Society has a bias towards cold, hard cash.
Look, maybe it’s different where you live, but I’m writing at you from here in a cafe on a chilly autumn morning from the middle of a small Canadian city. Out the window it’s rush hour. Cars are zipping to and fro, on their way to real jobs. Folks are being so-called productive—at least according to the big churning wheels of corporate capitalism.
Me. I’ll settle into some contract work later, but for now I have the rare privilege to sit here with a cup of tea and spill my thoughts into the keyboard. I’m not making any money being here, typing, writing, doing this thing I’m doing—but I to think of myself as working at this moment, as cushy and non-traditional as it seems.
I’m basically self-employed, and the more I widen that definition the more I see a fit for how I spend my days.
It bugs a lot of people, though. I get it. I hear it. I internalize it.
Capitalism has a job-equals-paycheque bias.
For example, I spent four hours yesterday (as I write this) afternoon, a Sunday, sitting in front of my laptop working on a short story, drilling into the plot, agonizing over word choices, trying to figure out how to land a strange premise and turn it into an interesting plot.
I would say I was working.
The bias of society would tell you that I was dabbling in a creative hobby.
The barista who sold me my tea this morning? She is getting a paycheque, earning a wage, and she gets to go home later snug and secure knowing that she made bucks, did a job, and can tell people she’s employed. And she’s not wrong. She’s provided a service and a product and, yeah, I gave her money in exchange.
As a contrast, I sat here and did complex creative work, wrote something, shared something, made something—but because I did it for free (to many people) it doesn’t seem to count in the same way.
Am I wrong? Or have we built up our idea of value and worth on some skewed logic?