In A Loud Culture, The Quietest Work Is The Most Important
[ I did not want to interfere with all of the lovely, personal Happy Mother ’ s Day messages yesterday...including my own! So, on the advice of everyone's favorite Editor-at-Large, Chow Magee, I saved this for today. Happy Belated Mother ’ s Day to all you Moms out there! ] American culture is not particularly good at recognizing work and efforts it cannot measure. Productivity is tracked. Engagement is tracked. Reach, impressions, and time-on-platform are tracked. The question of what attention is being paid to, and at what cost, gets less attention than the question of how attention is being captured. This is the context in which Mother’s Day arrives, and it is worth saying plainly what motherhood actually is. It is one of the last forms of sustained human attention left in American life that does not generate a metric. A mother reading the same bedtime story for the 20th time is doing the kind of work that doe...