Creeping normality: the impact of work on our lives

Dr. Harriet Fraad

In the slow march of time, what indicators does one use to recognize change?  Jared Diamond has employed the term “creeping normality”.  This is the idea that “a major change can be accepted as the normal situation if it happens slowly, in unnoticed increments”.  How does that relate to the world of work and happiness?

Dr. Harriet Fraad looks at connections between the political/economic life of the United States and the psychological life of the individual – how what happens on the large scale effects what happens on the small, individual-person scale.  There have been significant changes over time – whether you want to call it creeping normality or “creepy” normality, well I’ll get into that below.  Simply stated, though, Fraad’s thesis is this:

Capitalism, in its relentless search for more profit, has abandoned America and American families – the family of right-wing nostalgia is something that is destroyed by the capitalist system in the United States.  What has happened is American jobs have been computerized, mechanized, robotized and outsourced.  So instead of a scarce population that had to be paid well, particularly since the best jobs were given to white men, you now have the entire globe to exploit.  And wherever the ecological protections are the weakest and the wages are the lowest, and the protections of the workers is the lowest, you have capitalism going.  So most of our goods are now from China.  Everything is precarious: people’s jobs are precarious in this economy and their personal lives are utterly precarious.

So, yeah, there is this

The result is a laundry list of ills such as higher divorce rates, men feeling dislocated in society, women facing structural impediments to equal wages, longer work hours for all with lower pay, increased suicide rates, etc.  Today is definitely not the same a yesteryear.  But it goes unnoticed, or at least not commented upon in the mainstream (lamestream) media.  Dr. Richard Wolff describes more of the problem and perhaps a means of stopping people from thinking too much about the past:

According to the OECD, American working people do more hours of paid labor than the working class of any other country on the face of the earth. . .  The cost of this to our health, to our mental health, to our interpersonal relationships, to our sense of exhaustion and irritation with one another, is stupendous.  We are 5% of the world’s population; we consume 65% of the world’s psychotropic drugs.  Now either you explain that by saying the United States is a population of drug addicts, or, if you reject that because it really is silly, then you have to look at what might make a perfectly reasonable population, which I think we are, function this way.  Well I think I’ve give you a clue – we work ourselves literally to death.

A difficult thing for me to grapple with is that some of the marketplace pressures (e.g. women feeling the need to join the workforce) at the same time overlap with movements for social justice (women on their own seeking the rights to access to jobs and equal wages).  Things get complex and influence each other.  What follows is a complex paragraph but it is how I conceive of things “working” together:

I view these changes over time taking place on sliding scales that run parallel to each other.  Like bars of a graphic equalizer – over time – they shift up and down.  For example, on one, women the opportunity for more freedom: employers have offered more positions and accept women working in their organizations. On another (keep in mind parallel) scale, there are the economic factors that have driven this move of women into the workplace, the need for one household to have two incomes in order to compensate for the flat-lining of income over time.  And on yet another scale is the social movement of women seeking their independence and getting their place at the table so to speak. Through their demonstrating and lobbying, women have more choices for work now and they are no longer narrowly constrained by socially-acceptable mores dictating that being a subservient, stay-at-home wife is the most legitimate life choice.

Our graphic equalizer bars go to 11

These graphic equalizer-type bars move up and down in relation to each to other: they are not locked together, though they do influence each other.  This, to me, is what is so fascinating, how things are related and influence each other.  How things change over time.  And that last bar is the most interesting one. And the most perplexing one.  This is how anyone – man or woman – may take control of their life.  Things don’t take place in a vacuum so taking control of one’s life must take into account what is going on in society and how things got to be that way.  Guess we’ll see what happens.