Sharing/An ode to the unpaid worker

Yesterday, a friend pulled a tarot card for me. I thought it might be fun to see what tarot is like. I prefaced my request to her with a caveat that I don’t believe in fortune-telling and that I just wanted to have some fun. She seemed to be okay with that and the card that she pulled for me was called ‘sharing’.

Here’s some of what the card said ‘The card advises you to collaborate and cooperate as they are essential for your success. It encourages you to foster a culture of sharing and teamwork in your workplace and reminds you that by sharing knowledge, ideas, and responsibilities with your colleagues you can achieve greater productivity and create a positive environment for yourself. Embrace generosity and openness in your professional interactions.’ My first reaction was that it was irrelevant to me. After all, I’m not working and haven’t worked for the last 7 years.

Then I thought about it some more.

Sharing is a core value of mine. So it’s pretty cool that the card pulled for me was about that. I may not have been working at an organization for the last several years but that has not prevented me from fostering a culture of sharing and collaboration, except that the community rather than the workplace is my domain for this now. Soon after I started living in Dubai, I reached out to other members of the expat community that I lived in via Facebook posting this ‘Many of us living here have many professional and other skills which we may not be putting to use because we are not able to work due to visa restrictions or personal constraints. Why don’t we teach these skills to others for free to those who may be interested in learning? It will give us a chance to exercise the skills, keep them sharp, and maybe learn something new in the process and meet like-minded people. Most of us do not believe that we are good enough at something to teach it to others, but we may just surprise ourselves if we tried.’

Fast forward to today, the people who responded to this post, (and many did), and I have an active community called ‘Learn and Share’ through which we’ve conducted 50+ small-group, in-person workshops, mostly all free. We’ve learnt a lot of different skills, stepped out of our comfort zones, and had a lot of fun along the way. Some of my dearest friends in Dubai are people I have met through Learn and Share. I’ve received a lot of gratitude and appreciation from the members of Learn and Share community for starting this and keeping it going. Some of them have even described me as an ‘entrepreneur of sorts’. But do you see me putting this up on my CV or mentioning it on LinkedIn? No. Because I don’t tend to characterize it as ‘work’.

This made me rethink my first reaction to the card pulled for me. I may not be engaged in ‘paid work’. But in so far as work is defined in physics as something that involves an expenditure of effort and energy, I have been working.

My propensity to share isn’t limited to my work with ‘Learn and Share’. My first free-lance article in Khaleej Times was on tips and tricks on how to crack deals in sales in Dubai. I regularly share my knowledge, experience, and perspective – whether on things to do and see in the UAE, or what I’ve learned from the workshops that I attend, or just my point of view on contentious social issues – through my blog. I don’t write or share these for numbers – I’m not a serious blogger or a wannabe influencer – I do it because I feel that if even one person benefits by reading what I’ve written in some way – then my job is done.

Again, would I characterize my 200+ blog posts as ‘work’ and put my blog on my CV or mention it on Linked In? No. Because I don’t think of it as ‘serious’ work. I could go on about the various other ways in which I share my ideas and try to bring people together to collaborate and this article would become long and unwieldy.

The only reason why any of this is important is that for most people, their sense of worth is tied up to work. And when they perceive themselves or others perceive them as ‘not working’ then they start losing their sense of self too. It happens to me and to all the highly educated, qualified women around me, who gave up on their careers after moving countries, having babies, caring for others, for whatever reasons. When people ask me what I do, it always makes me uncomfortable and I never know how to answer.

Possibly the reason for my discomfort lies in the fact that as women we don’t value the other work that we do, because society doesn’t value it. Society values the salary, the designation, the recognition – the Forbes ‘thirty under thirty’, the awards. And because we live in society and those values creep into our system as if by osmosis, we stop valuing our work and contributions too. And when we stop valuing them, we stop stepping up and offering our talents for others to use and to teach others.

Many of the women I approach to teach their skills to others back off saying they are not confident enough, it’s just a hobby for them, they’re afraid to mess up, they don’t want to waste peoples’ time etc etc. I try to push them gently, saying it’s okay, but beyond a point, I give up.

Where would society be without the caregivers who stepped away or the people who chose less conventionally rewarding tracks? What would the world be without its storytellers and artists and volunteer workers? Is the act of volunteering to read a Urdu short story to a blue-collar worker lower in value and prestige than valuing a stock or a bond?

I don’t claim to have any answers for how to make non-conventional, unpaid work more valued by society. I can only say that a good first step is owning that what you do is work, being less self-conscious and more appreciative of it, and appreciating such work done by others around you. Even if it feels fake, and believe me, it does, sometime.

Normally when I sit down to write something, the words just flow out of me and I complete what I set out to say in one sitting. Not so for this piece. I found the act of writing this down distasteful, and had to take several breaks and will myself to return to it and finish it. Why? Because I hate writing what sounds to me like gratuitous self-praise. But it’s an important topic, and I wanted to speak on it, and there was no other way to lead than by my example.

So all my dear fellow unpaid volunteer workers around the world, unite and lose your self-chosen chains of self-consciousness and self-deprecation. Own up to what you do and be proud of it. And be assured that the world is a better place for your efforts.