wendell for wednesday

At our house, we’ve been doing a lot of thinking about work lately: what is “good work,” what do we want to teach our children about work (and how that compares to what they actually observe and learn from us day-to-day), how we want to spend our days, what the culture says about work, and so on. Of course, Wendell has much to say on this topic. I just spent the last several minutes reading this essay on his opinions on women and feminism, and, as usual, my brain is spinning a bit. I can’t help but think back to the book, Radical Homemaker (my thoughts here) because so much of what Hayes articulates in her book Berry has already said elsewhere and long ago.

So here’s today’s Wendell for Wednesday:

But there is a paradox in all this, and it is as cruel as it is obvious: as the emphasis on individual liberty has increased, the liberty and power of most individuals has declined. Most people are now finding that they are free to make very few significant choices. It is becoming steadily harder for ordinary people—the unrich, the unprivileged—to choose a kind of work for which they have a preference, a talent, or a vocation, to choose where they will live, to choose to work (or to live) at home. . . . We try to be “emotionally self-sufficient” at the same time that we are entirely and helplessly dependent for our “happiness” on an economy that abuses us along with everything else. We want the liberty of divorce from spouses and independence from family and friends, yet we remain indissolubly married to a hundred corporations that regard us at best as captives and at worst as prey.

I’d love to hear your two cents in the comments!