Project System Elephant: A New Way to Look at Work

About one year has passed since I’ve sold the remaining stakes of ownership in my companies and exited as CEO. From that point on, I no longer had a standard job. I’ve put the proceeds into several low cost index funds and have so far been lucky to be able to profit from the rising stock prices so much that what I withdrew to cover my cost of living during this past year didn’t diminish my investments.

I started to increase the amount of time and energy invested in my four daughters and became a de facto full-time dad when my wife doubled her weekly working hours early this year at her job as a physician. We effectively changed from 50/50 work and household/kids each to a traditional setup, except that my wife is the one working and I’m doing what’s still so widely considered to be a woman’s job.

When I told people about this new arrangement of ours, they often stated the following:

“Ah, so you’re now a privatier!”

While that is technically true, since I’m not registered unemployed and our household income is enough for our family due to my wife’s job and my investments without me having to work, it rubs me the wrong way to hear this. And this made me curious to learn why exactly that is.

Here’s a question that might explain it.

If you would meet a woman who is the mother of four children and spends her full days taking care of them and the household at home while her partner works all day, would you also classify her as a ‘privatier’? Not unless you’d like to get hit in the face by her, I’d assume.

Why is that? And why is that different for a man and a woman who do the same job?

Easy to answer: Because sexism.

Too many people regard the work that goes into raising children and taking care of a home not as “real work”. This notion and sexism go hand in hand. I’ve heard that statement classifying me as a ‘privatier’ instead of a full-time caretaker of a family of six from many people who I would put on very differing points on the political spectrum, and even the progressives who lean to the far left didn’t regard my new job as a full-time dad as a “real job” at first. I was once even asked what I do to fill the days now, in all seriousness.

It should go without saying that it’s a lot more work than most jobs and that’s certainly true of my own previous actual paid jobs. One of the problems surely is that people can’t see the work, especially those who don’t have kids. It’s not as tangible as building a house or a company with many visible employees sitting in an office somewhere. So some just assume it all sorts itself out on its own.

This goes to show how ingrained these stereotypes are in us.

There has been progress, though. It’s visible, but only if you look for it. The general opinion slowly shifts towards acknowledging that both parents can and should be involved in raising children, not just the mother. My home country offers paternal leave for dads of young children, acknowledging that it’s actual work, especially to take care of a new human during the first few years. Women are increasingly found in higher paying work positions and also in the boardrooms.

On a recent trip to the US I noticed some ads in public stating how important both parents’ presence were for a child and how the specific advertiser would like to study the impacts some more and was looking for volunteers. Especially in the US, where the culture demands both parents working multiple jobs over the majority of the twenty-four hours they have each day, and neglecting your children is a perfectly acceptable sacrifice for creating a higher standard of living or just to be able to cover the rising costs, I found this to be intriguing and signaling a small spark in making the shift. We’re still a long way from where we need to be, globally, but I think it’s improving.

As a start, we really should attach more value to caretaking.

You can see that not much progress in that regard has been made when you look at the Wages for Housework movement, which has been started in 1972, over fifty years ago. Have you even heard of it? It hasn’t reached its goal, probably because giving money to people also means giving power to people. And those who hold the power most often don’t feel like sharing it. It’s better for those in power to keep it the way it is. So it remains unpaid and unacknowledged work, although it’s arguably the most important job of them all to properly raise humans.

I have done this for just a year now and the amount of disrespect I’ve received has been huge already.

I can only extrapolate how millions of mothers have been feeling for centuries, when they raised their children and never even got so much as a “thank you” from society.

We seem to assume that only a paid job is a real and worthy job.

Even though the job of raising children is of massive benefit to everyone, you receive nearly nothing back for doing it. It’s unpaid work that benefits others.

“But the value of the care work is in the work itself!”

This is what we seem to think about other caring jobs, too, such as nurses and elementary school teachers. This must be why we pay them so little and treat them with a lot less respect than they deserve. Maybe it’s some sort of envy about them having a meaningful and actually contributing job as opposed to us with our replaceable paperwork pushing office jobs.

Take a look at what a nurse makes and compare that to what a lobbyist or corporate lawyer earns. Which one is more important to the benefit of all the people?

This sucks and needs to be discussed and changed.

The situation has influenced my own views on that level. It’s tough to hear people say these things to me, especially when they are people I generally like, because I’m always reminded of the size of the problem and rarely there’s time to explain this in person (because usually my kids are around me and require my service).

I feel not only how I’m looked down upon, but also how the people are probably looking down upon so many women who do the same job as I am. It has decreased my sense of self-worth and makes me feel bad for everyone else in the same position, too.

And while all that negativity affects me, I’m not running away from taking care of the children, not by a long shot. They are growing older and are becoming more independent from me on their own over time.

🐘 What Is Project System Elephant?

I can’t change the way society looks down on people who care for kids. And I realized that it’s bad for my own mental health to feel so disrespected for just a year. The urge grew to change something about it. So I looked at what I can control to improve it for me, and thereby, for my kids as well. Because projecting lowered self-esteem on my kids certainly isn’t corresponding to my ideal of being a good father to them.

And, frankly, telling myself every day that I’m doing an important and good job being there for the family and taking care of their needs when seemingly everyone else thinks otherwise has become too hard for me.

Right now, my four kids are aged between 6 and 12 years. The older ones are fairly independent already.

It won’t be long until it won’t take 4-5 hours per week anymore just to do all the family’s laundry. I will have more time for my own development and projects in the near future. So I was starting to think about beginning a new path and re-inserting myself into the respectable workforce within the next year or two.

But where? I feel like I’m done with starting and running my own companies. It has to be something new.

Remember how during the lockdowns of the COVID-19 pandemic, people who worked essential jobs weren’t allowed to stay home but had to continue working, because society depended on what they did?

We called those nurses and teachers “essential workers” and that was exposing one of those hard truths many people didn’t like to hear: All of the others are non-essential workers.

This included nearly all office jobs. The only thing that was essential about those unnecessary jobs is that they pay salaries to hundreds of millions of people. But what they were doing was practically not important at all for our society to keep functioning. This harsh fact definitely had some effect on those people. A lowered sense of self-worth. Sounds familiar?

In my native language we called them systemrelevant at first, before realizing the detrimental effects of that language to all those who were suddenly irrelevant. We later replaced it with “those who work in Daseinsfürsorge”, meaning “care of existence”.

Before that switch I was told of a situation where a kid had misheard the term and stated his mom still needed to work despite the lockdown because she was a “System Elephant”.

The late British anthropologist and former professor at Yale University, David Graeber, was aware of this phenomenon even before the pandemic hit and published his book called “Bullshit Jobs”. There’s been a clear tendency in our society to employ people and give them meaningless tasks. Oddly, the invisible hand of the free market never solved this problem. More than a third of all people in Western Europe claim their job doesn’t improve anything at all about the world and that no one would notice or suffer if they were to stop doing their jobs tomorrow. As then proved by the pandemic lockdowns.

To a large degree, my old job running a company in web design and marketing was also irrelevant and inessential. I accept that. But going forward I’d like to do something that actually changes anything for the positive. There’s no shortage of those jobs, but I’ve got a few limiting issues, such as being 40 years old and not willing to start another multi-year spanning apprenticeship or even longer university program. Also, for the first few years I won’t have enough time to work full-time while still caring mainly for the kids.

I need something outside of the house, and luckily most of the jobs I’m talking about are. Another plus, next to my experience, is that I don’t have to rely on a good salary. But of course, most essential jobs don’t pay that well anyways.

I’m pretty open to anything, including suggestions by you, valued reader!

So I can hopefully some day become a System Elephant in the workforce in addition to the actual System Elephant I already am at home taking care of my kids.