“I often talk about emotional labor as being the work of caring,” wrote MetaFilter commenter Lyn Never. “And it’s not just being caring, it’s that thing where someone says ‘I’ll clean if you just tell me what to clean!’ because they don’t want to do the mental work of figuring it out. Caring about all the moving parts required to feed the occupants at dinnertime, caring about social management. It’s a substantial amount of overhead, having to care about everything. It ought to be a shared burden, but half the
