What non-monetary benefits do I get from my job?
My fiance and I have started discussing having a kid. Loosely, in the distant future, pls don’t be alarmed. It’s very hard to avoid the subject, at our age. Since the day I turned thirty, I’ve been reminded of my biological clock every six minutes. This is annoying, but I am grateful for the acknowledgement that women’s time is more valuable than men’s.
We started to do some concrete financial planning. It hasn’t been easy. I emailed daycares to ask how much they cost, and one told me that it depends on the baby. So now, not only do I have to make sure my baby is healthy, I have to make sure they’re cheap. What is the right pre-natal supplement for that??? And now, about half a dozen daycares in my neighborhood are asking me to bring my “baby” in for a tour, which means I need to find a baby to borrow. LMK if you have one.
As we got deeper into these conversations and began generating spreadsheets of income and expenses, we began to look at our own careers to figure out how we’d cover all the childcare hours. My fiance has a full-time job and we’re both on his healthcare. I’m a freelancer with about six jobs at any given moment, all of which pay different amounts. So if one of us were to give up parts of our career, it would have to be me.
First, I should describe how I make money. It’s not obvious; many of my closest friends don’t know, and to be honest, I’m also confused. I could say I’m a “writer,” except… that wouldn’t really clear things up at all.
I work about sixty hours/week. I have a regular freelance writing job, which takes about twenty hours/week. That’s the only thing I have to do, every single week. I also pick up ad hoc freelance work for a variety of other online publications, but I can go weeks without any of these. That’s another ten hours/week, on average. I make some income off my social media and various subscription services, and I put in about five hours/week to grow those. I also pick up as much corporate work as I can get because it pays the most hourly. Sometimes, it’s very quick – posting a picture of me with a product, for example. Other times, I’m asked to give a presentation to a company, which requires a large amount of work over a few weeks for a fairly large payout (LMK if you want me to come talk to your company!!!). On average, this is about five hours/week.
Then, there’s my unpaid work. Or, as I like to think of it, my delayed-paid work. It’s between me & God, not the IRS (because I don’t make money on it… not because I’m cheating on my taxes, okay???). I’m working on a feature film. On weeks when I’m doing rewrites, I can sink twenty hours per week. On other weeks, I spend time on my stand up, or other longer-term projects with a nebulous pay-out. Or I try to relax, but the prospect of “trying” is often so overwhelming that I just give up and return to work.
So, if I only did my consistent writing freelance job and my corporate work, I could work 25 hours per week and make about 85% of my current income.
I have a unique situation, but the choice itself is more general. Plenty of women who can’t stop working full-time make time for childcare by choosing to get off a management track, to take a lower-paying remote job, to cut their hours, etc. It is what Sheryl Sandberg would call “leaning out.”
On the one hand, it’s a nice option. As a child, I had this impression of stay-at-home moms as very unhappy. As an adult, I tried Xanax and realized a lot of the people I thought were unhappy were actually just medicated. Having the flexibility and financial freedom to cut back on hours – even if it’s just to save money on childcare – is privilege. And working, it turns out, is a lot of work. Growing up in the 90s, I was told a career was the ultimate source of fulfillment for a woman. But work itself hasn’t quite lived up to the hype. This isn’t work’s fault, necessarily. Any number of things didn’t meet the hype. I sat through hours and hours of sex-ed as a teenager, but I never once got an STD. What a rip-off; what am I going to text my exes about now?
On the other hand, there’s a reason the last fifty years have been good for women. I don’t want to discount, like, three waves of feminism (I’ve lost track of what wave we’re on, but you get it). Right now, one of the highlights of my day is cleaning while listening to a podcast (as I said, I can’t relax). If I had to do this for hours per day, would I resent it?
This is all very hypothetical; I’m not even pregnant. I’m the opposite of pregnant, which is to say, I have an IUD, I drank three Cold Brews yesterday, and I just asked my two-year-old niece if she thought she could change her own diaper. But like all choices, I think it’s best approached with maximum information. Before I choose to work fewer hours, I want to know exactly what I’m giving up.
So, I decided to make a list of benefits I get from my career, besides money (which is, to be fair, the Big One).
Here’s what I have:
something to talk about at dinner parties, since it’s way too depressing to talk about politics these days
an excuse for checking my emails constantly. Truly, I’m just addicted to the dopamine, but I can pretend it’s because I might miss an ~opportunity~
a thing to tell the lady at the DMV I need to get back to. This won’t make them see me any faster, it will just make me feel in control
a reason to be at my computer. When I spend three hours reading about Lucy Letby, at least I can claim I had to be online for work. And the article just…appeared
independence, which I’m also starting to think might not live up to the hype (more on that in a later post)
occasionally, celebrities put my tweets in their instagram stories. this isn’t technically “paid” work, but it is one of the best things that can happen to me professionally
talking to adults
the dream of hitting it big. with one of my tweets.
an understanding of what makes people so busy. this helps me relate to my friends who work in finance
an excuse for very rarely reading books
enjoyment. This is huge, but it also gives me this sense that if I take time off for a while, I’ll find my way back to it. But I know it’s harder than it looks.
a sense of personal accomplishment. On an intellectual level, I know this is a big one. On an emotional level, I also get a sense of personal accomplishment from doing laundry or any number of sit-ups.
a sense of purpose? question mark because … is my purpose to write things at a computer? is my purpose to have a baby?? sometimes, I think my purpose might be to wander around grassy fields and look at sheep. It’s very hard to make choices.
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