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e87b33b
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What you don't necessarily realize when you start selling your time by the hour is that what you're really selling is your .
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Barbara Ehrenreich |
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0f19d85
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When someone works for less pay than she can live on -- when, for example, she goes hungry so that you can eat more cheaply and conveniently -- then she has made a great sacrifice for you, she has made you a gift of some part of her abilities, her health, and her life. The 'working poor,' as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society. They neglect their own children so that the children of others will ..
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Barbara Ehrenreich |
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daacd07
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I grew up hearing over and over, to the point of tedium, that "hard work" was the secret of success: "Work hard and you'll get ahead" or "It's hard work that got us where we are." No one ever said that you could work hard - harder even than you ever thought possible - and still find yourself sinking ever deeper into poverty and debt."
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Barbara Ehrenreich |
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8d81b67
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I do not write this in a spirit of sourness or personal disappointment of any kind, nor do I have any romantic attachment to suffering as a source of insight or virtue. On the contrary, I would like to see more smiles, more laughter, more hugs, more happiness and, better yet, joy. In my own vision of utopia, there is not only more comfort, and security for everyone -- better jobs, health care, and so forth -- there are also more parties, fe..
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Barbara Ehrenreich |
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f0832e4
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But the economic meltdown should have undone, once and for all, the idea of poverty as a personal shortcoming or dysfunctional state of mind. The lines at unemployment offices and churches offering free food includes strivers as well as slackers, habitual optimists as well as the chronically depressed. When and if the economy recovers we can never allow ourselves to forget how widespread our vulnerability is, how easy it is to spiral down t..
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poverty
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Barbara Ehrenreich |
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a866b9b
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A lot of what we experience as strength comes from knowing what to do with weakness.
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weakness
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Barbara Ehrenreich |
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3281df3
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There is a vast difference between positive thinking and existential courage.
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Barbara Ehrenreich |
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6cf3557
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The question is why one should be so inwardly preoccupied at all. Why not reach out to others in love and solidarity or peer into the natural world for some glimmer of understanding? Why retreat into anxious introspection when, as Emerson might have said, there is a vast world outside to explore? Why spend so much time working on oneself when there is so much real work to be done?
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positive-thinking
self-improvement
self-help
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Barbara Ehrenreich |
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b27e683
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The failure to think positively can weigh on a cancer patient like a second disease.
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positive-thinking
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Barbara Ehrenreich |
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4f977e4
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Maybe it's low-wage work in general that has the effect of making feel like a pariah. When I watch TV over my dinner at night, I see a world in which almost everyone makes $15 an hour or more, and I'm not just thinking of the anchor folks. The sitcoms and dramas are about fashion designers or schoolteachers or lawyers, so it's easy for a fast-food worker or nurse's aide to conclude that she is an anomaly -- the only one, or almost the only ..
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Barbara Ehrenreich |
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1a33577
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What would it mean in practice to eliminate all the 'negative people' from one's life? It might be a good move to separate from a chronically carping spouse, but it is not so easy to abandon the whiny toddler, the colicky infant, or the sullen teenager. And at the workplace, while it's probably advisable to detect and terminate those who show signs of becoming mass killers, there are other annoying people who might actually have something u..
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Barbara Ehrenreich |
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7826566
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When someone works for less pay than she can live on -- when, for example, she goes hungry so that you can eat more cheaply and conveniently -- than she has made a great sacrifice for you, she has made of a gift of some part of her abilities, her health, and her life.
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Barbara Ehrenreich |
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8e276e3
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In other words, it requires deliberate self-deception, including a constant effort to repress or block out unpleasant possibilities and 'negative' thoughts. The truly self-confident, or those who have in some way made their peace with the world and their destiny within it, do not need to expend effort censoring or otherwise controlling their thoughts.
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Barbara Ehrenreich |
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29bc543
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There seems to be a vicious cycle at work here, making ours not just an economy but a culture of extreme inequality. Corporate decision makers, and even some two-bit entrepreneurs like my boss at The Maids, occupy an economic position miles above that of the underpaid people whose labor they depend on. For reasons that have more to do with class -- and often racial -- prejudice than with actual experience, they tend to fear and distrust the..
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Barbara Ehrenreich |
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f9d54c6
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The urge to transform one's appearance, to dance outdoors, to mock the powerful and embrace perfect strangers is not easy to suppress.
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Barbara Ehrenreich |
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d87d167
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To draw for a moment from an entirely different corner of my life, that part of me still attached to the biological sciences, there is ample evidence that animals -- rats and monkeys, for example -- that are forced into a subordinate status within their social systems adapt their brain chemistry accordingly, becoming 'depressed' in humanlike ways. Their behavior is anxious and withdrawn; the level of serotonin (the neurotransmitter boosted ..
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Barbara Ehrenreich |
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289a1f6
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Breast cancer, I can now report, did not make me prettier or stronger, more feminine or spiritual. What it gave me, if you want to call this a "gift," was a very personal, agonizing encounter with an ideological force in American culture that I had not been aware of before--one that encourages us to deny reality, submit cheerfully to misfortune, and blame only ourselves for our fate."
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cancer
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Barbara Ehrenreich |
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96a782a
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What these [personality] tests tell employers about potential employees is hard to imagine since the 'right' answer should be obvious to anyone who has ever encountered the principle of hierarchy and subordination. You bet, but never to the point where I would hesitate to inform on them for the slightest infraction. Oh yes, but I know better than to let this capacity interfere with a slavish obedience to orders . . . The real function o..
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Barbara Ehrenreich |
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31a37e9
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Human intellectual progress, such as it has been, results from our long struggle to see things 'as they are,' or in the most universally comprehensible way, and not as projections of our own emotions. Thunder is not a tantrum in the sky, disease is not a divine punishment, and not every death or accident results from witchcraft. What we call the Enlightenment and hold on to only tenuously, by our fingernails, is the slow-dawning understandi..
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enlightenment
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Barbara Ehrenreich |
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a128eb1
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Then, in the 1980's, came the paroxysm of downsizing, and the very nature of the corporation was thrown into doubt. In what began almost as a fad and quickly matured into an unshakable habit, companies were 'restructuring,' 'reengineering,' and generally cutting as many jobs as possible, white collar as well as blue . . . The captured the new corporate order succintly in 1987, reporting that it 'eschews loyalty to workers, products, corpo..
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corporate
downsizing
corporate-greed
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Barbara Ehrenreich |
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d618332
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We can hardly pride ourselves on being the world's preeminent democracy, after all, if the large numbers of citizens spend half their waking hours in what amounts, in plain terms, to a dictatorship.
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Barbara Ehrenreich |
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da59aa8
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You might discover that, nationwide, America's food banks are experiencing 'a torrent of need which [they] cannot meet' and that, according to a survey conducted by the U.S. Conference of Mayors, 67 percent of the adults requesting emergency food aid are people with jobs.
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Barbara Ehrenreich |
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8bf5de2
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You can think of death bitterly or with resignation, as a tragic interruption of your life, and take every possible measure to postpone it. Or, more realistically, you can think of life as an interruption of an eternity of personal nonexistence, and seize it as a brief opportunity to observe and interact with the living, ever-surprising world around us.
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Barbara Ehrenreich |
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86be6c8
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Transcendent Oneness does not require self-examination, self-help, or self-work. It requires self-loss.
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Barbara Ehrenreich |
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0a82e20
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When our children are old enough, and if we can afford to, we send them to college, where despite the recent proliferation of courses on 'happiness' and 'positive psychology,' the point is to acquire the skills not of positive thinking but of *critical* thinking, and critical thinking is inherently skeptical. The best students -- and in good colleges, also the most successful -- are the ones who raise sharp questions, even at the risk of ma..
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Barbara Ehrenreich |
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d83524c
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To acknowledge the existence of other people is also to acknowledge that they are not reliable sources of safety or comfort.
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Barbara Ehrenreich |
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88d2d80
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You still don't like the idea of gay marriage? Then, as my friend the economist Julianne Malveaux says: Don't marry a gay person. Case closed, problem solved.
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Barbara Ehrenreich |
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f0a4941
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According to a recent poll [...] 94% of Americans agree that "people who work fulltime should be able to earn enough to keep their families out of poverty."
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Barbara Ehrenreich |
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7783e24
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What would it mean in practice to eliminate all the 'negative people' from one's life [as demanded by motivational speaker J.P. Maroney]? It might be a good idea to separate from a chronically carping spouse, but it is not so easy to abandon the whiny toddler, the colicky infant, or the sullen teenager.
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Barbara Ehrenreich |
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7915d00
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Women have always been healers. They were the unlicensed doctors and anatomists. They were abortionists, nurses and counselors. They were the pharmacists, cultivating healing herbs, and exchanging the secrets of their uses. They were midwives, traveling from home to home and village to village. For centuries women were doctors without degrees, barred from books and lectures, learning from each other, and passing on experience from neighbor ..
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Barbara Ehrenreich Deirdre English |
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173dcbf
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My aim here was much more straightforward and objective -- just to see whether I could match income to expenses, as the truly poor attempt to do every day. Besides, I've had enough unchosen encounters with poverty in my lifetime to know it's not a place you would want to visit for touristic purposes; it just smells too much like fear.
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Barbara Ehrenreich |
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c10cfb7
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You can talk about depression as a "chemical imbalance" all you want, but it presents itself as an external antagonist - a "demon," a "beast," or a "black dog," as Samuel Johnson called it. It could pounce at any time, even in the most innocuous setting."
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mental-illness
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Barbara Ehrenreich |
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7e4023a
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I believe nothing. Belief is intellectual surrender; "faith" a state of willed self-delusion."
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Barbara Ehrenreich |
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6863b3b
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This advice comes as a surprise: job searching is not joblessness; it is a job in itself and should be structured to resemble one, right down to the more regrettable features of employment, like having to follow orders--orders which are in this case self-generated.
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job-searching
joblessness
jobs
middle-class
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Barbara Ehrenreich |
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9f84b22
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Morality, as far as I could see, originates in atheism and the realization that no higher power is coming along to feed the hungry or lift the fallen. Mercy is left entirely to us.
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Barbara Ehrenreich |
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9c70b92
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I displayed, or usually displayed, all those traits deemed essential to job readiness: punctuality, cleanliness, cheerfulness, obedience. These are the qualities that welfare-to-work job-training programs often seek to inculcate, though I suspect that most welfare recipients already possess them, or would if their child care and transportation problems were solved.
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Barbara Ehrenreich |
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3ef43f4
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However we resolve the issue in our individual homes, the moral challenge is, put simply, to make work visible again: not only the scrubbing and vacuuming, but all the hoeing, stacking, hammering, drilling, bending, and lifting that goes into creating and maintaining a livable habitat. In an ever more economically unequal world, where so many of the affluent devote their lives to ghostly pursuits like stock trading, image making, and opinio..
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Barbara Ehrenreich |
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6c33810
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For all the talk about the need to be a likable "team player," many people work in a fairly cutthroat environment that would seem to be especially challenging to those who possess the recommended traits. Cheerfulness, upbeatness, and compliance: these are the qualities of subordinates -- of servants rather than masters, women (traditionally, anyway) rather than men. After advising his readers to overcome the bitterness and negativity engend..
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Barbara Ehrenreich |
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3089f75
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But Jesus makes his appearance here only as a corpse; the living man, the wine-guzzling vagrant and precocious socialist, is never once mentioned, nor anything he ever had to say. Christ crucified rules, and it may be that the true business of modern Christianity is to crucify him again and again so that he can never get a word out of his mouth.
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Barbara Ehrenreich |
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cba6162
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My father had been a copper miner, uncles and grandfathers worked in the mines for the Union Pacific. So to me, sitting at a desk all day was not only a privilege but a duty: something I owed to all those people in my life, living and dead, who'd had so much more to say than anyone ever got to hear.
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Barbara Ehrenreich |
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58dbc48
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I couldn't help noticing that the existential space in which a friend had earnestly advised me to 'confront [my] mortality' bore a striking resemblance to the mall.
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Barbara Ehrenreich |
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cd641ec
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Happiness, after all, is generally measured as reported satisfaction with one's life - a state of mind perhaps more accessible to those who are affluent, who conform to social norms, who suppress judgment in the service of faith, and who are not overly bothered by societal injustice...The real conservatism of positive psychology lies in its attachment to the status quo, with all its inequalities and abuses of power. Positive psychologists' ..
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positive-thinking
positivity
happiness
life-satisfaction
positive-psychology
critique
psychology
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Barbara Ehrenreich |
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696b777
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In fact, if you're not prepared to die when you're almost sixty, then I would say you've been falling down on your philosophical responsibilities as a grown-up human being.
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Barbara Ehrenreich |
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dac16c1
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What I have to face is that 'Barb,' the name on my ID tag, is not exactly the same person as Barbara. 'Barb' is what I was called as a child, and still am by my siblings, and I sense that at some level I'm regressing. Take away the career and the higher education, and maybe what you're left with is this original Barb, the one who might have ended up working at Wal-Mart for real if her father hadn't managed to climb out of the mines. So it's..
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Barbara Ehrenreich |