I remember a McKinsey women’s event where fifteen or twenty young consultants from the San Francisco office sat around a glossy oval table listening to a junior partner speak about her successful ascent. The topic turned to work-life balance, as it always did at such events, and she advised us as follows: If there is a household task where it matters that you do it, then do it. If the task is agnostic to you, then outsource it. I vividly remember her examples:

Putting your children to bed? It matters that it’s you—you should do it.

Laundry? Doesn’t matter who does it—outsource it.

Made sense to me. I was twenty-two. She was successful. We were in an office with marble countertops in the kitchenettes. Who was I to argue?

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For me, looking back on that advice now with over a decade of distance, I am most interested in what that junior partner’s advice implies about living—that tasks like laundry folding don’t matter, and anyone who is able to should reinvest the time that we would spend folding laundry into higher-value activities, namely those that make money. I imagine this taken to the extreme: an allegedly frictionless life with no laundry folding and no cooking, no dishes and no cleaning sinks, no grocery shopping. Our cultural vision for the good life is shaped by powerful people at top, and this seems to be the vision. Erase that menial stuff, only do the good stuff.

Here’s the problem I see with that: optimizing for the most possible paid working time would make me absolutely miserable. In the job at McKinsey, which I hated, more hours would only make me sicker and meaner. In a job I love, writing, I simply cannot be genuinely productive for more than a handful of hours each day.

An ideal is emerging for me, a triad of types of work: The work you do to get paid, the life maintenance tasks like laundry, and the creative things you do for you. The economy-oriented work, the basic needs work, and the soul work, each of which brings something different to a full life. Three legs that create a solid foundation. I think the benefits of the paid work and the creative work are more obvious, but I would argue the maintenance work also has benefits. The role of these tasks in this triad is to anchor me to the world. They remind me how life is sustained. They remind me to value such work at the level it should be valued.

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