Sticks with me

 I admit, I sometimes hate-read Metafilter a little. I am not a member so I don't post over there (there are reasons I'm not a member; they are similar to the reasons why I don't hang out on Mastodon much any more - basically feeling I don't quite fit in and a few people making me feel like I'm not smart enough for the room).

but once in a while there are useful things. I still think about "Ask vs.. Guess Culture," which I learned about over there, and also the idea of "pointy" vs. "round" personality types (in short: pointy types care a LOT and sometimes unnecessarily much about what other folks think; round types are much less anxious)

(And ask culture and guess culture: ask culture are the "never hurts to ask!" people who sometimes ask for way too much, and guess culture are people who ONLY ask if they think a yes answer is likely because (if you are guess culture like me) you don't want to put them out or embarrass them with an unreasonable request or (if you are some forms of ask culture) you are simply passive-aggressive and want people to read your mind)

And then today. There was an article linked about "Executive Function Theft" and like a lot of emotional-labor type things people probably think it applies in more cases than it really does but the fundamental idea is that there are some people who get lots of tasks offloaded onto them, and it takes time and energy and brain-functioning to cope with those, and it draws you away from (either) your primary purpose or the creative things you wish to do.

I see this a lot. A lot, a lot. A simple example is the decline in customer service to the point where most of the tasks are "automated" except really the customer does them. So, like, you order your food at a kiosk, punching buttons to request what you want, and sliding your card through (and more likely than not, being asked to apply a tip, which I HOPE goes to the unseen folks preparing the food, but who knows) and then go to a window where your bowl of food is shoved out to you, and then you go and find a place to sit and eat. And it's not relaxing, and the restaurant I know that went to that has not lowered its prices in return for reducing its staff to a bare minimum)

Or, I see it on campus: a lot of tasks offices on campus used to do, we now have to do. Instead of printing off originals of the documents you need copies of (e.g., an exam) and then filling out a sheet and leaving it in the office (in the old, old days the secretary made daily runs to the print shop, at the end of every day, and dropped off copying and then picked up the previous day's stuff) or filling out the sheet and taking it over yourself and waiting while they did it (and sometimes, you know? That was a nice little break in the day. And the now-retired Print Shop Lady was a nice person and it was pleasant to chat with her for a few minutes while you waited). But now - since the pandemic - there's an online form you must fill out. And it's long, and like three different places you have to fill in your department name, and it's tedious, and it doesn't always autofill. And once or twice things have gone wrong, like somehow they made double the copies of one thing and none of the other, and when you call to ask, people are a little snippy with you, and it's just kind of demoralizing. Or with IT - one of our subscription softwares expired and I asked them about the renewal code. Last year, they sent me a code and said "have each of your students enter this on the lab computer they are using" and it was a mess, just a giant mess, we couldn't get it to work. So they had to come over anyway. At least this year when I reminded them (it expires the same time every year so they should know about doing the renewal) they said they'd come and do it in the lab for us (because a couple students really messed up computers last year, I guess) but "here's the code you can do it on your office one"

The problem is? There's a wizard to guide you in the program BUT there are several different pathways depending (heh: "Choose your own adventure"?) but it's not immediately clear which path, so I had to do trial and error a couple times to get it to work. Which eats up energy and brainspace and emotional "spoons" and goodwill. 

And there are more things: textbook requesting is a lot more complex and annoying now than it was in the early 2000s. It's not that we've gotten so very much larger as a school (though it's possible, between the bad budget cuts of 2016 and the pandemic, office staffs have gotten smaller) but a lot of this is the Automation Is The Way Of The Future and Everything Should Be Integrated Into One Platform ("one platform to rule them all"?) and it's NOT more efficient, at least on the faculty side.

 And a student employee who was supposed to give us some important information to use in midterm grade posting was slow to get it to those of us who needed it, and sent it in a VERY disorganized form, and a couple of my students wound up with incorrect grades, and now they're angry at ME even though I fixed it and explained. 

And so, this afternoon, I dealt with several issues instead of doing the research I planned on, and it's now quarter past 4, and I have AAUW at 6:30 so......(blows raspberry) I guess I do it tomorrow afternoon and come in a bit on Saturday as well.

And anyway. "Theft of Executive Function"

And there was a useful comment, at least useful to me, from Jane the Brown. I don't know how much of it is echt Buddhism (I know very little about Buddhism) but Jane (am presuming she is a "she") mentioned the ideas of Entropic Labor and Heroic Labor, where entropic is the annoying stuff you do every day and is never done, like washing dishes, and heroic is like..... I don't know, patching a hole in the roof,  and .....that's it

What I do, what I do ALL THE TIME NOW? Purely entropic labor. I grade the exams. I write a new exam. I grade that exam. I grade the labs. I prep the next lab. I respond to student e-mails. I soothe people's upsets and hurt feelings (Quis consolator consolatorem?). And I push off my research - which is probably the closest thing I do in my sorry life to heroic labor to another day. Nothing is every done; I never feel like I've fixed anything. And that's the source of my distress.

And yes, a friend on Bluesky reminded me that in fact, teaching people SO THEY CAN GRADUATE AND GO ON IN LIFE could be a form of heroic labor, but you know? My part in that is very small and I don't tend to see the outcomes of it, and it's easy to get discouraged. 

(And I also wonder if some of the "sickness" in our society, where you see some men writing about "the old days were better when we regularly went off to war or 'discovered' countries and subjugated the indigenous people there" is because MOST of us are stuck in endless loops of entropic labor)

And Jane talks about trying to rethink it:

Buddhism works with this, getting people to rake the sand that will be blown into a state of disorder again. The idea is that leaning in to the unending and "futile" nature of the task will help you stop trying to turn it into Heroic Labour and you'll become mindful and do it for its own sake and the peace it brings. 

I can't quite with that though. I'd probably make a poor Buddhist. I am not good at accepting the fleeting nature of everything. (I just learned this morning that Interweave Knits is apparently going digital only, no more print magazines, after next spring, and it really fouled my mood for the rest of the day). And especially not when it's stuff like filling out dumb online forms that take three times as long as they should. 

I don't know what the answer is. Well, I do, but it's not something I'm going to get: I need more things that feel DONE and that feel IMPORTANT and that give the "dopamine hit*" that heroic labor supposedly does. But especially, something LASTING and that MATTERS. I feel more and more like nothing I do really matters, or rather, that it does not matter that I am doing it; there are hundreds, maybe thousands of people in this country that could do exactly what I do, and probably do it better.

(*I am not convinced that the whole "activities as dopamine reward" is as much a thing as pop psychology makes it to be)

but still: I really wish I didn't have my time shredded into confetti every day by putting out little fires and doing the equivalent of endless sinks full of dishes.