We're Too Old Not to Notice, and Thank, All the Invisible People Who Got Us Here
Too Old for This Sh*t: How to Take Your Life Back from an Ageist Society
How many people labor every day to give you the life you lead?
This question is primarily for First World folks. We in the West enjoy an unbelievable amount of luxury which we take for granted.
If you don’t travel, you don’t see who picks the coffee beans for your cuppa, who shears the sheep for your coats, who tumbles the jeans to give them that worn look.
Who does all the things all over the world so that you get to have what you have?
How often do we consider thanking all the people who clean the buildings which smell nice first thing in the morning, who change the bed pans and diapers for the loved ones we can’t or won’t manage, who sit our dogs or kids so that we can have a day/week/month off?
Why does it even matter?
This piece was inspired first by a quote I heard on NPR. Then I was moved into writing it tonight because a Substacker wrote this marvelous Note:
@katiejgln
It really should be common sense by now that a huge portion of every single country’s wealth and stability relies on unpaid care, domestic, and emotional labour, still disproportionately done by women and girls.
If all that labour vanished tomorrow, society wouldn’t just begin to function poorly. It would eventually cease to function at all.
Damn right.
Please visit this note as the comments are terrific and add more context and research to this premise.
I wasn’t thinking solely about women’s work, but that of the untold millions and billions of people who do unpaid and poorly-paid and indentured labor all over the world so that the few can be so comfortable and pampered.
This comment, heard on NPR during a totally unrelated story, was this:
“Who are all the invisible people I need to thank for this?”
This meaning our food, our clean buildings, our clean clothing, construction, roads,…..every single little thing that makes up our lives is touched by people who get absolutely no acknowledgement.
This, meaning the domestic help that frees people up to work, the garden help that keeps our housing values higher, the people who repair the bridges at night when the traffic is lower (and some end up dying for it).
Chances are very good that everything I touch, wear, eat, toss, drive, etc. has the hands of hundreds if not thousands of unseen workers involved in it.
The sanitation workers who pick up my garbage, the volunteers who clear the trash out of the ditches, the slave prison labor, mostly Black folks still picking cotton possibly made into the t-shirt I use for pajamas.
Do I think of all of them? Unlikely. I take them all for granted.
I learned a lot of this doing extreme adventure travel, such as climbing the iconic peak Kilimanjaro in 2013.
I summitted Kilimanjaro. MEMEMEMEMEME, we love to say.
YOU didn’t carry your food, tents, tent poles, the toilet, the medical equipment, the cooking gear. The porters did. YOU didn’t choose the route, do the safety walks, perform the medical checks, the guides did.
YOU can’t get your ass down if you bonk. The porters and guides will.
See all those folks in the photo above? They’re only carrying about 25 lbs of basics for their day. The rest was already schlepped up to the next camp, and will be set up by the time they get there.
I wrote a series of articles on the Kilimanjaro Porter Assistance Project which was built to ensure their safety, their meals, their warmth, clothing, sunglasses hats, and shoes. Many never had any of those things. Some had to let senior guides rape their wives to do the porter work.
Not making this up. We have no idea who does the work, and what it costs them to do it, and how little they are paid. True all over the world, and many times worse for women.
Who also port on Kilimanjaro, by the way, and they are expect to sleep with the guides on the mountain as well or not get paid.
See what I mean?
KPAP was formed to help protect those porters.
By the way, don’t you dare climb Kilimanjaro using a company that isn’t a member of KPAP, above. Why? Because those porters aren’t protected. They may not even get the tips you give the guide.
When you do that kind of research it really helps put the things we enjoy in perspective.
I agree entirely that the world operates on women’s work, largely unpaid and brutally undervalued. Please don’t get me started.
That doesn’t tell the whole story. The child labor, the caste systems, the slavery that still exists all over the world.
The millions of poorly-paid Chinese factory workers whose hands have crafted, well, damned near everything.
One commenter on Katie’s Note mentioned the Icelandic women’s walkout. That’s a terrific story, by the way.
From Wikipedia:
On 24 October 1975, Icelandic women did not go to their paid jobs or do any housework or child-rearing at home. Ninety percent of women took part, including women in rural communities.[3] Fish factories were closed since many of the factory workers were women.[4]
During the Day Off, 25,000 out of a population of 220,000 people in Iceland gathered in the centre of Reykjavik, Iceland's capital, for a rally. At the rally, women listened to speakers, sang, and talked to each other about what could be done to achieve gender equality in Iceland. There were many speakers, including a housewife, two parliament members, a women's movement representative, and a female worker. The last speech of the day was by Aðalheiður Bjarnfreðsdóttir, who "represented Sókn, the trade union for the lowest-paid women in Iceland".[2]
Employers prepared for the day without women by buying sweets, pencils, and paper to entertain the children brought into work by their fathers.[2] As a result, sausages, a popular meal, sold out in many stores that day.[2]
We could use one of those. Truly. But we’re going to get something like that without having to go on strike.
We’re about to find out how many underpaid, capable, dependable and absolutely critical Brown and Black hands are part of our agricultural food chain. Who staff the hotels, restaurants, tourist spots, hospitals, clinics, nursing homes. The more that are rounded up, the more the economy will simply grind to a halt as people, even some green card holders, are kicked out, or many more go underground.
They sure aren’t going to show up to pick our strawberries, build our hurricane-ravaged homes, pave our roads, wipe our grandmother’s rear end.
Men and women and children, the invisible, the unseen, the forgotten, yet the absolutely essential. We’re going to learn the meaning of “essential worker” in real time, far worse than during the pandemic, when the human scaffolding holding up so much of what makes America function is detained and/or deported.
I’m not going to get into a political dialogue with anyone about this; that’s not the point of this article. It’s about the hordes of invisible people who have long been willing to do what many will not so that a small percentage of the world’s population lives in incomprehensible luxury.
Before you say that you hardly live in luxury, please visit the vast shantytowns in South Africa.
Go visit Kibera, in Nairobi, before you complain about all the things you don’t have. The people who live in these slums are the people who do all the work that the White folks don’t want to do.
Go see the slums of Rio or Calcutta. Then please, complain all you want about what you don’t have. All the conveniences you deserve. You do that.
Travel is a great way to realize that we live in an embarrasment of riches compared to most. And in many of these countries, such as Bangladesh, India and Vietnam, millions of people labor to make things we use every day, and then throw away.
Nobody is thanking them. I am, right here. It’s not enough, either.
I have learned to be immensely grateful in ways that only travel can teach.
Who are all the invisible people I need to thank for the life I lead?
That’s why I’ve gotten into the habit of thanking people who clean the airplane as I hurry off, clean the bathrooms as I scurry through, mow the lawn and pick up the garbage as I walk past.
I will stop and thank the person sweeping the floor at the airport. They often don’t speak English but they know what I’m saying.
I see people who deserve to be seen for the work that they do to keep our world moving.
Why bother?
Two things happen: they light up like a beacon. And so do I.
Sure, our husbands and lovers and partners and kids need to see our work as women. But that’s hardly all of it.
We need to see and acknowledge people who do what we will not to, so that we can have the life we live.
Let’s say thank you.
Let’s play.
Many thanks to those fellow writers who inspire me, the subscribers who help me pay my light bill and those I’ve not met yet.
Such important information that no one ever talks about. I am going to take on your practice of thanking everyone that is behind the scenes and am grateful you brought this to my attention.
Cheers to this. One trip to Kenya taught me that I enjoy, comparatively speaking, immense wealth and privilege, all of it unearned. But as you point out, even in the US, I'm surrounded by "invisible" hands who labor to grease the skids of my life for me. Saying thank you is a small but surprisingly powerful thing to do. My husband always thanks the TSA agents at airport security, and even the grumpier ones light up.