Creativity I

I'm a big fan of the New York Times Magazine.

Not enough to want to subscribe to a newspaper, though. I'm not a fan of newspapers. I have small kids so I never get around to reading everything; it always just ends up making a big pile of clutter that migrates around the house making me crazy; and then you have to recycle it, knowing as you do that some unspecified number of trees has died to bring you this information.

Three strikes. So no paper.

But I do like the New York Times Magazine. For several years my parents - who know we enjoy reading it and don't subscribe - would save all their copies of the magazine and send them to my husband and me a couple times a year. A much-appreciated deluge of sometimes out-of-date but otherwise excellent reading material.

Sometime after May of 2007, we received the magazine that contained this Freakonomics piece:

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D07E6D9133EF935A35756C0A9619C8B63&scp=3&sq=freakonomics%20tomato%20knit&st=cse&pagewanted=2

(Sorry it's not a clickable link - I can't seem to make those work).

In the article, the two economists behind Freakonomics mull over the apparent conundrum of adults spending time and money to perform "menial labor" when they don't have to.

The menial labor in question: gardening and knitting.

Tasks such as these aren't income-generating market work, they aren't housework (a.k.a. unpaid chores), and they aren't pure leisure, since they are work. How can the same activity to labor for one person and leisure for another?

In the end, the authors conclude that it is labor if someone else tells you to do it, leisure if you do it of your own volition, and that the desire to do such tasks are based in "incentives that go beyond the financial."

When I first read this article, the thing that struck me wasn't their conclusion, which seems like a reasonable tool for splitting the labor from the leisure.

No, I got stuck way back on the fourth paragraph:
"Isn't it puzzling that so many middle-aged Americans are spending so much of their time and money performing menial labors when they don't have to? Just as the radio and phonograph proved to be powerful substitutes for the piano, the forces of technology and capitalism have greatly eased the burden of feeding and clothing ourselves. So what's with all the knitting, gardening and ''cooking for fun''? Why do some forms of menial labor survive as hobbies while others have been killed off? (For instance, we can't think of a single person who, since the invention of the washing machine, practices ''laundry for fun.'') "

It's the last, parenthetical, question that gave me pause. How is it, I wondered, that these brilliant guys were puzzling mightily over something so blatantly obvious?

No one does laundry for fun because (correct me if I'm wrong) laundry isn't a creative activity. Other examples:
Changing diapers;
Doing the dishes;
Making mac 'n cheese and hot dogs that the kids will turn down again;
Taking out the trash.

You do them, you do them again, and then you do them again, all with the knowledge that - once they are done - you'll probably have to do them again. There is no tangible outcome (other than a clean home... which is nice).

Making a scarf, growing a garden, playing an instrument, landscaping your yard, weaving a basket, cooking a gourmet meal for friends, and brewing beer. Creative endeavors, all. Labor that has, as it's end product, a tangible item that can be enjoyed and admired and - importantly - serves to reflect information about it's creator. Whether it is a beer, a scarf, or the best-looking lawn on the block, it is displayed and shared as more than just a piece of clothing or a meal. It becomes a symbol of the creator.

Yes, it is labor that we could outsource. Some people choose not to because the payoff of creativity is, indeed, an incentive that goes beyond the financial.

I think that creativity and self-expression fill a need a basic human need. Talking about - and puzzling over - these tasks as just random chores we inexplicably don't outsource to Land's End and Whole Foods misses an entire facet of what it means to be human.

It is true that scarves are less expensive when they are mass-produced in an overseas factory and shipped to Wal-Mart. It's true that a bottle of tomato sauce made from tomatoes grown intensively in one location, shipped to another location for processing, and then to another to appear on a store shelf is less expensive than making your own, but only because we don't pay the true cost of the farming and shipping process.

It appears more efficient. The end product is cheaper. What I no longer buy is that either of those things is better. I also no longer buy the premise that earning as much money as possible in order to hire as many middle men as possible - at the lowest possible price - to make and grow the items that fill our basic human needs is better.

It doesn't feel better to me.

If the goal of the game of this cultural moment is to insulate ourselves from getting dirt under our fingernails supplying our own needs, I think I'm going to go play a different game.

Given the number of people who perform these "menial labors" in their free time, I suspect that I'm not the only one.