I'm a hard worker and love my work. I have felt pulled toward work. And it's a pull I have ferociously had to counter to make room for my family.
Arlie Russell HochschildRead
Could it be, I wonder, that there is such a thing as a wantologist, someone we can hire to figure out what we want? Have I arrived at some final telling moment in my research on outsourcing intimate parts of our lives, or at the absurdist edge of the market frontier?
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote questions the value of outsourcing our personal desires and wants to others.
In this thought-provoking quote, Arlie Russell Hochschild speculates about the humorous and absurd notion of hiring a 'wantologist' to discern our personal desires. It challenges the reader to reflect on the implications of commodifying even the most intimate aspects of life and considers whether we risk losing authenticity and self-awareness by delegating our deeper wants to external influences.
Themes
WantologistDesiresOutsourcingLifeAuthenticityAbsurdity
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about the impact of consumer culture on personal identity, this quote could highlight how we often look outside ourselves for answers.
More from Arlie Russell Hochschild
All quotes →The focus of our public discourse has been on how American companies are competing with Japanese, German, and other foreign companies. What this allows us to ignore is how each of those American companies is really in competition with the families of the workers. That's the real competition.
Arlie Russell HochschildRead
What emotions would we experience if we weren't working ourselves to death? What wishes drive us? What fantasies hitch themselves to our continual busyness? Only when we step away from our frenzy can we know.
Arlie Russell HochschildRead
No work-family balance will ever fully take hold if the social conditions that might make it possible - men who are willing to share parenting and housework, communities that value work in the home as highly as work on the job, and policymakers and elected officials who are prepared to demand family-friendly reforms - remain out of reach.
Arlie Russell HochschildRead
In response to our fast-food culture, a 'slow food' movement appeared. Out of hurried parenthood, a move toward slow parenting could be growing. With vital government supports for state-of-the-art public child care and paid parental leave, maybe we would be ready to try slow love and marriage.
Arlie Russell HochschildRead
Many women cut back what had to be done at home by redefining what the house, the marriage and, sometimes, what the child needs. One woman described a fairly common pattern: I do my half. I do half of his half, and the rest doesn't get done.
Arlie Russell HochschildRead
Similar quotes
..This is why the ultimate reason of things must lie in a necessary substance, in which the differentiation of the changes only exists eminently as in their source; and this is what we call God.
Gottfried LeibnizRead
There is only one thing about which I am certain, and this is that there is very little about which one can be certain
W. Somerset MaughamRead
Throughout history, every mystery ever solved has turned out to be NOT magic.
Tim MinchinRead
My deep religiosity [...] found an abrupt ending at the age of twelve, through the reading of popular scientific books.
Albert EinsteinRead
Last of all came the cat, who looked round, as usual, for the warmest place, and finally squeezed herself in between Boxer and Clover; there she purred contentedly throughout Major's speech without listening to a word of what he was saying.
George OrwellRead
Don't go outside your house to see flowers. My friend, don't bother with that excursion. Inside your body there are flowers. One flower has a thousand petals. That will do for a place to sit. Sitting there you will have a glimpse of beauty inside the body and out of it, before gardens and after gardens.
Robert BlyRead