defiantly to the idea of not hiring one for his daughter’s upcoming fifth birthday, and of instead planning it himself. He could afford to hire a service, but why do it? It was a powerful symbol, so he felt, of his attachment to his daughter and to the idea of himself as a “hands-on dad.”
A third person drew the line on emotional detachment in the simple act of buying a gift for a colleague’s new baby:
The wife of a colleague had just given birth to a new baby. They had set up a gift registry at Babies “R” Us, so I went to my computer and clicked on the registry. There were about a dozen choices. I didn’t want to pick the most expensive, since I don’t know the couple that well. But I didn’t want to be cheap, so I didn’t choose the least expensive thing either. I aimed for something in the middle, gave my Visa details, and that was that. But then I felt strange. I hadn’t visited the baby. I hadn’t gotten in the car. I hadn’t looked over toys or baby clothing. I hadn’t wrapped the gift or written the card. I didn’t deliver the gift. I hadn’t even called to congratulate them on the birth! A month later I couldn’t remember what the gift was, only how much it cost. So I bought some little plastic measuring spoons, got in the car, and paid the family a visit.
If she could not even remember what she had given, this woman wondered, had she really given a gift at all? For a warm-hearted person, that felt too cold. So she did things—bought the plastic spoons, paid a visit—to express the degree of warmth that seemed right to her. She sensed that she had been too detached from the colleague, the mother, the baby, and the very idea of herself as a loving person. So she made up for it.
People also guarded against over-attachment. One kindly woman who was coping with both a husband and son in ill health drew the line at taking on an ill niece. “I’m a show-up person,” she declared, “but I can’t worry about Lily now. I have to watch that I don’t over-extend.” She had overextended herself in the past:
I was helping so many people, I felt like the old woman who lived in a shoe. Partly, it was a matter of timing; within one week, bad things happened to three people I love. But partly I just have to watch that I don’t over-do, because I get exhausted and then resent it—which I hate because then I’m not helping anyone.
We each set up terms of emotional engagement. We listen for bells signaling an “attachment alert.” In response, we extend our attachment here, decrease it there, to maintain those terms. Consciously or not, we try to avoid feelings of anxiety, fear, or sadness, which tell us when we have reached our symbolic limit. It is our desire to avoid those feelings that motivate us to work as hard as we do to set up the right degree of attachment to the world.
Most of the time, we do not notice what sets off our moments of attachment alert, nor could we coherently describe the exact terms of emotional engagement that these alerts help us maintain. It is only when we cross over one of the invisible boundaries between emotionally engaged enough and not enough that we find ourselves estranged—or, like Grace, in the company of others who are. An attachment alert goes off inside us not so much in response to what we are feeling as much as in response to how much we feel anything at all. As intimate life moves into the market, we continually ask just where, on the banks bordering this wide channel, it feels right. As the market frontier moves, so too does the language, the way of thinking and talking about relations, and the feeling rules that influence just what degree of attachment “feels right.”
In recent years, we have seen a rapid growth in personal services such as that which Evan offered Grace. Childcare workers, potty trainers, closet organizers, photo album assemblers, personal shoppers, physical trainers, eldercare workers, and grave beautification services now do what families, friends, and neighbors used to do in many communities (or which might not have gotten done at all). Such services save time, provide skill, and often help. But they also separate us from the acts by which we used to say how much we care. They shake up our terms of emotional engagement. This shake-up can alienate us from ourselves and others, but more often it sets us to doing the strangely invisible work of shoring up our bonds, in order to keep our personal life personal.
TWOCan Emotional Labor Be Fun?
In his 1776 An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith describes the hapless worker in a London pin factory standing for hours measuring pin after pin. In the 1867 first volume of Das Capital, Karl Marx takes us into the grueling twelve-hour day of a worker spinning, weaving, and dyeing wool in a Manchester cotton mill. For both authors, the iconic laborer was a man doing physical labor in a dreary factory. For Marx, the grim nineteenth-century factory—with its poor lighting, long hours, and low pay—oppressed the manual worker, whose focus on one tiny part of a larger process of production made him feel alienated from the things he made and from himself. For Smith, the pin-maker’s tedious task was the downside of a division of labor that nonetheless benefited the whole world. The Highland sheep-herder, living far from city factories, mastered many more skills and more greatly enjoyed his work than the city pin-maker, Smith noted, but he lived in a poorer world.
Neither Smith, who extolled the virtues of capitalism, nor Marx, its most powerful critic, could have envisioned the new iconic worker: a female service worker doing emotional labor. Nanny, childcare worker, nursing home attendant, call center employee, waitress, teacher, nurse—all such workers maintain voice-to-voice or face-to-face contact with clients and, in the course of doing so, perform emotional labor. This is the work of trying to feel the appropriate feeling for a job either by evoking or suppressing feelings—a task we accomplish through bodily or mental acts.1
Service jobs vary. For the psychotherapist, emotional labor requires years of training, a formal degree, and is central to the job; for the hairdresser, manicurist, physical trainer, wedding planner, or bartender—emotional labor requires no training or degree and is largely optional.2 One married mother of two in California told me in an interview I conducted for The Outsourced Self, “I have three mothers: my physical trainer, my masseuse and my psychotherapist. I’ll be going to them all until I die or they do.” In confessing a strong attraction to an older male colleague, she appealed to them all for advice: “My physical trainer is telling me, ‘He’s trying to seem cool because he’s so into you.’ My masseuse is telling me to take a vacation, and my therapist is helping me examine my marriage.”3
Some workers are superb natural therapists, while others do it poorly. Some manage emotion workers (head nurses, for example), while others are those managed by them (the nurses under supervision). Some work in teams; others alone. But for all of them, the same question comes up: Can emotional labor be fun? Or in a deeper sense, can it be meaningful?4
One can enjoy emotional labor immensely, I think, provided one has an affinity for it and a workplace that supports that affinity. Of the American childcare and eldercare workers I’ve interviewed, most expressed an affinity for the work they did. One nanny told me, “I’m a kid person. I climb right into the sandbox. I couldn’t handle working with the elderly.” I also heard eldercare workers express a special affinity for work with the elderly. “The lady I take care of reminds me a lot of my grandma,” one worker declared, “and I’m not one for kids.” Other workers were first drawn to their job on pragmatic grounds—the pay, the commute, the hours, or the availability of work—but later came to enjoy it.
But by itself, affinity does not tell us how much a worker loves her job. That is because we bring to work a certain idea about what it would take to love the job. Contained in that idea is what aspect of ourselves we wish to have affirmed, and people differ in what that aspect is. One person may be most gratified by the ability to provide for her family (a pragmatic source of meaning), or to serve God (devotional), or to seek opportunity (entrepreneurial), to overcome challenges (self-challenging), to exhibit great skill (professional pride), or to demonstrate one’s character as trustworthy, reliable, and helpful (to be a good person).5
