@margot on cohost

@margot

she/her
patreon.com/emaytch

follow me if ur cool

mastodon

mastodon.social/@emaytch

personal website

emaytch.neocities.org/

@margot11/9/2023, 11:21 PM

often i think about how the labor of working classes was presented to me as a child and teen, and my basically complete reversal on how i felt about it after i started actually doing some of the work; i knew i loved working with my hands, but the only outlet available to someone like me seemed to be art, and i don't regret exploring that aspect at all, i sometimes wonder what an alternate life might've looked like for me.

while i didn't end up actually working towards any sort of electrician or welding work like i contemplated at one point (altho the chance is never over until i lay dead in the ground), i often wonder how many other people are kept out of those professions simply because they feel like the kind of spaces they or people who look like them belong. i hope i can help encourage people who are interested in those things to explore them, and i hope one day the false concept of them being antithetical to queers, bookworms, sensitive people, etc (as though the tool cares who wields it) is something that fades with time

You must log in to comment.

in reply to @margot's post:

Nire Bryce @NireBryce11/9/2023, 11:27 PM

same, and the being excluded really was part of being moved away from there.

but as time goes on I realize more and more that, even those jobs are becoming less and less about using your hands. As the most recent example of it sticking out to me, the guys who supply firewood give up their splitting mauls to pull a lever attached to a chainsaw over and over to cut wood into logs small enough for the splitter to handle. Machining and fabrication gives way to CNC. Everything becomes automated with someone Standing and just Pulling an Un-Ergonomic Lever All Day because we can't automate out human oversight but we can everything else.

I hope we can reverse the flow of it, make things made for people. Because if we don't, I don't know if there will be anywhere left for people like me who can only really learn by doing the thing, with their hands, and without that everything feels fuzzy and difficult to translate.

because only being able to really learn in your hobbies and not really anywhere else... sucks when you have to work.

I don't mean to be a downer, and if anything I'm hopeful because everyone's seeing it now. I've just been thinking this since the start of the pandemic when everyone I know who was burned out on computers realized they could learn and thrive in things they could like. See. and Touch.

@margot11/9/2023, 11:46 PM

yeah, that's definitely an aspect of it, and that's part of the thing-- i was pushed away by the people in my life not because of any idea that that kind of work was bad, but the idea that it wasn't a way to make a living. and maybe they would be right! certainly with my health it would be hard to work at factory levels.

i do also see some optimism in watching people turn around and make that realization. i dont know how much of it is too late for a lot of people (hopefully not at all!) but if nothing else i hope changing that is part of a better world we leave for future generations

Gwen @Gwen11/10/2023, 1:07 AM

as someone who grew up with family that has always worked grueling, physically-demanding and shitty jobs, i'm not sure sure what you mean by " how the labor of working classes was presented to me as a child and teen"?

Part of my deep desire not to do physically demanding jobs and to work office jobs is specifically because I spent my entire life seeing my mom and stepdad and every adult around be work themselves into the dirt in service and production jobs. factory jobs, cable journeyman jobs, tradejobs, construction, you name it. some were better paying than others but they all left everyone i love broken and battered.

@margot11/10/2023, 1:21 AM

yeah, i mentioned that aspect in another comment, and i certainly don't think it was an unfair aspect of why i was steered away from those professions. i do hope someday that we can actually get those trades to a point where they don't destroy our bodies (altho, from the sound of many people i know in office jobs, 'destroying your body working them' isn't totally excluded by office jobs-- they just tend to have more protections and better health insurance)

what i more mean is that growing up they always seemed like boys' clubs. the kind of place where you had to be rough and loud and brash, i guess? its hard to explain exactly what i mean from a child's viewpoint, because, well, i was a child. but there certainly wasn't any aspect of them being presented as trades and skills in the same sense that i can see in history and among people i know now. if anything it always seemed like the opposite.