Who Gets to Be the Hero?

A couple of years ago, I spent a long stretch trying to answer one question: why was I so burned out? The short answer was labor. The longer answer had to do with a life too messy to accommodate the relentless productivity that capitalism demands of us. But what was it, specifically, about the work I’d been doing that produced the feeling of endless effort without progress? I came to think part of the answer lay in the difference between work and labor — a difference I’ve kept turning over ever since.

Hannah Arendt draws the distinction in The Human Condition. Labor is what we do to stay alive. “It is indeed the mark of all laboring,” she writes, “that it leaves nothing behind, that the result of its effort is almost as quickly consumed as the effort is spent.” Historically this meant the agricultural and care work survival depended on. Today it also includes the things we mass-produce and discard, and the repetitive upkeep that keeps households and organizations from quietly falling apart. Whether labor sustains a life or a balance sheet, it has no end. There is no day on which we’re finished surviving — and, much as we’d like otherwise, no day on which shareholders decide they’ve generated enough wealth.

Work is a different animal. Work asks for creativity and judgment. It can produce something lasting, even when that something has no market value at all. The real difference between the two isn’t what gets accomplished but how it feels to do it. Work can be finished, and when you’re lucky, followed by rest before the next thing begins. Labor just resumes.

Most of us spend our days doing some blend of the two, and the blend is rarely one we chose. There’s the genuinely creative part of any job — building something new, solving a problem no one has solved in quite that way. And then there’s the part that’s repetitive, automatable, and quietly essential: the cleanup, the maintenance, the forms, the thousand small tasks that someone has to do and that no one is ever praised for doing. This second kind of work is the equivalent of doing the laundry. No amount of it ever produces less of it. There’s no launch party, no breakthrough, no triumph over adversity — just the daily struggle against entropy. We hand out medals for heroics. We don’t hand them out for keeping the lights on.

That’s the fault line I keep returning to: not skilled versus unskilled, or even hard versus easy, but recognized versus unrecognized. Some labor is seen — it earns a title, a raise, a story you tell at a party. Most of it isn’t, and the work that goes unseen has a way of piling up on the same people.

For most of my career I felt that accumulation in my bones. It was hard to build anything that lasted while spending most of my time cleaning up after other people. When I described one such stretch to a friend, she asked, “But how is that helping your career?” It wasn’t. It rarely is.

And who ends up doing it is not random. Historically we’ve sorted work by gender: men hunt the bear or land the big contract; women do the cooking, the childcare, the administrative work no one remembers. The same logic survives at the office. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the person handed the jobs nobody else wants is also, more often than not, not a white man. Women are expected to absorb more of that work and to feel less able to refuse it. Jenny Odell notes in Saving Time that — entirely apart from the second shift and women’s frequent role as the “default parent” — multiple studies show women are expected to say yes to requests for help more readily than men; in one, men held back from volunteering favors when women were in the group, but raised their hands sooner when the group was all male. And for women of color, Odell writes, the cost of guarding their own time is higher still — they’re more likely to be cast as “aggressive, out-of-character, or too emotional.”

The philosophy and the politics turn out to be the same thing. The line between recognized and unrecognized labor is also a line about power: who gets to make the lasting thing, and who does the invisible labor that frees them to make it.

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Eventually I hit a wall. I’d been pushing my career forward through years of upheaval, and one day I simply couldn’t anymore — tired all the time, late to everything, barely functioning as an adult. I arranged an unpaid leave as fast as I could.

I pictured luxurious open time: sleeping in, the gym, better food, travel. That is not what the first few weeks were. I spent hours fighting an insurance portal that demanded seven forms of authentication and then refused my payment anyway. I looked around my house and saw the piles for Goodwill, the unpainted trim, the weeds, the laundry. Chores expand to fill whatever time you give them. I hadn’t escaped labor — I’d just swapped one kind for another.

I didn’t start to feel better until I put down the laptop, the paintbrush, and the vacuum and stopped doing work simply because it was there and someone had to. Only in that emptiness could I begin to imagine a different shape for my life. When I stopped doing so much labor, I finally had room to do the work.

It was during that stretch of deliberate uselessness that I fell completely into a fantasy series. I won’t defend my taste, but it was wonderful: epic battles, doomed romances, no shortage of pain and peril. What struck me, though, was that it was fantasy in more than one sense. The world had perfect weather, gleaming castles, and — crucially — limitless help with domestic labor. Meals appear at the snap of a finger. Wages turn up in accounts no one has to balance. The sheets are changed by the magic of the house itself. If I lived somewhere like that, I’d risk torture and death to stay, too.

Here’s what I keep noticing in stories like these: the hero is almost always conveniently wealthy, and the labor is almost always done by magic, servants, or spells. It has to be. The hero couldn’t save the world over and over if he were busy doing his own laundry, planning a child’s after-school activities, or tracking down the forty-seven passwords he needs to file his taxes.

The hero’s journey, as we usually tell it, is full of hardship — but it is defined by the absence of labor. Arendt saw this clearly. “The daily fight in which the human body is engaged to keep the world clean and prevent its decay,” she wrote, “bears little resemblance to heroic deeds; the endurance it needs to repair every day anew the waste of yesterday is not courage, and what makes the effort painful is not danger but its relentless repetition.”

Which is the real question. In a world with no magic but plenty of bureaucracy — full of dishes and forms and never-ending upkeep that someone has to do — who gets to be the hero? And who has to be the one whose unseen labor makes the heroics possible?

I’m hungry for the world the fantasy only hinted at — a shift from labor toward meaningful work, where I get to aim my creativity where I choose, and where the labor that keeps everyone alive is seen and shared rather than quietly assigned to whoever is least able to say no. For most of us this sounds about as plausible as a house that does its own laundry. Hypercapitalism is one hell of a drug.

The gift I got from that period of rest wasn’t a tidy transformation. It was a glimpse — a vision of how different our lives might be if we stopped believing the old story about who is meant to be the hero and who is meant to labor quietly so the hero can shine. In the meantime, I still have a great deal of laundry to do.