Al Owski > Recent Status Updates

“"Loneliness makes us cling to others in desperation; solitude allows us to respect others in their uniqueness and create community." When children are taught to enjoy quiet time, to be alone with their thoughts and reveries, they carry this skill into adulthood. Individuals young and old striving to overcome fears of being alone often choose meditation practice as a way to embrace solitude.”

“[Nouwen] suggests we put those feelings to rest by embracing our solitude, by allowing divine spirit to reveal itself there: "The difficult road is the road of conversion, the conversion from loneliness into solitude. Instead of running away from our loneliness and trying to forget or deny it, we have to protect it and turn it into fruitful solitude.... Loneliness is painful; solitude is peaceful.”

“Nouwen contends that "no friend or lover, no husband or wife, no community or commune will be able to put to rest our deepest cravings for unity and wholeness."”

“Throughout his life theologian Henri Nouwen emphasized the value of solitude. In many of his books and essays he discouraged us from seeing solitude as being about the need for privacy, sharing his sense that in solitude we find the place where we can truly look at ourselves and shed the false self. In his book Reaching Out, he stresses that "loneliness is one of the most universal sources of human suffering today"”

“We all long for loving community. It enhances life's joy. But many of us seek community solely to escape the fear of being alone. Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.”

“...the principles of love are always the same in any meaningful bond. To love well is the task in all meaningful relationships, not just romantic bonds. I know individuals who accept dishonesty in their primary relationships, or who are themselves dishonest, when they would never accept it in friendships... friendships... mutual love provides a guide for behavior in other relationships, including romantic ones.”

“All too often women believe it is a sign of commitment, an expression of love, to endure unkindness or cruelty, to forgive and forget. In actuality, when we love rightly we know that the healthy, loving response to cruelty and abuse is putting ourselves out of harm's way.”

“Most women and men born in the fifties or earlier were socialized to believe that marriages and/or committed romantic bonds of any kind should take precedence over all other relationships.”

“The employment contract itself conceals reproductive labour. The person with a primary responsibility for reproducing labour power is not constructed as the creator of that commodity but is alienated from it through a model of capitalist ownership of the self, which does not account for one's dependency on other people.”

“Unwaged reproductive labour is not accounted for in the value of labour power. The wage appears as a fair compensation for the hours spent doing waged work, not for the process of reproducing oneself or others as labour power.”

“For example, childcare depends on someone being around all the time, attending to the needs of the child. While reproduction has been increasingly commodified over the past decades, it is difficult to fully integrate within the capitalist organisation of production, because to fully recognise it as work and to pay it accordingly would threaten capitalist accumulation.”

“Capital has dispossessed most people of what they need to survive. It is not a system driven by meeting people's needs; instead, its only drive is to accumulate value. But a majority of workers need to be kept alive in order to maintain the extraction of value, because it is the labour of workers that creates value in the first place.”

“Capital is more than just the organisation of factories or the ownership of the means of production. It is a set of social relations that structure life and work. The separation of workers from the resources they need to live should be understood as a relation of power, rather than just the ownership of things. In capitalism, value is created through labour, and power is expressed through the domination of labour.”

“Our needs, as we currently know them, are structured by capital's drive to accumulate value. The majority of people do not have access to the things they need unless they can find waged work.”

“There is so much work that goes into keeping us alive and healthy. Food needs to be prepared, houses cleaned, children looked after. We all need other people to care for us, Emotion cannot be understood in isolation from our other needs. We therefore have to situate emotional reproduction within the context of social reproduction more broadly.”

“the hegemonic status of the nuclear family still means that this form is promoted at the expense of other forms of sociality. It is inscribed across legal, material, and ideological structures. Those who live outside the nuclear family, or are the primary caregivers within families, lack much of the emotional support that the family supposedly has been created to provide.”

“The nuclear family...has been institutionalised as the exclusive site for catering to people's emotional needs. Unwaged forms of emotional reproduction are therefore often only accessible for those who are part of a nuclear family. Those excluded from the family often experience loneliness and a lack of emotional support.”

“High-end emotional services are often individually tailored as a part of their commodification. Certain forms of emotional labour and care services are thus limited to those who have the means to pay for them. For example, therapy and other forms of care that enhance mental wellbeing are difficult to access for those who cannot pay.”

“Nurses and carers...attend...to their need for social interaction and comfort. Emotional labour might not be formally integrated into the service itself, which is focused on the completion of physical tasks, yet management might rely on the empathy and sense of duty of its workers to provide emotional support for free. This allows for the exploitation of the caring capacities of already devalued groups of workers.”

“The commodification of emotional labour hands over control of this work from individual men to capitalists, which might lead to more explicit forms of control and measurement. Despite the seemingly infinite character of emotional labour, Federici notes that capitalists have done their best to find ways to manage and measure this work.”

“Higher standards of living often translate into greater access to emotional services for the wealthy. As Emma Dowling Writes, services that cater to wealthy customers generally place greater weight on the delivery of emotional services. Those at the top of social hierarchies can expect more attention to their individual emotional needs and a greater degree of emotional wellbeing.”

“the bourgeois nuclear family has always relied on the unseen labour of others”

“In childcare, for instance, parents can use the bond between the carer and the child to extract more labour than they are paying for. While many mothers resist 'being replaced' by a nanny or daycare worker as the child's primary caregiver, parents also expect a high emotional standard from their replacement caregivers, and are often happy to exploit the bond between the caregiver and the child.”

“The current configuration of reproduction has not abolished domestic work but rather shifted some of it onto public or commodified service-provision or waged domestic workers. Many of these jobs are low-paid and highly exploitative. Care work often depends on creating emotional bonds between the worker and the recipient of care, which means that these bonds are more easily exploitable.”

“Waged reproductive workers, such as carers and domestic workers, are at the centre of much of the contemporary debate on reproductive labour. Often migrant women of colour, their labour is introduced as a solution to the crisis of social reproduction that has emerged both as a result of women's struggle against unwaged labour and capital's increased use of women's waged labour.”

“In the past few decades, emotional services have become increasingly commodified, while also construed as the responsibility of individuals and families.”

“The emotional and social needs of people are codified in the built environment, creating boundaries for sociality. This institutionalisation of the nuclear family model often creates loneliness and a lack of emotional satisfaction for those who have been excluded from the family.”

“Gentrification poses a threat to those spaces that supported a wider set of social bonds in working-class communities. Domestic architecture has played a part in institutionalising the nuclear family as the most important form of sociality. The suburban one-family home, where the family is physically separated from other people, has become an aspira- tional sign of the good life.”

“Stephanie Coontz, looking at the working-class organisation of space in the early twentieth century, notes that there was a lack of distinction between the intimate life of the family and the social life of the neighbourhood. However, these spatial constructions of emotional life are difficult to sustain in the increasingly privatised landscape of contemporary capitalism.”

“The spatial organisation of working-class emotional reproduction is vulnerable to destruction as the public spaces that constitute an important precondition for many less privatised forms of sociality are increasingly rare.”