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 does not show up in any dataset. The same is true of the mother waiting through piano practice, answering questions in the back seat, comforting a toddler at three in the morning, or listening to a six-year-old describe a dream that makes no sense. None of it is efficient. None of it is visible to anyone except the child involved. And it is precisely this kind of work that civic life turns out to depend on. 

    Robert Putnam made the structural argument in Bowling Alone 25 years ago, and the data has only gotten worse since. The institutions that hold democratic life together—congregations, neighborhood associations, PTAs, civic clubs, fraternal orders—are anchored by people who show up repeatedly for work that does not pay. Motherhood is the first place children encounter that disposition. It is where they learn that another human being will remain present even when doing so is inconvenient. Strip that lesson out of the early years, and the rest of associational life becomes harder to sustain at any age.

    My Hebrew friends tell me that Jewish tradition has a vocabulary for this that secular American culture has largely lost. The eshet chayil of Proverbs 31, recited at Friday night tables across the Jewish world, praises the woman of the household not for spectacle but for steadiness—for rising before dawn, for the lamp that does not go out at night, for reliability sustained over years. Whatever one makes of the gendered framing, the underlying claim is durable: The work of presence deserves public acknowledgment, because the household and the community both depend on it. That is a civic claim, not a sentimental one.

    Neil Postman warned 40 years ago in Amusing Ourselves to Death that a culture organized around entertainment values eventually rewrites everything else in its image. He was writing about television. The argument applies more forcefully to the platforms that replaced it. Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation has documented the cost to adolescents in detail; the data on anxiety, loneliness, and self-harm among the young is overwhelming. Less attention has been paid to what adults are modeling. Children watching their parents perform online are absorbing a curriculum about where attention belongs, and they are drawing the obvious conclusion.

    The work of mothering, by contrast, remains analog. A child learns trust from consistency. Emotional regulation develops through repeated interaction with an attentive adult. Empathy is built in relationship, not on a screen. None of this can be automated or sped up without losing what makes it work. Meta alone reported over $200 billion in advertising revenue in 2025. That is the value the market assigns to the minutes it can pull away from the people in front of you. The cultural value of refusing to give those minutes up runs in the opposite direction, and it is not measured anywhere.

    This is one reason mothers today often describe a fatigue that is not entirely logistical. Earlier generations worked harder by almost any classical measure. What is new is that the surrounding environment has become actively hostile to the work. Parents are now asked to perform family life publicly, run careers, manage enrichment schedules, and curate competence on a feed, all while doing the same patient and unmetered work that mothering has always required. The work has not become harder. The conditions around it have.

    Tocqueville’s argument about American civic life rested on a foundation he largely took for granted: The household and the local association were the schools in which Americans learned to live with one another. Those schools cannot be replaced by policy, and they cannot be rebuilt by exhortation. They are rebuilt, if at all, by adults who choose presence over performance long before anyone is watching.

    That is what Mother’s Day is for. Not sentiment, and not a marketing occasion, but a public acknowledgment of a form of attention the surrounding culture no longer knows how to count. The algorithm asks what captures attention immediately. Motherhood asks what deserves attention over time. A self-governing society depends, in the end, on people still capable of telling the difference. 

    Thanks to all the mothers out there; we deeply appreciate you.