Care Doesn't Scale

I always thought I’m terrible at running a home. I hardly ever cooked, cleaned only when the mess got me angry, and in general saw household chores as a waste of time. Given a choice I’d always prefer to do something else than typical homemaking activities. It’s not like they had any lasting results anyway!

I worked in software nearly all my adult life

And software engineers hate manual, repetitive tasks. Our whole job is about automating such tasks so that they can be done fast on a massive scale. Instead of copy-pasting data from one application to another you can write a script that will do that for you, and then you’ll be able to process millions of such records in the time it took you to do just a hundred.

But there’s no way to automate or scale household chores! They always required much more time and effort than my day job did, and the results only lasted a day or two at most. I knew I’d probably get much faster at homemaking if I practiced it regularly, but to me this was kinda like getting really good at copy-pasting data to a spreadsheet. Extremely inefficient when you compare it to code that you write once and then run it infinite times forever.

I outsourced most of my cleaning and cooking as soon as I could afford it. Luckily, working in software I could afford it quite easily - code is pretty efficient at making money too. Why should I spend my time cooking if I neither enjoy the process nor do it well? I’d much rather pay someone who’s good at it and put my effort into my unique strengths where I can have the biggest impact.

I had to rethink my approach when my daughter was born

As it turns out, the first few months of raising a kid is all about repetitive tasks that can’t be outsourced, automated, and there’s no end to them. If you think cleaning house is boring and monotonous, try changing diapers for several nights in a row.

But at the same time, the time spent changing diapers or feeding my daughter was time spent in her company, getting to know her as a person and discovering the world together. Just like you can’t raise a baby online, you also can’t automate or speed up the time it takes for her to grow up, learn about the world, and make sense of her surroundings. Everything happens in real time. Everything happens in the physical world.

Whatever we’re doing now is going to be her baseline of normal

Just like a fish can’t recognize she’s surrounded by water, my daughter won’t recognize our family does things a certain way. For a long time this will be the only way she knows, and even later she’ll learn about all the other lifestyles mostly by comparing them with ours.

How does home look like and feel like? What kind of sights, smells, sounds and tastes are you normally surrounded with? What kind of things are available to grab, touch, chew on, or play with? What do we do when we spend time together? What do we eat and how do we do it? What do we do before going to bed?

There are as many answers to these questions as there are families, and everyone has to find a way that works for them. But having a cozy home where everyone feels loved and welcome isn’t something that will happen by accident, or something you can program once and then forget it. It requires focused care for our families, and paying attention to what they need and dream about. Care is all about being present. And being present doesn’t scale.

Neither homemaking nor caretaking jobs like nurses or teachers are usually well-respected, because the value they create doesn’t scale easily. In the past I thought this is a technical challenge that we could solve with things like online education platforms that can easily reach millions of children. And yes, a lot of problems can be solved this way, but an online app won’t notice when a kid is sad, ask him how his day went, or just pay attention to him and show him that his thoughts and feeling matter. We’d better find a way to appreciate this other kind of value too.