Thoughts on Meaningful Work and Unschooling

We live in an age of meaningless work.

For most of us, we spend the bulk of our waking life doing work to earn an income. This work can be rewarding or not. It can be self employment, volunteer work, care giving work, or selling your labour to someone else. Most of this work is designed to either contribute value on the capitalist marketplace or provide support to others who are contributing that value.

In his book titled Bullshit Jobs, David Graeber (anarchist theorist and prolific writer) argues that at least half of the jobs in today’s climate is useless. He eloquently categories these useless jobs into 5 different categories: Flunkies (who serve to make their bosses feel important), Goons (unpleasant, often harmful work done on behalf of bosses), Duct Tapers (providers of temporary fixes that prolong actual solutions), Box Tickers (meaningless work to make bosses look good), and Taskmasters (creators of more meaningless work simply to fulfill their own role). I outline these groups because everyone can think of a few types of jobs that fall into these categories.

I don’t think it’s a hard stretch to understand Graeber’s premise. When we start to unpack the usefulness of different roles or positions within various companies, the thread starts to unravel. If we keep pulling and look at the usefulness of entire companies or industries even; widget producers or app designers - there are plenty of people out there doing work which might make our lives easier, but really aren’t required. When we unravel the whole thread and look at the usefulness of the capitalism economy compared to the work actually required to be alive as a human being… well, there’s just a lot of us out there that are focused on making ends meet and then outsourcing the work required for actual survival.

Here’s what I mean: few of us build our own homes, make our own clothes, grow our own food. Most of us look to others to do that labour (often undercutting those in the global south in the process, but that’s another conversation for another day) and spend our time instead on work that makes us money, or caring for others so they or their families can focus on making money.

That first group of work, though, is what I’ve been exploring in a kind of reverse step back into the idea of slow work. I think this differentiation is important when we think about slow work. Because honestly, you can do any work slowly, and, yes, it might constitute practice and help you slow down your pace of life, but I personally find that the slow work that is truly rewarding is when I’m doing tasks that actually contribute to survival.

(For the sake of this post, I’m going use the term “well being” instead of survival because I think that survival elicits visions of hunter-gatherer-fighting-off-wild-animals type activities, and I mean something more modern: the act of being alive in the 21st century. In this context, well being means just that; the activities that keep us not just alive, but alive and well.)

The problem with looking at slow work within the context of a capitalist economy is that it is instantly deemed as inefficient. There’s not at lot of room for slow work within capitalism. As the saying goes: time is money. It’s hard to make time and space to do things inefficiently.

It feels much better to explore slow work from this lense of well being where we aren’t worried about efficiency or monetary value and instead can gauge value from emotional health, connectedness, and even physical wellness. There’s also significant value as we explore the notion of decolonial or anticolonial work both at the level of individual and societal change. Slow, meaningful work can provide a glimps into a world where value isn’t measured solely in dollars, breaking through the veil of capitalist realism.

I want to take an important pause to note that this work is not available to everyone and there is an immense privilege to be able to step outside of the capitalist economy to explore these practices. I am lucky to have my basic needs met through self-employment where I manage my own time with the security of generational wealth. I do believe that it is an important task for those who share this privilege with me, to do the work to dismantle the systems that prevent others from being able to have control of their time and energy without fear of losing that which they need to be able to survive: a home, clothing, food, safety, etc. Lack of these basic necessities is becoming more and more of a reality for people in our own communities, and across the world. It is scary times.

For those of us with this privilege who wish to dismantle these systems of oppression, one of the areas that I’ve explored with others extensively is raising children, especially within the context of education. Unschooling is a natural landing point for those who can recognize that colonial capitalist nature of the modern education system grooms our children to take their place in a culture that perpetuates oppression based on things like race, class, gender, and more. Further, the idea of unschooling as intersectional helps unsilo different pieces of these systems to build a more equitable culture.

In my last post, I wrote specifically about how the purpose of my parenting may be to help create alternative possibilities for the next generation within the tightening hold of late stage capitalism. Working together with our young people to design new approaches and systems that help us break free of capitalist realism and reject the voice of Mother Culture seems like a worth place to put our time and energy as anti-capitalist, anti-oppressive parents.

This shift in focus poses some internal conflict for me. For the last few years, my parenting and unschooling has been grounded firmly in the consent-based approach. Plainly, this means that I don’t force my kids to do things they don’t want to do. This usually looks like some heavy negotiations where both parties present their sides and work together to find solutions to meet everyone’s needs. It’s not always pretty and sometimes both parties feel like they’re losing out, but I have found this approach to work well and mirror the type of behaviour that I’ve found in larger communities that are grounded in equity and fairness.

But now, if I’m looking to help my kids learn to slow down and focus on meaningful work rooted in well being and decolonial values, it may not look very unschool-y. It might not consent based. It might not be gentle. I might have to push them harder to do things that they don’t necessarily want to do but I’ve come to a place where I think that its okay to do so and here’s why:

There’s a fundamental difference between pushing kids to take part in meaningless work that only contributes to the failing capitalist economy versus doing the slow work that contributes to well being. The latter group isn’t always fun. It’s not always pleasurable, especially to get started. Sometimes I have to push my own self to do this work and it’s always going to be easier to fall back on Youtube and video games which seems to be the common place in today’s culture with young people across the board.

There’s slight irony when you look at this division of labour between what contributes to a capitalist economy versus what contributes to actual well being when it comes to our modern education system. Almost EVERYTHING we push on kids in school is grounded in the former. And it’s funny for me because kids can tell this. It’s why many of them hate school - they know it’s useless. They know it’s grooming them to become Flunkies, Goons, Duct Tapers, Box Tickers, and Taskmasters. They can feel it.

Conversely, if we look at younger kids and the type of work we present them as “early skills development”, it’s mostly slow work grounded in well being. It’s rooted in patience and we reward perseverance, and it is often well loved by the kids. As we transition them into older and older grades, we remove this type of work and replace it with work that will make them good labourers in capitalism, and that’s when we see the love of learning fizzle.

My secret hope is that my kids (and others who are living in consent-based relationships with adults) will see the value in this shift. I get it: it’s hard to explain late stage capitalism to young people, and harder even to explain capitalist realism in language that they comprehend - but it’s possible. I hope that explaining and showing the value in slow work grounded in well being will resonate with them so that there isn’t need for push back. I hope that the rewards that I feel when I do this kind of work are universal and that they’ll feel it too. We spent an afternoon stacking firewood last week and I could feel the sense of satisfaction that we shared collectively when admiring the finished product.

I have a feeling that that collective satisfaction is worth the effort at the individual level, and that the rewards of improved mental and physical well being will be enough. Moreover, I think that the long term effects of grounding ourselves in this work is a direct “fuckyou” to the pressures of late stage capitalism, and if I know kids, they’ll be all about getting behind that rebellion.