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Creating backlash *

Home improvement is a miniature ecosystem with inputs, outputs, and flows; such an idea can make life much better


Illustration by Peter Grandi / BA Reps

At the beginning of our relationship 17 years ago, we started talking about acquiring a dog. “It would be great to have a dog,” he often said in a conversation, “but we don’t have time to take care of her.” We’ll try anyway, we thought. When we got the dog, it turned out that we had a significant backlash - in terms of time, money, emotional energy - which allowed us to bring the dog into our lives. Having a dog was also pleasantly emotional, so there was no loss of play. This experience revealed to us aspects of living together, which we began to call our “household model.” For many years we have adjusted this model; we call this process “household design”. We rely on this model in a number of solutions. Do we have only one car? Could we live abroad for a year?

It is best to think of a household as a miniature ecosystem that has inputs, outputs, and a stream of resources that nourish and support it. There are so many interconnected moving parts that the label “family” is simply not large enough to cover everything that includes a household. Our household consists of our family (two adults and two children), our marriage, our obligations and values, as well as our responsibilities: work, life insurance, Christmas cards.

Also, a household is not only money or tangible property; these are intangible assets, like emotional obligations and social connections. We are straight with children, but there is no prescription regarding what is considered a household. It can be two parents, or one, or three; it may not have children; it can be several generations; it can be a group of roommates. Households can even be called monasteries and other formats of collective living. In each case, there is a system of resource flows, including time, money, emotional energy, intellectual energy, social connections, physical energy and health. These flows can be controlled, and they help highlight a small home economy within the larger economy of the outside world. Home improvement is a cell of a social organism.

Interestingly, traditional macroeconomic theory calls the household sector one of the four sectors of the economy whose work it sees in consumption. We believe that home improvement is much more; and that people in households, like CEOs and CFOs, could benefit from controlling their inbound and outbound resources. You can benefit from an understanding of the structure of this cell, all its inputs, outputs and their relationships. Together we decided to write this essay to share some of what we learned about designing a household model, because we think it is time for households to realize their strength and help each other create more backlash.

Here is a short overview of our household: 10 years ago, when we first approached parenthood, we asked ourselves how we should continue to work, be practical parents and minimize the time our son spent in kindergarten. It was a turning point. We looked at our schedules, moved working hours and calculated that both of us could allow some time - we did not know how long - to work part-time. This household iteration lasted two years until our relationship began to suffer, and Michael, exhausted by work in the evenings, switched to day work.

Now Michael is a consultant and freelance writer who works from 30 to 50 hours a week with a flexible schedule; Misty is a vice president of consulting at a non-profit organization serving 30 hours a week on a fixed schedule. Over the years, we have found that we share domestic work according to interests, abilities and opportunities: Michael is engaged in cooking and housekeeping; Misty is involved in finance and logistics. (We arrange things like dishes, accompanying children to / from school along the way). Like everyone we know, sometimes we are strained by gender standards in our division of labor, but we are somewhat resigned to how this is happening now. A long time ago we decided not to try to divide everything equally, because constant monitoring of one's own efforts and those of another seemed harmful.Instead, we try to remember that this is a joint, common venture. If you take care of the household, the household will take care of you.
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Imagine a household model as a cable-block system. Ropes are pulled (creating tension) or weakened (creating backlash [1] ) depending on material resources, changes in the orientation of life or needs and other factors. If you focus on the specifics of the blocks, then just imagine the household as an abstract system of interconnected play and tension. The goal is not to accumulate backlash and avoid stress, but to find a balance in the redundancy and congestion of the system as a whole. We realized that a household that is able to balance and ready to withstand periods of imbalance is a healthy household. You need to maintain this balance and turn resource flows into something that you can control.

One element of household design is flow management. Each person has his own hierarchy of backlash and tension, and we bring it to our households. We can suggest this principle: households work best when they are built around a hierarchy of backlash and pulling people in the household. None of the households is like the other, because each person has their own values, but each household works better when everyone in it shares the same feeling of what is important. Now we need a lot of backlash to take care of children, which requires more time and emotional energy, and for this we agree to work a little less than a full day.

When our eldest son was 18 months old and finally began to sleep at night, Misty asked Michael when he would be ready to think about his second child. We cannot, he said. This would require all the backlash remaining in our system and even more. No functioning system can operate without play (in other words, at full voltage) for a very long time. This is how actual poverty can be described: depressing stresses and lack of excess. That is why it destroys people, marriages, dreams. But the stress caused by the presence of the child, partly depends on his age. A helpless baby for weeks makes you sleepless and irritable, pushing it to the limit of strength - until your baby smiles at you. As you grow older, the system relaxes more and more: diapers and car seats end, self-feeding begins, day school,independent game dates and overnight stays. Once you wake up and find that the rope was weakened by such small steps that you did not notice along the way, but now there is a noticeable backlash.

There are a couple of important things that we want to point out regarding backlash and tension in the household model. First, backlash wants to be used. We write this essay using backlash pieces: Misty writes and edits in the morning before work, while Michael takes the children to school; Michael writes and edits between other written assignments and consultations, and after the children are already in bed. Or, this backlash can be used to go to bed earlier or bake muffins for breakfast. One indicator that you are in the household is the adoption of joint decisions on how to use your backlash; people who always use their backlash themselves are roommates; but cohabitants who agree on the use of play in the interests of everyone live according to the concept of a household.

We are not saying that play is an absolute good and that tension or lack of play should be avoided. Backlash is not just an excess; it is an excess that can go to other things. In a sense, this is an excess that only becomes apparent when it feeds other things. When our eldest son was four years old, we realized that there was significant unused play in our household. We conveniently moved along the coast, but we also felt that we should do something bold and difficult. Sometimes the backlash is invisible, and it needs to be identified; sometimes it can be consciously cultivated. But we also do not need to completely avoid stress - we both felt that when we are valued for our work and when our responsibilities challenge us (but do not overload), we feel healthy and alive.
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Designing a household model will help you clarify priorities and make better decisions. Understanding the household model has given us the opportunity to efficiently use the tension for the benefit of the family, the people in it, as well as other communities of which we are a part. It also allowed us to consciously find play for big ambitions (moving a family abroad so that Michael could use a scholarship program, or allocating studio time for Misty) and everyday things (finding after a long day of patience to put two children in bed with emotional contact). Maybe one day we use backlash to start a joint creative venture, move abroad again, study the language intensively, and run for some post. It works better if you are all committed to a common future,if you can be sure that today's tension in one thing tomorrow will give backlash in something else.

An explicit household model also allowed us to avoid some common pitfalls. Often we see people trying to achieve greater backlash in one dimension — usually money — without realizing that it knocks the system out of order, depriving it of backlash in other parts. Another trap is the expectation that backlash always develops, especially when it comes to several households. And you need to plan for everyone to participate. (Note: “adds up” is embarrassingly translated as “folding”; it is understood that the backlash created by each of the participants in the household can go into a common pool, but it can also be that someone does not put in their backlash or conceals the contributions of others).

In many ways, our household construction project was made possible thanks to two difficult sponsors - luck and privileges: we are two (at the moment) educated white people from the middle class in the United States with able-bodied bodies and ample opportunities for social mobility, and on the joint path we received a generous share good luck. But in part, we were able to creatively approach the design of our household, because we paid attention to the gaps in the system, saw their costs and tried some alternative. We had neither trust funds, nor large posts, nor a close circle of support - we took all the luck and privileges that we had and used them to find ways to create more backlash.
This leads to a second important element in household design: controlling resource flows. You can make flows manageable, figuratively speaking, by setting regulators on them.

Here is an example. In 2006, we just bought a house and thought about getting married, although we have not yet integrated our finances. This meant that we were doing things like writing checks to each other from separate accounts to pay for a mortgage. Then Michael realized something about how we were paid: Misty received a salary every two weeks, while he received much larger, but irregular payments from freelance work. These were different types of money, each of which could be used for different domestic needs. Understanding this allowed us to establish a regulator on this resource flow. After the merger of our finances, we eventually sent money for different purposes, which allowed us to finance our “artisanal” wedding and one-month honeymoon in Yucatan. Although our comprehensive income was not significant,we did not need more money or even comparable resources; we just needed to use some other characteristic of financial flow; in this case, its delimitation in time.

Not everyone can put the same regulators on the same flows in their households. When discussing the writing of this article, we understood that the reserves of some people are so small that they may not have time, for example, to read an essay on household design, not to carefully evaluate their own backlashes and stresses.
A home improvement does not work if it is transactional or if you have a debate about what is included in key household chores
We also suspect that in every household there is at least one resource flow on which the regulator can be put. The budget function for household finances is to put in place a regulator to control the amount of money flowing in different directions.
But look further than money. Make a budget for your attention on watching movies or on social networks and try to leave more backlash for yourself (and not give it to corporations). Refuse creative and applied projects if they are too difficult to complete or they cost too much money. If you have children, get them to bed early if possible. We followed a certain sleep schedule for children, which allowed us to regulate the energy flow in the household; Well-rested children are a form of backlash (basically, they are easier to handle, but they also allow parents to spend time together, and these recharged relationships create backlash for the household).

And find a new home for your pets - either temporarily or forever when other duties pile up.

In our case, the most accessible resource for manipulation was the time that we managed to return when we both started working from home. Going to work is a huge backlash devastator, which is why (in addition to the impact on the climate) people should be freed from them as much as possible. But the most valuable stream? Positive mutual respect between us.

It is important to remember that backlash has no units. Household design is not accounting. This is a thing that can be felt, not measured. Yes, some of the flows have the usual units of measurement (hours, dollars), but even the richest person in the world may not feel so rich in terms of backlash. In fact, one has only to start counting every unit of backlash or tension created or used by people, so the trust inherent in the household model begins to suffer. Therefore, we believe that the household design process is better for our marriage than insisting on equality: generosity creates excess, and stinginess generally creates scarcity.

For example, the principle of “play does not have units” helps us solve the pocket money issue of our nearly nine-year-old son. We are strongly opposed to earning household chores, so he receives a fixed weekly “allowance”, which increases with age, as he wants to get more from the household and can give him more. There are regular household chores - caring for a cat, mowing the lawn - but there are also unpaid situational requests as household needs arise. He does not receive a buck for a single raking of leaves or for looking after his younger brother. A household does not work if it is transactional or if you have to argue about what is included in the main household chores. If you heard our calls to him to pay attention to what needs to be done and what kind of help is needed, you would most likelyThey also heard our principle: if you take care of the household, the household will take care of you. We are trying to teach him to be grateful to the system that takes care of him, and to be ready to do his part of the work in response. (Ten years from now, we will tell you if this approach worked).

Perhaps the most important part of household design is the maximum possible preservation of excess within the household. For example, food waste from the kitchen. You can compost them to enrich the soil at home, or you can put them in the trash, from where they will go to the landfill and not enrich anything. American households seem to be missing out on most of their backlash in favor of external actors, in line with the macroeconomic view that households serve only consumption. Money, attention, health, time, emotional well-being: they flow out of American households whose economic porosity is obvious regardless of worldview, political beliefs, or family history. Before the collapse of the housing bubble in 2008, many people around the world found affordable play in a cheap mortgage - a play that was tightened,when the system of backlash and tension of the financial economy began to crumble. Households were pulled down to impossibility, and in the next decade it was difficult to find even psychological backlash.

Households must constantly create surpluses, some of which can be taken, used for some time, and then returned to the household as surplus. When Michael was in college, he had a professor of anthropology who studied peasant economics and how they treated the household as an “el base,” the fundamental economic unit and sustainable ecology of factors of consumption and production. In the basic model, hens lay eggs, some of which can be exchanged, others to eat, while chicken droppings will fertilize the garden. The peasant base has been optimized to use as many elements as possible, and for centuries it has worked - until integration into a market economy based on monetary funds did not destroy this model. (For example, people needed money,therefore, they sold all the eggs and were forced to work for someone else).

Other people along the way influenced how we think about household models. One artist friend pushed Michael to develop a business model for his writing life. To create an approach to household finance, Misty used a book by Mary Claire Allwine and Christine Larson entitled “The Family CFO” (2004), where the family was seen as an enterprise that was tasked with organizing resources according to priorities for life, and not just to live month. Kristin Mashki’s work “This Is Not How I Thought It Would Be” (2009), which translates all household priorities into discussions with each other, also influenced. It helps the reader manage household time based on priorities by reverse engineering time investments.
Many Dutch fathers work four days, and the fifth is taken as Papadag, father's day
Awareness of household boundaries and sources of backlash has some policy implications. In the US, households have to take care of their backlash themselves. But in other parts of the world this is not the case as we learned last year while living in the Netherlands. There, the state helps create backlash for households. (Of course, they don't call it that.) Health insurance, although based on a highly regulated private system, is universal, comprehensive, and extremely affordable. Kindergartens offer flexible half-day contracts in the morning or afternoon, special hours, and the ability to accumulate days that working parents can use as needed. There is also a substantial state subsidy for kindergartens.

There are not as many patterns for household models in the US as in Dutch society. In the Netherlands, it is normal for mothers to work two or three days a week; these jobs were introduced in the 1970s to attract women to the labor market, which in fact means that you don’t have to choose between work and benefits. Many Dutch fathers work four days, and the fifth is taken as Papadag, father's day. All this is optional, but if people want, that is, these opportunities are widely supported by employers.

That's what the government is, we thought. It should provide backlash to the households that need it, especially for occupations of wide public interest, such as raising young people and caring for the elderly. Governments should also provide sources of backlash to households in emergency situations, and protect households from those aspects of life in a capitalist society that reduce backlash, increase stress and reduce the amount of managed resources. For example, in the event of too much stress or mental illness, most Dutch workers receive one year of sick leave with full maintenance, and the second year with 70% (guaranteed by the employer [2]) The government does not impose an excess, but provides it if you decide that you need it.

Designing a household model will be a good way for a single person or single parent to compare their needs and resources. It can also help to find out some things that divorcing families learn - without experiencing emotional pain and financial costs. When households diverge, the assumptions and facts regarding backlash and stress become apparent, so - when and if people create new families with other people - they take the opportunity to review and consciously plan resource flows. We have heard about cases when the separation of the old household improves some aspects of life, for example, when new schedules for fulfilling the parental obligations of two separated people give each of them more time for themselves. (Women need it most.) Imaginewhat else can everyone get with a more systematic design approach.

Talking about household design can be done in a variety of ways (What about universal basic income and household models? Is it harmful or useful to use corporate titles like COO or CTO when discussing family roles?), But we want to end by repeating this idea: if we, As a society, we try to help each other create more play, we all get more play.

The inevitable alarm is that households will have to compete with each other for play, but this is an incorrect analogy from the private sector, where firms really have to compete. Designing a household model is not a zero-sum situation; not for all threads. Take two neighboring families whose children run back and forth to play. When your children are in our house, I don’t care that they eat our food, both because I care about your children, and because they play with my children, and as long as their relationship has good dynamics, I can do other things when they play. Meanwhile, in the house of neighbors, where there are no children now, adults are doing everything they need. Children are fed and busy, parents are happy, relationships are being built. And all this backlash is unforeseen and accidental. Imagine what could happenif we decide to help each other create more play. There may well be more play for everyone.

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2. I know from entrepreneurs I know in the Netherlands that this may not work well with entrepreneurs. There are many cases of scam when people get a job and after a while pretend to be sick in order to receive money and not work. The burden on their content falls on the business, but the small business may not have play for this. Therefore, businesses prevent such risks through short-term contracts, watch restrictions and other measures. And if they didn’t make sure, then, as one of my friends had to do, they resort to the services of detectives to show the regulatory authorities that the employee’s lifestyle is incompatible with the declared illness.

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