My hope, as I’ve written before, is that this time away from the normal processes of sustaining and reproducing our lives would give us the opportunity – both individually and societally – to rethink how things are. Obviously this is culturally dependent and different places have different values, but I’m referring to my experiences in the industrial north, ranging from Russia to the United States, with a smattering of more progressive western European nations to boot.

So what am I talking about?

For me, I want an wholesale inversion of our collective concepts of value. This stems from the idea of the foundational economy, meaning the elemental services and goods on which everything else in our world is built. The way I see it, all sorts of inequalities stem from this inversion or perversion of what value actually is.

Children, for example. We’re animals, and part of the raison-d’être of our species is to reproduce. This isn’t meant to slight anyone who cannot or who chooses not to do so, of course. It’s a statement of the barebones imperative built into us as biological beings. Having and raising kids is foundational work. And it’s not valued, or protected, or honored, or remunerated in any substantial way.

This overlaps with carework overall. The domestic is the invisible, the undervalued. It’s “women’s work” and not considered as serious as, say, investment banking, or war.

This overlaps with teaching. Anything to do with caring and nurturing and educating. All of it undervalued. I fail to understand why an elementary school teacher has less respect and a far lower salary than a banker. Why is the care of children so often denigrated? Even in Switzerland, where so many public school salaries and facilities look like a fantasy-come-true when compared to the United States or Russia… even here, you can’t compare a teacher’s salary to someone working in the financial or pharmaceutical industries. Why?

Why is caring so undervalued? Why do we look down upon the people who cook the food, who clean the dishes and the floors and the toilets? I’ve worked these jobs before. I’ve washed pots and pans and I’ve mopped and I’ve cooked food and I’ve served food and I’ve made coffee and I’ve worn aprons and I’ve worked a cash register and I’ve dealt with people.

Someone wise said “We all want to eat off of clean plates but no one wants to do the dishes.” Why don’t we value the people who do those dishes?

The Great Pause has originated the phrase “essential workers”. It’s all over the world now. And isn’t it funny that the essential workers are in so many cases the same ones denigrated in our standard conceptualization of value? People clap for the NHS but are they getting raises? Do they even have the equipment they need to do their work?

I found this gem on Twitter. It’s not unique:

So my hope would be that The Great Pause could induce an inversion of value. We could pay the people in the foundational economy what the deserve, based on a wholesale reorganization of society on a different accounting a value.

We can’t continue this way, not the least because our way of life is destroying the biosphere. Every one of us is stuck in this paradox: we can’t reproduce our daily lives without sacrificing the future, and we can’t secure the future without sacrificing our daily lives.

I think a good start towards reversing catastrophe this would be reversing what we value. And that means taking the foundational economy – by which I mean the people who actually support the things that matter – seriously.