The World We Were Supposed to Want

[kimberlysteele]

The scene: a civilized neighborhood Christmas party in an upper-middle class home in the Midwestern US. The year: 1987. I distinctly remember one of the older neighborhood kids tell me his family was moving. Since his family's home was a perfectly adequate, roomy 4 bedroom, I asked why his family was moving away. His answer was because they "needed" a bigger home. Every 5-10 years they moved into a larger home after having enlarged whatever home they occupied. Their goal was ever-increasing real estate profits from ever-larger homes in a game that (for some people) does not end until they die and ostensibly pass the game pieces and board down to their children and grandchildren.

It Takes a Narrative

I often wonder how many memes it will take to grok the materialism of Millennials, the generation that claims to have rejected Boomer capitalism. Millennials often believe they are opting out of capitalism when the harsher truth is they've been cast out of elite circles and now lurk on the outsides, looking in. There is no opting out of capitalism -- though there are plenty of self-styled wokesters who preach about it while flipping their Thai hair weaves, eating salads of mostly store-bought ingredients off of Anthropologie plates, and broadcasting on TikTok. Nevertheless, the Millennial "I am a scrappy communist because I say I am" is a better narrative than the Office of Progress narrative, which is the idea that all functioning adults should be happy rotating from home cubicle to office cubicle, watching screens that tell them how to live at every opportunity while hopped up on injectable chemical concoctions.

Had my sex drive never asserted itself, I would have liked to have kept the trajectory I designed for myself at age 9: to work in an office, come home to a book-filled condominium on the second floor of a building in the town where I grew up, and to live my childless life between books, cats, and occasional solitary dinners outside my home with friends or family. I knew the exact place where I wanted to live. It was small consolation to realize I could not have afforded that condominium as a single spinster even if I had a much more lucrative job: the price of real estate was already soaring when I was in my teens and by the time I was in my late 20s, nobody with an income south of 60K could afford to live anywhere near my hometown in any sort of single family residence. By the time I was 25, it became perfectly apparent that if I wanted a condominium in such a nice place, I would have to marry a man in order for him to buy it for me, and that would have defeated the point as the whole fantasy was a lonely and solo one.

I flirted for a while with corporate jobs straight out of college. The pay I received was barely more than the babysitting gigs I had at age 14; it was laughable and pathetic. I wasn't willing to work my way up that degrading chain by trading all of my youthful energy for something that felt like a living hell. Plus the number of people able to benefit from the living hell was shrinking in the 1990s and is a great deal more diminutive now.

I Want You to Want Me

We are all supposed to want the elite Office of Progress lifestyle. You know the one: it involves driving the latest electric car, living in ever-larger homes, posting on social media, and drinking at least one Starbucks beverage a day. We are not supposed to think about how stupid it is to drive a car that is probably using electricity that originates from coal. Despite lip service given to greenwashing holidays like Earth Day, we are not supposed to consider the wastefulness of living in a big, mostly empty McMansion. As for social media, anyone who turns it off because it is boring or (GASP) does not have any presence at all on Insta, FB, Twitter, YT, etc. is considered a freak or an unfortunate. Those who reject Starbucks out of hand are just weird -- unwillingness to shell out six or more dollars for a mediocre calorie bomb of a drink is trés 1978, and not in a good way.

School

The point of public schooling in the 21st century is to neuter boys, often literally via the trans push, and condition the girls to work outside the home in the good old Office of Progress. My childhood was unhappy for one main reason: I did not sleep properly. Why could I not sleep properly despite having stable parents with no shortage of money? I was busy being conditioned to sit quietly in a desk dictating and absorbing elaborate orders. When I did not get along with other order-followers (who I was always being pitted against in academic and popularity contests) I was punished by ostracism. To think I could have been home actually learning for all those wasted years! 95% of my adult academic knowledge came from the 5% of free time when I could think unhindered on adequate sleep, far away from school. For instance, I learned most of what I know about plants from my mom and the books I used to identify common weeds from ages 13-19 during summers in Michigan. Cooking? That was learned from my mom and library books; the single Home Ec class I took in junior high was a farce. As far as English, the best way of getting me not to read a book is to put a deadline on it and mar it with a quiz or a test. Not that I was in any mood to learn while in school: I was so starved on every plane except the physical one, I wanted to kill myself. When etheric poverty is in full sway in the form of an ugly box one must sit in with other teenagers while being lectured by older inmates, there is nothing to improve the astral shield and hence nothing standing between the seedy lower astral and the developing mental sheath.

A Woman's Place is in the Home

If today's "liberated" woman was truly happy with working outside the home as a regular thing, we would not have seen so much outright sabotage designed to prolong the Panicdemic and to continue Zoom work-from-home schemes that are still going on to this day. The reason women want to stay home, including this woman, is because it is the magical formula of the woman to secure the homestead. Men were designed to hunt, to go to war, and to defend. Women were designed to make the home into a healing place where babies can grow into healthy adults and to give men a place worth defending. Without the healing influence of the home, we all feel more raw, vulnerable, exposed, and beaten by forces that are always getting at us. School is vile because it trains women to force themselves into the role of Atlas: winning bread outside the home and then having the double and triple roles of having the babies it is fed to and making it into sandwiches so everyone can have lunch. Anyone who thinks a woman can do all of these things and do them well is either smoking the strong stuff or has access to Supermom.

The consequences we all live down are all around us. Tired women who have nothing left after having to work all day end up with feral kids being raised by social media, or their husbands leave them because marriage is hard and it's twice as hard when there is nobody competent at home who can enchant the home into a protective symphony of astral, etheric, and physical shapes. Ugly environments of convenience attempt to replace craftsmanship and care, and though I am thankful for their gifts, I am also resentful that everything has to be so ugly and ignorant of etheric ebb and flow. I myself am an example of classic bad faith, caught between worlds while laboring outside the home and always schepping to make ends meet. I'm a long, long way from Buddha, renouncing my niceties and creature comforts to contemplate trees.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Yes to all those things.

Which is why I don't have a paying job (I cannot make myself utter the words "I don't work" or "I don't have a job"-- I just don't get paid money for it!)

But at the same time, I'm an introvert, and there are definitely times when, after being around my kids 24/7 for weeks on end, I *long* for a job. Not for the money, not for the status or the supposed fulfillment of a career. Frankly, I dream of stocking shelves on an overnight shift. No, the appeal is a regularly scheduled time to go do something alone without talking to other people, nobody needing cuddles or reassurance, no household crises that everybody looks to me to solve...

I know how much of a fantasy that is, of course. It's just that even doing the "right" thing can have its aspects of imbalance. Modern homemaking is itself deficient in many ways-- even if I'm not away at a job, all my neighbors are, so it's in an empty neighborhood. My kids don't have the options I had in the 80s: within biking distance I had two aunts, four houses where my mom trusted the adults enough to let us spend the day there, several elderly neighbors we'd drop in on (whom my mom had known since her own childhood), my friend's grandmother who always had carrot cake, and the public library and the bay were in bike-reach as well. My kids? We live in a sketchy neighborhood, and all our relatives are at least 2 hours away by car. They have *none* of that. So they're at home more, and we're obliged to put them in the car and take them elsewhere to see relatives, have a non-ghetto social existence... in order to afford a safe neighborhood where they could have more physical freedom, I'd have to go back to work.

Everything's a tradeoff.

[kimberlysteele]

Thank you. I could not be around kids 24/7. I would be tearing my hair out -- yes, I would long to stock shelves, or shelve books, or to be alone. It's bad enough with three cats in the house... supposedly they should be entertaining each other but I often feel like a referee.

Back in the day, we had a whole network of neighbors and people who lived in town who weren't even family but who acted as side-parents. I knew every family on my block except for the psycho couple at the end of the block who shot at various animals with a pellet gun. I used to pick tiny bouquets of wildflowers and bring them to each neighbor. I think I was seven. By the late 80s, pretty much everyone had moved away and two little girls who picked flowers actually picked the cultivated flowers out of one neighbor's yard and attempted to sell them to other neighbors. They were hellions with (understandable) behavioral problems whose parents were in the midst of a terrible divorce. I feel bad for those girls: it's obvious they witnessed parents argued about money, because otherwise they would not have bothered trying to profit from selling flowers from questionable sources. And kudos to them for trying to take matters into their own hands from a young age. It's just so terribly tragic that parenting and the neighborhood network itself had so obviously disintegrated by the mid-80s. Nowadays, it's mostly helicoptered kids and lots of divorced or divorcing parents. There are a lucky few whose parents stay together for the long haul. Though in the old days, you had lots of couples who stayed together who would have been better off apart. Like you say, everything is a tradeoff!

[(Anonymous)]

In many ways the town, and the neighborhood, that I grew up in, were ten years behind the times, in the best ways. It helped that we lived in the house my mom grew up in. My own family is part of the move-to-another-town-for-a-job world, and suffers the resulting lack of intergenerational/geographic *context*.

"Side-parents" :) yeah. And even so, my friends' parents were very hands-off. Barely saw them except for the occasional offer of a snack. But my own parents (rightly) trusted them not to be creeps, or to have drugs in the house, or to be watching explicit movies with kids around. Safe. That's all that was required.

I have zero neighbors I'd place in this category-- intact homes with a mom and a dad are nonexistent here. It's all single moms, kids being raised by grandparents, and houses where you can't even tell who the parents are because of the rotating merry-go-round of unfamiliar adults cycling in and out of the household. Significant number of kids with obvious behavior problems. I can't tell if this is a function of our income (we live on a single income, so we live in a single-income sort of neighborhood... but in our tax bracket, single-income homes are nearly all single-parent homes), or just the new normal. Both, I think.

[kimberlysteele]

A friend of mine -- single parent, of course -- came home to find her kids watching Legends of the Fall with the sitter. Both her girls were under the age of 8 and were severely traumatized by the film, which includes lots of sex scenes and a teenage soldier suffocating to death via poison gas. What the hell kind of idiot sitter allows children to watch Legends of the Fall? I would have been PISSED.

[methylethyl]

I've been scoping out the college girls at church for babysitter potential. But it's tough working up the courage to let somebody else watch them... for reasons like that!

[kimberlysteele]

As long as the babysitter is vetted, I wouldn't let my "it happened to a friend" horror story stop you from hiring a sitter. My friend should have made it clear that anything outside of Rated G movies was off limits. Personally, I would forbid my sitter from allowing my kids to watch Bambi, Snow White, or Dumbo as they are all traumatic and scary. Disney is sketchy -- if I had kids, I would make sure I watched it first or at least read the reviews.

That said, I was babysat and actually it was my beloved aunt who let me watch the worst/best movies... and here I am, all alive and well-adjusted and s**t. You've done a fine job raising them and it's good for them to be babysat (babysitted?) because it teaches them responsibility, maturity, and to behave themselves when Mom isn't watching.

[methylethyl]

Plus, it's been forever since we got to do anything without them-- you need a date night now and then!

a valueable rant, imho

[ehu]

Thank you for this. A timely nudge for those of us on the fence about home-schooling!

Apropos sacred homemaking,
when may we expect your book?

Re: a valueable rant, imho

[kimberlysteele]

Aww, thanks for asking. Swear to Dog this is the longest I have ever taken to write (and re-write) a book. I am shooting to solicit a publisher in 2024.

I wish I had been home-schooled. It wasn't even on the radar back in my day.

[causticus]

One of the great modern American myths is the notion that women didn't do any work prior to being yanked out of the home and thrust into the corporate world. Of course, if work is narrowly-defined as only the kinds of productive activity that generate W2 and 1099 forms, then sure, there might be a grain of truth to that myth. But of course, that's not the reality on the ground at all.

Also interesting how women quickly went from being incubators to being "empowered" tax cows and corporate servitors. Today the former is considered to by awfully-awful oppression and the latter is totally "stunning and brave" freedom that should constantly be celebrated and praised. The whole "boss babe" (i.e. woman with masculine, aggressive personality) meme is used to prop up the latter. In reality, a man who has to deal with all sorts of BS for 8+ hours a day at work most certainly does not want to come home to more of that. Women being shamed and gaslist into adopting a competitive demeanor has created the grotesque harpy caricature we all know and not-love today.

[kimberlysteele]

It's as if they thought housework would do itself just because women had access to in-home washing machines and vacuum cleaners... sheesh. We're still just glorified incubators. The difference now is that we're expected to earn grocery and housing money while being incubators, often literally: most women work nearly the entire time they are pregnant. Plus every office I ever worked in was a sea of women and a sprinkling of beta males, yet upper management was always 90% men, because nobody can climb to the top and be a halfway-decent mom, and most women choose to be halfway-decent moms once they have kids.

[causticus]

From the POV of management, Beta Males are great (as in, unthreatening) office fixtures. Nothing disrupts an orderly office dynamic like a good-looking, charming/charismatic young man who ain't the boss. These days though it's kind of dangerous to be a Beta Male in a thoroughly-feminized office place. There's no shortage of angry HR harridans chomping at the bit at the opportunity to tear down and ruin some weak, docile male. Increasing numbers of young men these days want no part of this nonsense. Instead they're learning hands-on trades, where if successful they end up making much more money than office plankton, have zero college debt, and zero office politics BS to put up with. If I had that kind of knowledge and had gone that route when I was younger, my family would have probably seen me as a class traitor for skipping out on college, LOL.

Regarding women still being thought of as incubators:

On the contrary, the family-rearing expectations, at least among the comfortable classes, have been melting away with each passing decade. Mainstream "progressive" PMC culture is now thoroughly anti-natalist, except among maybe the top tier. The Boomer myth of blank slate "equality" (i.e evolution miracuously stops at the neck) has become a dogma that's ruthlessly-enforced by the dominant institutions. Women are now told that they need to become like men and spent their most fertile years being miserable (so empowering!) 8+ hours a day rotting away in a cubicle and sucking up to some boss who couldn't care less about them as people. By the time they start thinking about "settling-down" and starting a family with Mr. Reliable, 95% of their eggs are gone for good.

My point is that (as JMG likes to say), the opposite of one bad idea is another bad idea. The sterile 1950s vision of the atomized nuclear family in suburbia (and the bored, pill-popping housewife) was one very bad idea. Second Wave Feminism was a reaction to that and introduced some equally bad ideas. Now, the so-called "tradcon" element on the new right aspires to return to the previous bad idea. All current-day political ideologies suffer from a failure of imagination. I just hope the inevitable "Second Religiousness" backlash, whenever it may come along, isn't nearly as terrible as the woke plague, and hopefully not led by disgruntled PMCs like Naomi Wolf.

Sorry for the rant; things are a mess right now! (understatement of the century)

[kimberlysteele]

Was it you who said nobody should work in a cubicle? Someone said it on this blog and I agree. "Increasing numbers of young men these days want no part of this nonsense. Instead they're learning hands-on trades, where if successful they end up making much more money than office plankton, have zero college debt, and zero office politics BS to put up with." GOOD. My mechanic, who is indie and not part of any corporate chain aside from whatever deals he does with parts manufacturers, says he just hired an older, knowledgeable guy to help him at the shop and he's hoping it will work out. He says there are lots of hungry, know-almost-nothing young men wanting to essentially apprentice for him, but of course since we are in the modern era, they want to be paid.

The Trades

[(Anonymous)]

Office politics exist in all wage jobs. They may look different in the trades, but everyone is still trying to get the best tools/work/people within the shop environment. The people who lose the competition for those things are still unhappy and complain.

Re: The Trades

[causticus]

For sure. My most miserable job experience was in an all-male, blue collar type shop environment. It was an etheric hellscape (imagine 50+ wifi radios running at the same time within a confined, windowless space), and a few of the coworkers were totally cuttthroat and ice-cold, not to mention the presence of a sociopathic boss.

Re: The Trades

[methylethyl]

The sociopathic boss will tend to attract the nasty employees.

[causticus]

I can't remember if it was me who said that. But it sounds like something I might say.

On your mechanic and his aspiring apprentices, it sounds like a whole culture and support-system for apprenticeship needs to be rebuilt from the ground up. Much of the old infrastructure for that seems to have rotted away.

[lp9]

So much of the historical "knowledge" about women's work is just class-based perceptions. Sure, lots of middle class women were homemakers around mid-century before taking office jobs, but my grandmas both worked all throughout the 1950s and after (one was a teacher; the other at a bakery, lingerie store, and other shops). And my GREAT-grandmas were also employed in the 1920s-1940s (one cleaned houses and hung wallpaper; the other was a postmaster and telephone operator--they were both homemakers, cooks, and did work on their farms at the same time). One of my great-grandmas was the sole breadwinner for the family for about 10 years while her husband farmed and took care of the kids since he was laid off during the Depression.

[kimberlysteele]

Notice how much of it was women doing etheric labor (a.k.a. "housework") for richer women. Let's take laundresses for example: If they had a choice, I would place bets most of them would have preferred to stay home doing their own etheric labor for their own families instead of busting their butts cleaning and pressing other people's dirty laundry.

[(Anonymous)]

All of my grandparents were solidly middle-class and raising kids in the 50s. One grandmother worked for the sheriff's office, and the other grandmother was a homemaker... but only because she had crippling arthritis and could not work (she'd worked previously as a secretary, to support herself and my young uncle, after her first husband died). She felt lousy about it, too, because all her peers had jobs, and she felt like she should be contributing to the household. Sort of to make up for it, she wound up being the driver for the whole neighborhood's worth of kids-- she had a car and she was available and by golly she was going to make herself useful somehow. One of her sisters had a lifelong career with Bell telephone as a regional manager, having worked her way up from switchboard operator-- that job outlasted both her marriages. Another sister ran a deli with her husband for many years, and a third retired from a long career with a department store, where she made custom drapes (husband ditched her with 2 small kids to support). People now have weird ideas about what the 50s were actually like for women-- maybe it depended on where you lived, but looking at people I know, I get the impression that the two-parent nuclear family with a working husband and SAHM is more the exception than the rule.

The generation of women before that... weren't exactly slouches either. Just off the top of my head, in my great-grands' generation: two aunties who owned and ran an ice-cream parlor, one who played the organ for both the church, and for silent movies, one who ran a small hotel, one who was in charge of payroll at a military base, one career nutritionist, and one too busy running a rural homestead to have a paying job (don't ever tell a farmwife she "doesn't work"!).

So where *did* that housewife stereotype come from, exactly?

[kimberlysteele]

How odd -- my mom and my aunt both worked for Ma Bell back in the day and my mom was a very well-liked switchboard operator.

I find it interesting that women who stay home or run cottage industries (home-based businesses) are still seen as lazy because they did not much else outside of raising children. As if keeping a home and raising children into adulthood wasn't hard work...

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, the idea that being at home means you're doing nothing, or picturesquely chirping around your house in lipstick and pearls while vacuuming... is a bit of a mystery. Probably a product of appliance advertising.

Trying to keep up with the household inertia and chaos, while homeschooling (or even with just little kids not at daycare)... People seriously do not realize how much harder that job is when you are never at the house *without* the kids. It's shoveling snow in a blizzard. I *wish* I could run a cottage industry, and my hat's off to ladies who manage it.

[kimberlysteele]

That's why it's so grotesque that childcare workers are paid so little, and for that matter, home nurse aides. Basically the childcare worker or home nurse aide is expected to do all the tasks that should either fall to the mother or to the adult child who looks after his elderly/disabled relative/parent. Etheric labor is taken for granted and undervalued at every turn.

[methylethyl]

It's worse than that, though. Expecting someone who has no emotional or future investment in those children, to do all the thankless work of cleaning up after them, wiping butts and noses, etc. *and* paying them poorly for it... does not attract quality labor, and frankly invites abuse. The occasional reports of ill-treatment by daycare workers are not surprising-- what's surprising is that you're not hearing about it every day. I spent a lot of time in before- and after-school care, and remember the ladies in charge of that as very brittle and grumpy... and is that any wonder? Fortunately, they were responsible and did their jobs, and nobody got hurt. But I think that was a pretty normal daycare environment: loud, chaotic, and overseen by tired women who'd had about enough of small children. Even where it isn't abusive, that's not exactly healthy for anybody involved.

Total polar opposite of when I'd go spend a month with my grandma in the summers. She was old and couldn't keep up, but she liked me, wasn't cranky, left me largely to my own devices (the gift of quiet and boredom!), and would show me how to do stuff if I asked-- she taught me to crochet, embroider, read a pattern, use a sewing machine, face a collar, hem a skirt, make paper dolls, cut snowflakes... all the cool stuff my mom didn't have time for. She was a lousy cook, but in all other respects, I think she had the "etheric work" thing nailed down. The house was always pleasant.

[illyria2001]

Women have always worked outside the home. Only wealthy women have had the luxury of being able to stay home; poor women have worked on farms and in factories and in other people's homes. And these days, it is foolish for a person of either sex to be financially dependent on their partner, because that partner may abandon them or pass away or become too ill to provide for the family. The myth of the happy homemaker is for the 1950s, tradwives, and religious fundamentalists.

[kimberlysteele]

Poor women have mostly worked outside the home doing the etheric labor (a.k.a. housework) of richer women. Teaching their kids, cleaning up their laundry, doing their dusting, watering their plants, scrubbing their floors.

Disagree with your assertion that the myth of the happy homemaker is only for certain sets of people. I would be happier if I could keep all of my work inside the home (notice I still want to work and I plan on working until the day I die) and that would technically make me a happy homemaker. My essay is an attempt to explain what I perceive as an etheric plane phenomenon and how it affects the planes around it: the astral and the material plane.

[lukedodson]

"The reason women want to stay home, including this woman, is because it is the magical formula of the woman to secure the homestead. Men were designed to hunt, to go to war, and to defend. Women were designed to make the home into a healing place where babies can grow into healthy adults and to give men a place worth defending."

I remember once, I was in my parents' house with a girlfriend at the time, and when we left we did a little tidying up. When my mother saw it, she said: "did Indy help you? This cleaning has a woman's touch."

Your point about the wider culture indoctrinating young women out of their natural focus on the hearth and the homestead seems very accurate to me. My social circles tend towards the hippy/alternative side of things, and there is a very disproportionate number of young women who are buying old vans, and living an itinerant lifestyle. Each to their own and all, but it seems kind of sad to me; an indicator of how fragmented our society is, how there is no hearth to welcome these young women and allow to express their biological natures, so they become adventurous vagabonds, roving around looking for new experience.

[kimberlysteele]

I think lots of women have become embittered and saddened by the choices put before them. There is no hearth to come home to: atomization of families, nuclear family lifestyles, and corporate greed have put an end to any home they could have made.

"A woman's touch"... how cool that she noticed. In my upcoming book, I will make the assertion that decor is actually crucial to maintaining the energetic field of a house... it's going to be a strange book.

[lukedodson]

Sounds like a cool book! I look forward to it.

You are right, of course, and what is especially sad is that very few of these women seem to recognize it as such, beyond maybe a vague acknowledgement of living costs. Financial factors are a massive issue, but it's not the whole story; after all, the word 'economics' stems from the root word 'oikos', or 'household'.

[kimberlysteele]

Fascinating, I did not know that was the root of the word "economics". To each her own, but living in a van does not sound pleasant. I find being in cars leaves me etherically starved and stripped. The reason I will be avoiding going out of town for my upcoming summer vacation (staycation) is because I don't want to suffer more etheric depletion than the summer naturally brings. For me, summer is an etheric drain. I wake up tired. All my physical and mental problems that stem from having too much heat in my blood get worse. Now that the Solstice is over though, I can look forward to being a tiny bit more energetic every day until I am back to my old self in Autumn.

[lukedodson]

Interesting! I find high summer a bit of a drain as well. I'm a late autumn birth, so maybe it's partly to do with that, but the short nights and heat take it out of me. The climate of southern England is actually a little too warm for me, which a lot of people find bemusing and hilarious!

Terlets

[(Anonymous)]

Hello again Kimberly.

So the sparkly toilet challenge runs apace here at the homestead. Even though I got up late to go do a farm errand with a friend of mine, I still had the moment to swish out my toilet after my morning pee. It took less than a minute.

I’ve been doing it for two weeks already and I like the ease of it all. Maybe it’s helping with my financial stickies too, I’ll be watching that spot to see how it goes.

Annette

Re: Terlets

[kimberlysteele]

Woohoo! Yes, now that I always have a sparkling toilet, I think I will find it impossible to go back to having a non-sparkling toilet, come what may financially.

[(Anonymous)]

I always like to make a living space cosy. For me it's very much a natural inclination.

Our apartment came with furniture. It's nice, but a bit non-descript. I got a lamp, a few cheap and cheerful throw pillows, and my daughter and I rearranged the furniture. Our home looked completely different. My daughter was stunned by how we could effect such a big change with so little.

Heloise