Another Way To Look At Redefining Work As Us Running Our Own Communities

I used to be in significant demand as a babysitter as a kid, back in the day when we lived just a stone's throw away from the western edge of Sea-Tac Airport. This was up the hill on 160th, just off Des Moines Way before the airport buried it all in their last big expansion. This was so because, even though I was as odd a kid as there ever was, I was really trusted in this context because I also had a big part in taking care of my younger brother (in his six short years of life); severely debilitated by brain damage from a botched birth (and diagnosed as Cerebral Palsy).

I mention this now because the link below really triggered a memory, as well as connection to what rethinking what work ought to be in our profoundly new operating environment.

If you think about this at all you can quickly come to a new understanding that, radical though the suggestion in the linked article might be, it does touch on how looking at how we take care of ourselves, in our own communities, is precisely part and parcel of what should define all of the parameters of the new work definition.

As readers of my blogs should know by now, I am proposing that work needs to be taking part in various aspects of what it takes to make a community happen. The idea being that a new City State does a comprehensive inventory of all of the tasks that are required to make a City State possible in the first place; all of the things that would make it as semi-self reliant as it could be, and then group them in a task classification system. A citizen would then have the opportunity to then choose which tasks they would alternate through, just as long as it included whatever number of tasks from each group, to meet their City's minimum task requirements. That way everybody would have to select from the task groups that are always the least desirable. That way as well, we would have ourselves moving around, in a more comprehensive fashion, in all of the things that make up the reality of a City, or town, or whatever you want to call it. Something that I think would be important to do if we are really to take responsibility for being both the workers, and the management of our own communities. 

This way "sharing the caring" could be both empathic and practical. And it would truly go a very long way to ensure that everybody could feel that they actually are needed; and that actually do have a meaningful role to play in everyday life; the kind of thing that I think would go a long way to provide an involvement in depth that would be both healthy for the individual, as well as for the community as a whole. And just to be clear here, we could do this without any need for money any more at all. After all, it's just about keeping track of the resources, the participation, and making sure for an equitable distribution. And if we made a good part of our own end use items, precisely because we would have access to all we needed to do that, we could make this work in a much better way that what work makes us do now.

What do you think?

SHARING THE CARING

A Radical Idea To Improve Family Life In America: Babysit Your Neighbor’s Kids

7 diggs vox.com Human Nature

Child care costs are rising, yet there's a massive reserve army of potential babysitters.