This morning — this is Thursday, the last day of the kids’ school year — I woke up early. Earlier than I usually do, at least, 06:30 or so, but I stayed in bed, trying not to wake Ada, until a little before seven. I got myself ready as I usually do, then went downstairs for breakfast. Tess was having a hard time figuring out what she wanted to eat, and we were all trying to help her. Eventually I offered a chunk of English cucumber, and Tess, who is turning six in a couple of weeks, raised her eyebrows and shrugged in a way that said “Well, I don’t mind if I do.” Then she specified slices, not chunks, and so I sliced the cucumber. The rest of her breakfast — half a slice of buttered toast, half a slice of Nutella toast, a couple apple slices and a little pile of thin pretzels — went untouched until after I had biked her to school, and biked back home, and found that I was ready for half a slice of Nutella toast myself.
I cleaned up the kitchen, made a coffee, and sat down to read chapters four and five of Prototype Nation, which the reading group was set to discuss at noon. As I read I iced my left elbow (tennis elbow), and also let my mind wander a bit. After about twenty minutes I made a second coffee. The chapters I was reading concerned an anonymous western-backed hardware accelerator, located in Shenzhen, which was founded in 2011; the author, Silvia Lindtner, was embedded as an ethnographer at a startup in this accelerator in 2013. The accelerator doesn’t come off particularly well, and in addition to sharing some unsavory stories about her time there, Lindtner offers a general critique of startup culture. I found myself agreeing with her critique. But I was careful with my scorn, aware that my own recollection of what it was like to work in and around startups is colored by my ultimate failure to find the career I had wanted there. My involvement with the hardware startup scene probably peaked in 2015, around the time of my first trip to southern China. This trip included a tour of the hardware accelerator HAX, which also happened to be western-backed, Shenzhen-located, and founded in 2011. It was mostly a social visit, and I was only there an hour or two. A few days later, the hardware startup that I was employed at folded, and I spent the rest of that summer networking, writing, and preparing to get married. Eventually I landed at a startup making CAD software, which was ultimately not a match made in heaven, and over the following couple of years, as we had kids, and as this newsletter turned into a reasonably sustainable source of income, I quietly withdrew from the whole scene. Hardware startups weren’t chasing me, I realized, and I didn’t really want to chase them, and a decade later here I am writing an essay that started with my extremely domestic Thursday morning routine.
Anyway — after critiquing the culture at this hardware accelerator on what I would call political grounds, Lindner critiques it on the basis of its approach to gender, race, and the “happiness labor” performed by the accelerator’s office managers, both of whom were Chinese women. This is where I really perked up. These women were paid — significantly less than their colleagues, it should be noted — for ostensibly administrative duties, but ended up doing whatever was needed to keep the startups happy. They arranged social events, confirmed and managed travel logistics, and spoke on behalf of the startup dudes during sourcing meetings. They were asked probing questions and were put in inappropriate situations, but most importantly they kept tabs on their wards’ emotional states, springing into action if they perceived a sense of stress in someone other than themselves. They were there to absorb and ameliorate whatever feelings the startup dudes could not.
It was this idea — that some people are paid mostly to monitor and manage someone else’s emotions — that I wanted to talk about with the reading group. I was thinking about my career, and the happiness laborers I’ve relied upon, and also what it was like to work in places that didn’t employ happiness laborers. I was also thinking about my work now: the part of my work where I sit and write for an audience, and also the part where I bike my kids to school, and make sure they eat cucumber slices first, and so on.
After talking with the reading group I had a cold glass of peachy-orange gazpacho, then biked to Sunset Park to pick up some cast iron pans that someone was giving away. It was a lot of pans, I think seven in total, including a old Griswold “Colonial Breakfast Skillet.” I mostly wanted the Griswold but was willing to take a flyer on the rest of the lot, and plus I was happy for a chunky little bike errand to get me out of the house. I put a heavy Lodge griddle, a cornbread pan, and a couple of muffin trays in my backpack, then loaded the Griswold and two other frying pans into my bike’s front basket. As I was loading everything up it became evident that this person was also giving away a baking stone, which I put on top of the bike basket, leaning it over and onto my handlebars like a weird ceramic spoiler, and as I was strapping the whole load down this person ran back inside and then emerged with a wooden-handled aluminum pizza peel. I slipped the peel under the strap, its handle jutting out to the right. It was all slightly sketchy and quite heavy, but I was happy with the score and excited for the bike ride home. The person who was giving this stuff away told me that their family was moving to Ireland the next morning, in the hopes of living somewhere that they might align with politically. I imagine it was an intense moment in their lives, and they seemed happy to be jettisoning the dead weight. I wished them luck and rode off.
It was fairly hot, and my route was mostly uphill, and by the time I got home I was soaked. Ada and the kids were home from the end-of-the-school-year ice cream social, which Ada said was cute, and the kids had a friend over, and a half hour later a second friend arrived. I ended up spending some time with the kids, who were playing a version of “punk rock workout,” which is a game I invented during Covid where you listen to punk rock and do things — anything — in the little exercise area of our basement. The kids don’t actually know what punk rock is, and in reality I think the closest thing I’ve ever played to punk rock was At the Drive-In’s In/Casino/Out, which is really post-punk, or maybe post-hardcore. In contrast, recently we mostly listen to girl pop during punk rock workout. I try, as much as I can, to be a pure enabler during this game: As long as they’re not at risk of going to the hospital, I basically let the kids use the exercise equipment however they want. The whole activity is a little weird, but every once in a while there’s a magical moment where the kids and I are just hanging out together in the basement, them scaling the little bouldering wall with their tiny hands and me putzing around the workshop and fielding requests to play Pink Pony Club again.
Today, during punk rock workout, I mounted a vise to my primary workbench. It’s honestly not an ideal setup: a four-inch Wilton bullet vise, which I love, mounted to a thick piece of maple, which I also love. The piece of maple is about eight inches wide and twenty inches long, and it’s bolted with two huge carriage bolts to the workbench top itself. The vise cantilevers off the workbench, and as far as that goes it’s sturdy enough, but the workbench is on casters and is ultimately not something that will react well to being yanked around. Before I mounted it here, the vise lived on a slightly sturdier, secondary workbench across the room, but that workbench is now strewn with rainbow-colored popsicle sticks, fused together in a wispy mat of hot glue. The secondary workbench has been taken over, in other words, by my kids, and it was with an overwhelming sense of warmth and pride that I finally decided that it was time to let them have the space that the vise used to occupy.
There have been a lot of big feelings in our house recently. Yesterday I discovered that one of Tessa’s “squishies” has a remarkably similar life story to Tessa’s. The squishie, who looks like a lime green hedgehog and who is referred to as “the green guy,” has a dad that’s a lot like me and a mom that’s a lot like Ada. He also has a sister who sounds vaguely like Nora, and it was his last day of school today, and after school he went to an ice cream social with his mom and sister. Later in the afternoon he got upset because his family wanted him to go out for dinner, and it was raining, and he didn’t want his shoes to get wet. The way Tessa described it, this experience sounded tough for him; I empathized.
“Dad,” Tessa whispered, and I leaned in so my head was right near hers. “I’m telling you about my day.”
And now here I am, telling you about my day.
At least half of my day, maybe six and a half hours, was spent doing happiness labor. I can, on my best days, write for maybe four or five hours, though I’m more likely to put in an hour-and-a-half stint sandwiched on either side by mushy, expansive periods in which I supposedly do research.
The happiness labor is mushy and expansive too, but for different reasons. As evening set in I tried to stay in the kids’ room until they’d really gotten their fill of me, which is more or less the same as saying that I let bedtime drag on quite a bit. Notionally bedtime occurs at eight PM, but it’s typical for the kids to stay up until eight-forty-five or nine, and while I’m often anxious to finish bedtime quickly so that I can do the dishes and maybe “write something,” I also recognize that it’d be nicer to enjoy bedtime with them, and have it go until nine, than to rush it and then have to triage a stream of post-bedtime interruptions as I struggle to direct my attention elsewhere. So recently I’ve found myself lying on their bedroom floor, which is carpeted, and just talking to them with the lights out. Sometimes we do this pseudo-meditative relaxation exercise where I work from head to toe (or the other way around), acknowledging each body part, wiggling it a bit, and then letting it relax. Sometimes we just talk, usually about what’s happened that day or what will probably happen the next day. This all happens, I should mention, on evenings when Ada is out; bedtime is almost always a one-parent activity in our family, and she’s the default bedtime parent. Our parental happiness labor is imperfectly gendered — a modern truism, perhaps, in the sense that seeing things as imperfect, and seeing them through the lens of gender, are two of the defining characteristics of modernity. I shop for groceries, cook dinners, and take on house projects that I act like everyone else has demanded. In addition to making the kids’ breakfast and packing their school lunches, Ada is their primary caregiver in the afternoons, and on most weekdays I try to get out of the house, usually to exercise, when I know they’ll be getting back from school.
The whole setup is unfair and inequitable, but mostly I’m struck by just how unexpected it feels. For most of my young adulthood I kind of assumed that I’d spend forty hours in an office, or a factory, or a jobsite, ideally in some sort of managerial or executive role but still keeping a neat workbench for myself, which I’d maybe come in on the weekends and fiddle with. This image shifted over time: In my early thirties I thought I’d be a consultant, or maybe a software product manager, again ideally working adjacent to construction, or manufacturing, or craft. Either way, many of the personalities that walk through Lindner’s narrative in Prototype Nation are people I once considered peers, whether aspirationally or appropriately. A few of them I could still email and ask for a favor if I needed to; a few of them might even read this. But we exist mostly in different worlds now, and I struggle to understand which of Prototype Nation’s characters are more appropriate for me to identify with. I was, at various points in my career, a startup dude. Like Lindtner, I have also written extensively about product development work in general and startup culture in particular. But today — not exactly a typical Thursday, but not exactly an atypical one either — I mostly felt like a happiness laborer.
It’s about this time that Ada comes home, and we talk for a while about the day before going to bed. The next morning, a Friday that feels like a Saturday due to the kids’ lack of school, I again wake up early, 05:45 this time, and this time I get out of bed and slink downstairs to start my day while everyone else sleeps. I find myself looking on the internet to see if people actually like cooking muffins in cast iron pans, and discover that these might have been intended as popover pans. I’ve never made popovers, and I have the sense that nobody else in my family wants to eat them, but I figure I can dust them with powdered sugar and end up deciding it’s a decent idea to make a batch. While the oven preheats I sit down and write, thinking again about the green squishie and how I’ll allocate my time during the first day of my kids’ summer vacation. Nora comes downstairs a little after the popovers come out of the oven; at first she seems curious, but quickly decides that they’re terrible and ends up asking for frozen pizza. Then Ada gets up and immediately leaves the house for an early exercise class, accepting the tea I’ve made for her but shaking her head at the popovers. Eventually Tess wakes up too, and after she’s ignored Nora’s warnings, and has licked the powdered sugar off of about six popovers, the three of us decide that we should go downstairs and do a punk rock workout. I put on In A Silent Way (definitely not punk rock) and stretch; the kids spread various equipment out and use it to play “teacher.”
Towards the end of chapter five of Prototype Nation, Lindtner describes visiting a small factory with HAX. It’s not totally clear what work the factory does, but Lindtner describes in some detail the working conditions there, which “lack some of the most basic health and safety measures.” “As we entered the building,” she writes, “a harsh toxic smell made my eyes tear up... a group of women had just returned with food to their workstations, where they began to eat amidst machinery, soldering stations, and fumes. Throughout the entire visit, not one of the start-up teams commented about the conditions.” Lindtner steps out of the factory, searching for fresh air. She’s nominally a peer to the startup dudes, but has also set herself apart from them. Her role, in the end, is to document what life at HAX is like, and this factory — which someone else describes to her as “a hard visit” — is part of that work.
Someone turns to Lindtner and asks, “Are you gonna write about the working conditions in this factory?”
There were a bunch of years where I thought my job was to write about what life was like in factories. I mean this in a general sense, and not tied in any particular way to working conditions per se. I mostly wanted to spend part of my day making widgets, or managing people who did, and part of my day writing about what it was like to do so. To the extent that I actually did this, it worked fairly well. But over time these two parts of my career diverged, and today the only widgets I really make are the ones my kids request, along with some smattering of things that I think they should at least lick the powdered sugar off of. This is, in the end, fine by me — but it makes me wonder sometimes whether it’s okay for me to write about the conditions I find myself working under now, and if so, to what level of detail. Do I mention the half-finished soldering project that Nora and I have been working on, also in the unventilated basement, while Tess messes with hot glue unsupervised? Do I mention the emotional outbursts that I both witness and on bad days take part in, after the game of “teacher,” or whatever, has turned vindictive? Do I mention the rather precipitous decline in my own personal income as I’ve withdrawn myself from one part of the labor market and turned more sincerely to my own forms of happiness labor, both at home and through my writing?
It’s mid-morning by now, and Ada has come home from her exercise class with donuts. We convince the kids to go up to the kitchen (but not to clean up the punk rock workout area), and after the snack, and some additional negotiations, Ada takes them out for a couple of hours. I will have only a little while to myself today, and I debate about how to spend it; on the one hand it is a weekday, but on the other hand it’s kind of the first day of summer. The scope of my work is messy no matter how you cut it. I write down what I can, and take a deep breath, and close my laptop.
Thanks to Scope of Work's Members and Supporters for enabling me to do my happiness labor, and thanks to the rest of you for accepting it. Thanks to Ada for reading this essay prior to publication, and also for all the emotional labor she does, and also for everything else. Thanks to Mike for sharing this Matthew Yglesias essay with me, which provided at least part of the permission structure for sharing the thoughts here. Thanks to James and Anna for the excellent discussion about happiness labor and Prototype Nation, and thanks to David for recommending the hot glue and rainbow-colored popsicle sticks.
