Each of us is doing the work of others and not getting paid for it. [Shadow work] is responsible for taking away a great deal of the leisure time we thought we would all have in the twenty-first century.
Daniel Levitin
Since I learned about shadow work, I have started seeing it everywhere.
The above definition from Daniel Levitin is a little narrow; “shadow work” refers to all forms of unpaid labor, including housework and childcare, not just the labor that has been outsourced by companies to consumers.
Pumping gas, bagging groceries, checking airline luggage…these are all examples of “shadow work”—tasks that have been offloaded onto the consumer over the past several decades.
Another variety of shadow work has grown alongside our embrace of new technologies. For me, the most frustrating shadow work of all comprises those task we are driven to do to protect our data online. Yes, I’m talking about password management—a collective effort that seems to take up at least an hour or two of my life every month, the mundane activities of resetting passwords, creating new ones, paging through my password manager app on my phone, or—most dreaded of all—”verifying my identity.”
In the wake of the Equifax data breach back in 2017, I had a minor panic attack about how vulnerable my information was, how easy it would be to open a line of credit in my name with just a few choice pieces of information. So, to be safe, I placed “freezes” on my accounts at each of the four main credit bureaus.
Smart, right?
The downside was that in exchange for this (mostly imagined) safety, I added more shadow work to my life. Last year, my wife and I went through the trying experience of buying our first house—and the process of “lifting” those “freezes” on my accounts was clumsy and painful, involving an hour-long adventure with Equifax’s phone tree that I journeyed through on three separate occasions.
The problem? They couldn’t verify my identify.
I would posit that it’s not just the burden of extra “work” that makes this variety of shadow work so awful: it’s how the work makes you feel very small and uncertain, up against large, faceless forces who have little interest in your life.
Taxes—beloved by no one except for Turbotax and H&R Block—is an example of alienating shadow work in the same vein. The method of taxation in this country would be darkly comical if we weren’t all subject to it. Why are we being forced to compile, collate, and submit paperwork providing answers to questions that the government already knows? There’s not only no good answer to this question, but there’s no one to answer it in the first place.
And that’s the frightening thing about the shadow work of our modern work: there’s no one in charge of it—much of it just happened to us, with no good explanation. As technologies continue to proliferate, I have no doubt that there’s more shadow work to come, work that we won’t see until it’s too late, and we’re already doing it.
Taylor Coe 