(Nimue)
For much of human history, 'work' was whatever you were contributing to keep you and your community going. We know from the archaeology that prehistoric people certainly did support ill, injured and disabled members of their communities who were unable to work. Cooperation has been the essence of human civilization for most of our history. Our desire for social recognition and to make a meaningful contribution is deeply rooted in this.
Unfortunately, our current take on capitalism has a distorting effect on the idea of work, which impacts on how we view and value ourselves. The pandemic showed us that the most essential work for keeping society functioning is low paid and undervalued. Care work is underpaid and often unpaid. There are many things that need doing that are not effectively handled by profit-oriented systems. Health care and education would be two obvious cases in point.
Our scope to interact with this capitalist system can greatly inform sense of self. Doing an essential job that pays so little you can barely afford to eat must be a psychologically very difficult place to be. I've spent time on minimum wage jobs – which are by no means wages you can live easily on. Being economically undervalued takes a toll, as well as having huge practical implications.
Creative work can be absolutely dreadful on this score. The amount of time that goes into it means either charging far more than the market will tolerate, or earning very little as an hourly rate. This impacts particularly on visual artists and crafters, but the effects are there across the board. It doesn't help that the current government in the UK has treated the arts sector as worthless – despite the huge sums of money the arts create within the economy. For whatever reasons, in this line of work, the economic value of the work isn't recognised and that often translates into devaluing the people who do it.
One of the other groups of people seriously struggling with being undervalued and underpaid, are farmers. It's hard to make a case for any other line of work being more essential to everyone, and yet we don't value that properly either. With nurses obliged to use food banks, it's clear we have a structure that undervalues essential work. It's hard to see what possible justification there is for billionaires, and I do not accept that anyone's work could be genuinely worth that much money.
What we can do around this is value each other in ways that aren't underpinned by how much we earn. We can support those essential workers who need and deserve better pay and we can decline to celebrate the gross excess of those whose 'earnings' have no bearing on the true value of their contributions. The money that a person attracts is not a measure of their value, nor of the intrinsic value of what they do. We can be alert to New Age ideas about attraction and recognise that privilege attracts opportunity and that this has nothing to do with a person's goodness. Probably the opposite. Our current systems reward those who are willing to exploit others, and who take more than they give.
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