If there were a return to pride in and appreciation of a job well done, there would be no shortage of people willing to do the work, in my mind. The reason most people are so unwilling to do these things is because they feel like it is beneath them, and that doing them is a demonstration of their low status.
The whole modern economy is based on having them feel low status...
People content with their jobs and lives don't consume as much. The whole 1.2 trillion dollar advertising industry (plus tons of non-measured counterparts, e.g. lifestyle articles in magazines, movies etc) is based on promoting unattainable lifestyles as exciting to sell products they associate with them.
Maybe some people. Not others.
N=1. I absolutely don't think maintenance is "low status". I just consider it a waste of human time and resources that interferes with deriving utility and enjoyment from things, but is strictly necessary. It's something to be minimized, both in terms of doing no more than strictly necessary and finding technological solutions to reduce maintenance burdens of products/systems. But when it has to be done it has to be done, I have no problems with it.
It has nothing to do with status. Most maintenance work isn't done in front of people, and not doing it at all signals much lower status than doing it. Rich people may do less of it themselves because they can afford to pay someone else to do maintenance tasks.
Well, parent already said "most people", not all.
(But even if they haven't said "most", one should assume they allow for exceptions in any general statement in a casual conversation. Unless of course they used the universal quantifier and insisted on "absolutely everybody, no exceptions whatsoever". But I digress).
>It has nothing to do with status. Most maintenance work isn't done in front of people
It doesn't have to be to be associated with low status though. It's merely enough that it's considered as stopping one from doing the things they think would raise their status (what they "should be doing" that's not beneath them).
What I meant is, while I can't read minds, "most people" disagrees with the ad-hoc statistical sample of "people I know". What I perceive is people differing in the amount of resistance they have towards doing unwanted things that still need to be done, but I maybe once saw it being considered a status issue.
> It's merely enough that it's considered as stopping one from doing the things they think would raise their status (what they "should be doing" that's not beneath them).
Do people really think this way? "This task is beneath me", "that other task is not beneath me"?
I consider chores to be stopping me from doing things "I should be doing", but it has nothing to do with status; it's just about having better things to do with the time. I hate chores as much now as I hated them in the days I had trouble making ends meet; the only difference is that nowadays I can afford reducing some of them (e.g. I have a dishwasher now, and I can afford a little bit extra to buy something that's easier to clean than the cheapest option). Rich people are able to outsource more.
Maybe the picture is backwards? Outsourcing chores is a status signal in the sense that your ability to reduce maintenance burden is correlated to your wealth. That doesn't mean people hate maintenance because of status - what makes this a good status signal in the first place is that chores are a waste of life.
I think the difference in our opinion is that I see those two phrasings as being more or less the same. "better things to do with the time" I understanding as not very different from "those are beneath me, I'm here for a higher calling".
As opposed to enjoying e.g. cooking and tending the house, and not considering them a waste of time.
Kind of like people tend to look down on garbage men and cleaning persons, even though their work is essential.
> Kind of like people tend to look down on garbage men and cleaning persons, even though their work is essential.
Ok, I've seen people thinking like this; I actively changed the mind of or filtered out people like this from my social circle. It's a proxy for looking down on poor / less successful people. Still, these are jobs associated with less well-off precisely because the tasks are unpleasant, and everyone who can avoid them, will.
(Then again, maybe it's self-reinforcing at this point, and the factor that poor people do these jobs makes for an extra incentive to avoid doing the same, even if one is poor too.)
They do so many foods better than the people who invented them.
You might be considered very low status if you "can't afford to pay someone and you still don't do it", and slightly less low status if you do them yourself.
One is lowly and dirty-ass, the other is lowly-and-clean.
But not lofty and successful as "I'm all about creating, I have staff to do those things, can't be bothered as my time is precious".
To the more well off/elites etc, someone who "can't afford to pay someone" and does those things themselves is still low status. They are not going to get impressed with someone cleaning the house themselves...
You can be high status and poor, or high status and rich, but the former is easier to achieve. This probably stems from a “it is easier to thread a camel through a needle than for a rich man to find grace” kind of mentality, but also relates to values of self-sufficiency. Nevermind that everyone goes to the grocery and only maintains small vegetable gardens.
As someone who likes to make money, I am in a subculture of my immediate social network.