baby.
You sounded less snarky than I would have hahaha! My response would have been "it sounds like you think a lot of women only want to rejoin the workforce because they think they're supposed to" (we can throw in a "... because Feminism" if I want to be particularly ungenerous
I suspect that, as the thread goes on, the population we're talking about is getting smaller and smaller - because they're extrapolated from a letter to an advice columnist and a general vibe, not because they represent a large and coherent group of people. I'm sure many people feel conflicted about going back to work - and I suspect the main conflict is just "I want to be around my kids because I love them" vs "I need to make money and to have future prospects to make money".
Why be ungenerous? Isn't it kind of an interesting question? Of course the main conflict is what you describe. If I could rewrite my original comment it would be more along the lines of:
This post helps me articulate what I find frustrating about the conversation around women and the balance of work and life: it is mainly driven by women with exciting and challenging careers. Like that Facebook woman whose name I can't be bothered to look up. Besides the irritation of being told to Lean In by a woman with three nannies is the assumption that an email job is worth leaning in for.
Even a crappy email job allows you to go to the bathroom by yourself without hearing somebody screaming and pounding the bathroom door.
Not an escape, no, but a break. But for the women who openly don't want to go back to work, I assume it's because a long break from working permanently depresses your wages.
Yes, and you miss out on a decade of social security credits and 401K contributions, plus the pay raises and advancement that you get during that decade. A break of 2-3 years in an email job type situation can be no big deal if you happen to be lucky enough to hit one of those "OMG we can't find enough workers" booms that come around every decade or so, but jumping back in can be tough in a recession.
Then, if you're a stay at home parent, there's the indignity of not being able to get a credit card in your own name. (My personal pet peeve.)
However, I chose to stay home and raise 6 kids...I did other things along the way as well, but that was the primary thing. The last 4 were easier than the first 2.
I got over caring whether I had company in the bathroom or whether my house was clean or whether the kids were fighting or not. They learned to take care of themselves and each other, I wasn't a doormat or anyone's servant.
I don't get this Patriarchy thing...did women forget everything about assertiveness and independence that was feminism of the 70s?
One other factor is that so many more jobs are fully or partially remote. With that kind of flexibility it’s easier to work childcare into the mix especially as the kids get older.
Frankly, if I could make the same amount of money picking up dog poop and taking my dogs out I would quit in a day.
I suspect it's very common for women to switch to part time work or leave the workforce entirely after they have kids. Why? Because the oft quoted "72 cents on the dollar" that women supposedly make compared to men doesn't correct for experience or years spent actually employed. Factor in those variables and women's pay rises to about .96 to that of women.
However the narrative that is being pushed does not conform to reality. Women are supposed to "lean in", regardless of their ability to hire a nanny or their desire to actually spend less time with their children.
I hear this argument a lot, and this thread has led me to reflect on it. On one hand, women are being led by the culture to see it as shameful to want to work rather than raise kids full time. But on the other, they can't overcome their natural inclinations to raise children or choose less demanding fields, resulting in a lower salary--why hasn't the girlboss culture changed this?
I think the answer is pretty simple: yeah, work sucks, but people just like having money and being able to buy stuff, live in nicer houses, send their kids to better schools, etc. (Men are totally benefitting from this, btw, as women are able to spend more on their appearance.) Also, I posted this above, but it's *wealthier* families who are two-earners; poorer women (whose wages would not cover the cost of a nanny) are less likely to work and instead prefer to do the childcare duties themselves.
I've also seen the shaming of women for not wanting to rush back into work. They can't win, and The Mommy Wars can be something else.
",,,it's *wealthier* families who are two-earners..."
Yeah, but which is the chicken and which is the egg? Plus how many of those high earning families can afford to hire a nanny to help out with child care?
Plus if the almighty dollar is so important why are so many women choosing to neglect their careers in favor of child raising? Again, "72 cents on the dollar".
Well, there seems to be a lot of agitating over this statistic and how bad it is that women make less, but people who are upset and want to change things (sometimes even private matters like the division of labor at home) are often derided for not understanding natural inclinations
My position is that if women choose to switch jobs (or leave them entirely) as a result of having a kid--well, that's their personal choice.
And for the purposes of this discussion I bring the statistic up because it seemingly illustrates that this practice is pretty widespread.
I'm open to new information but I believe that parents (even mothers) spend more time today with their children than parents did in the past, and higher-educated mothers spend even *more* time than less-educated mothers.
So if women want to spend more time with their children they should get a college degree. (I'm kidding, I'm kidding!)
https://www.vox.com/2018/2/19/17018380/gender-wage-gap-childcare-penalty
I'm guessing the argument is that if there's a tradeoff between earned income and childcare, it's reasonable to assume that women who work less are thus spending more time with their children, but it's important to note that it's been found (from what I've seen) that 1. higher educated (and even wealthier, but I cannot find the source on this) parents (even mothers) spend more time with their children than less-educated parents and 2. parents today (yes, even women!) spend more time with their kids than parents of the past.
Some of this is probably due to personality differences, but I wonder how much of it is the ability for wealthier people (and modern people are certainly wealthier) to buy time and labor saving devices.
https://ourworldindata.org/parents-time-with-kids
As an alternative explanation higher earning families can more easily survive off a single paycheck. If the father is earning $200k a year there is much less pressure on the mother to hold down a job to provide extra income.
But higher-earning families are more likely to be dual-income, and higher-educated people spend more time in wage labor.
Higher earning _men_. Are women in higher earning families immune to the gender wage gap? Everything I've heard suggests that is not the case.
Plus working part time or taking on a lower paying job with fewer responsibilities while raising kids still qualifies as employed for the purposes of determining two income households.
Also, it is harder and harder to raise a litter of human kittens on one salary at anything resembling an acceptable middle class standard, unless you also happen to be a hedge fund billionaire or partnered to one.
Exactly. It's the two income trap. While fundamental human morality and justice requires us to allow both men and women to pursue their career ambitions, it should be well understood that such freedom comes with the downside of requiring many women to work, even if they don't want to, in order to compete financially with those who do want to.
A similar effect us observed in programs ostensibly intended to Make Homeowership More Affordable.
Mostly these programs had the effect of driving property prices up, such that two incomes and an neg-am mortgage is the only way you can get the kittens a yard to play in.
Around 1974, federal banking regulations were changed to allow two family incomes to be taken into account when allocating home mortgage credit. Before, an additional income was treated as temporary.
The upshot was that it became necessary for most families to have two incomes in order to be able to afford a home. Unless you were already rich, anything else was like bringing a knife to a gunfight. This change in regulation went unnoticed at the time, but it probably had more real-world impact on families than all the Supreme Court decisions ever handed down.
"The concept of the email job helps me anchor a culturally unacceptable question that bugs me: why do women (and women seem to many/most? of these jobs) prioritize these kinds of jobs over staying home with children?"
Because they aren't idiots and realize that providing financial security for their children can't be reliably outsourced, while childcare can?
Staying home with kids full time is difficult and can be quite isolating. Even though that's been my biggest job category, which has left me as a non-entity as far as society is concerned, I understand women wanting to get out of the house and have a job. I expect a lot, maybe even most women/parents would like to work part time and have time for both, a good balance. Then there's the financial security of being able to earn a living wage and not being dependent on your spouse. Marriage has a high failure rate.
Why do so many *men* working email jobs prioritize these jobs over staying home with children? This is not a uniquely female phenomenon.
Why does a substack readership of (I assume) mostly non-email jobs assume we can write off this type of work as unsatisfying or at least universally less satisfying than caring for children full time? If we did it about a factory job that would be read as pretty elitist/classist.
I assume good intent but I think we would do well to question some assumptions in this original post.
I think you're right, obviously, that not all people have email jobs, but I also think it's astounding how much our culture *assumes* everyone has an email job. This was most obvious, and polarizing, in the discussion around remote work during Covid ("why can't everyone just stay home??") but also - nothing is open outside of work hours. If you need to talk to your insurance company, or your bank, or a lawyer; if you need to visit a government office or sort out your taxes - our culture just seems to assume that at least one spouse in every family can take a pointless phone call for half an hour every few days. It's another hidden tax on the poor - I think if both parents work on an assembly line or something they must just have to take their lumps with whatever the insurance company rejects or denies, because they're just not able to spend 45 minutes on hold while door panels come down the assembly line.
"This was most obvious, and polarizing, in the discussion around remote work during Covid ("why can't everyone just stay home??")"
I found it interesting that I see more blue-collar types continuing to mask and otherwise treating COVID as a threat, long after the PMC has moved on to other concerns. This is probably because if Bob The Burgerflipper gets the 'VID, he doesn't get paid if he doesn't show up to work, and if he doesn't get paid, then neither does the rent.
EDIT: Bob The Burgerflipper also has much less trust in authority than does Robert Banker, ferinstance.
If you see a burger flipper with a mask, it's probably because their boss told them to wear one.
I've seen plenty of places where some employees were masked and others not, so I doubt that there was a directive, or if there was, it wasn't enforced.
Some people felt like masking kept other viruses, like the flu at bay and they like avoiding the inconvenience of being sick. I can see it if you live in crowded conditions.
I certainly did not see an outbreak of masking before the COVID showed up.
No neither did I. However, I think a lot of us are more comfortable masking up than before. My daughter in NYC does in crowded situations because she hates getting laid up with various viruses. She's also a bit of a germaphobe. Not from me, I'm more of the philosophy its inevitable and makes you stronger. That wasn't true with COVID. Pre-vaccine I masked up and took precautions, especially because I took care of my 80 year old mother.
I've been masking up lately because of the smoke. It really does help.
I’m a postal mail handler who worked nights for several years before getting a position on days. It’s been over two years, but I’m still getting used to how much easier it is to get medical care now that I work from 8 am to 4:30 pm instead of heading home at 5 am.
I know I’m one of the luckier ones there, too.
Yeah. I have many Pandemic Inflicted Wounds *dramatically claps hand to forehead,* and probably the PIW that is most toxic to those around me is the deep resentment I have developed towards people who assume everyone has an e-mail job, people who have email jobs, and generally the concept of e-mail jobs altogether.
Covid left me with a profound and persistent sense of alienation from almost everyone who could “just stay home.” It starts to feel like we live in two separate worlds—the world where we have to get out and touch things and be present, and the world where we....don’t. The crack between those worlds probably always existed but was previously ignorable until the pandemic sort of levered it open into a chasm.
My wife has an email job. It allowed her to work from home during Covid, is unionized with great benefits, and her boss is a wonderful woman who encouraged her into training so that one day my wife can take over a new position: another email job. My wife tries to explain her job to me sometimes, but with all the obscure government jargon and acronyms I have a hard time following along. There is a lot of Excel spreadsheets, and a lot of phone calls and meetings. I don’t think an email job would be for me, but my wife is great at it, and has moved up quickly in her short time there. She’s also a thousand times happier than she was in her last job. Not everyone is suited to these types of jobs, as it is easy for people to coast and not participate from what I glean from the office chatter I overhear when my wife is working from home, but a world of email jobs seems a pretty fine one to me.
I am a teacher, and reading your description of email jobs sure took me back to teaching remotely.
This kind of pitch -- proposing a new taxonomy that seems clear & useful enough for others to fill in further -- is really worthwhile, & I wish people tried it more; seems like the most fitting creative task in the era of big admin & big data. & it seems very complementary to AI: define a new pattern for it to match to, then let it run wild proposing new applications or datasets. After all, the reason we remember Euclid & Freud is that they did much the same thing: they gave their acolytes a clear set of rules & axioms & "win conditions" & set them loose to build up their abstract games into high-status disciplines; Pythagoras isn't seen as the founder of math because he built a politically powerful math cult, but Euclid is because he gave people a list of clear (albeit facially absurd) rules, eg: "ok imagine that lines are infinitely thin." &, fittingly, "email job" might be a good description for those people who apply these kinds of rules once they've been established: the people who decide that this company will begin every meeting with a land acknowledgment, & sign off every email with gender pronouns, & defer between identities in some particular way; those ways we're all softly conditioned at every moment, by the little skinner boxes of ideology who hover nicely over us in every meeting, or in every thread.
Thus maybe "email job" is an overly constrained term for what could more appropriately be called "the deep state" -- that thing which democracy-lovers define as democracy. As you point out, they often come from changes in litigation risk: eg when the civil rights enforcers decided that mere "disparate impact" on any "protected status" created massive liability; but now these decentralized petty enforcers are the ones in charge (the ones who apply this pressure on the public -- & the ones who have seized control of every major cultural institution, public & private).
I think in many ways I have an email job, and it’s really lovely. Great colleagues, on a university campus, incredible flexibility, and bandwidth at the end of the work day to do my own creative stuff. No complaints. Much happier in this situation than I think I would be either struggling to support myself in a purely creative fashion or working super hard to make a ton of money.
I don't know if this is real or not (obviously) but somebody on Twitter was talking about a competition where white collar professionals compared the number of hours they worked versus their salary.
The winner was somebody at Google who worked less than ten hours a week while pulling down $500k a year.
Ha! I've had a version of that conversation with friends. There's a whole secret world of work out there that isn't articulated publicly because no one wants to ruin it for everyone else.
I read about some human who outsourced his own job to India. Paid his ringer peanuts and goofed off at the office all day. He won awards for productivity and quality of work.
Now that, humans, THAT is an email job. Watch and learn, kids, watch and learn.
You've summarized it very well. There's obviously a bit of breathing room around impact - some will be completely nebulous, others may have occasional real-world ramifications - but the diffuse and in many ways fungible, non-specialized nature of it is a defining characteristic. It's also one I've not seen well-summarized prior to reading this piece, which is surprising, given that (as you say) millions of us have jobs like these.
The requirements for a college degree are half ass-covering and half interia. In my previous email job I was trying to hire another email jobber to report to me, but she didn't have a college degree. My boss was very skeptical; I pointed out how well she interviewed, how solid her resume was, and that the one referee I'd heard from had spoken in glowing terms. In the end she turned us down for a better-paying job elsewhere, and I'm happy for her. But that one exception aside, everyone I dealt with except the front-liners who actually went into the world and did the work had a degree. I think it's less that people are impressed by college or now assume that it "teaches you how to think" but more that it shows people can sit at a desk for a couple of years and occasionally write a paper without walking out and quitting.
The requirements for a college degree are, AFAICT, the ability to jump through hoops and perform tasks with little supervision.
During a remodeling, everyone on my floor got moved in a big group to the conference room.
I hated it. I felt like I was being watched all the time, I couldn't goof off or wash my ass without it being public knowledge, even though probably nobody was paying attention.
Then I wondered how the secretaries and cubicle workers do it? They're always in a Panopticon all day long, constantly observed and scrutinized, and they never get away until quitting time.
So why am I not in a cubicle? Then it occurred to me that I have a corner office to myself, because I don't need to be supervised. I am so well trained that I supervise myself. I am the voice in my own head telling me to stop reading Substack and get back to work.
They say the most effective prison is when the prisoner never knows he's in prison.
I'm not sure, college seems more supervised year-on-year (from the outside looking in.)
This is a main point of Discipline And Punish. To create a soul that carves the regulations onto it's own surface.
The software development term "Yak Shaving", defined as "All the work you have to do before the actual work" encompasses this concept rather well
I wonder how Graeber would respond to this article if he were alive.
Having interacted with him several times in my life, I would guess that it would not be a pleasant exchange.
It would have been interesting to hear a conversation between the two of you.
Wow, it's really convenient if you just leave out the part where I say that most lawyers do that and other things! Banned for 24 hours for extreme dishonesty.
Like I very explicitly said that some lawyer jobs are email jobs and very explicitly said that there are other legal functions that happen away from the courthouse, and you drop this comment, I'm sorry, I'm showing restraint by now issuing a longer ban.
The key to happiness in an email job is to automate as many tasks as possible, and spend the rest of the day on personally fulfilling activities (reading, writing, taking walks, etc).
If you need to stay “active” on Microsoft Teams, the market provides solutions: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=mouse+jiggler
Tangential, but here to say I’m all ears for a juicy Graeber analysis (or links to good writeups!)
Well I was going to go through his last book The Dawn of Everything for a kind of read-along but was so immensely frustrated by how fast and loose the authors played with citations that I couldn't take it. https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/the-dawn-of-everything-wicked-liberty
I should’ve known to just search his name in your archive to find the exact 8,000 word take I was hoping for 😂