I have underemployed-caregiver syndrome.
Discussion
Self-diagnosed, since I'm the only expert in this field.
If it’s on webMD who are you to argue against
For those of you new to this ailment, it is when someone in high demand on the primary employment market marries someone even more in demand and has kids, or when one of their dependents suddenly needs so much care that they can barely hold down employment, or (for advanced cases) some combination of the two.
Is there a questionnaire I could use to self-diagnose whether or where I fall on this spectrum?
I bet you're not more underemployed than me.
However I am not a caregiver, unless you count the plebs we'll all be saving in a couple of years time.
So I can't fully compete or empathise.
But from what little I understand, you have my sympathy.
I actually do a lot, but it's not paid and it's sporadic (depends heavily on my mood for the day), so it doesn't really count.
The people who do best splitting work and home life seem to be the people who are really constant and not particularly artistic or autistic. The median people. The ones who work at 50% productivity 24/7/365.
I'm like 10% productivity, 80% productivity, 500%, 10%... 15%, -80%...
😅 🙈
Leads to the weird situation that I always feel completely lazy and useless, but I make my employers so much money on that one 500% day, that they get upset when I quit.
Live view of me trying, and mostly failing, to be productive today:
Have you ever thought about making yourself 500% money on one day?
Then nobody cares if you’re lazy, including you.
That's why I'm trying to be self-employed, to be honest. I keep literally making other people rich, while feeling like a lazy bum, and it's like...
I should do this for myself, for once. 🤔
You definitely should 🫂
It's especially stupid not to, in software development, because the work is all just me sitting at my dining room table and typing on my laptop.
So, I just went and got my own laptop and now I type for myself. 😅
That's it. That's basically the entire change to self-employment.
This is the way
Can we call it traditional mother syndrome?
Is your family happy with this syndrome? I guess yes. If so, enjoy your syndrome 😀
It's more the case that my working outside of the home stresses everyone out because all of the nothing that I do all day stops getting done, but when I'm home, it's like, But now you do nothing all day...
Try not doing anything when you're home one day and let them learn the difference.
It's actually really hard to really do nothing. 😅 Can never manage to do it, even when I've got the flu, or something.
I'm ill today and the closest thing I can get to relaxing is doing all the paperwork, cooking only one meal, instead of three, and helping my daughter clean up her bedroom.
Like, I'd go absolutely bonkers doing nothing.
It's probably just that I usually am so productive, that my "being unproductive" is still productive, but I have the sense that I came to a complete stop. But I didn't. It's just that I'm used to being so much faster, that it's like I feel like I'm moving in slow motion through a fog.
Sort of like, when I don't feel fit and can only read a couple of chapters in a book at a time, rather than zooming through the whole book, and it feels like I can hardly ready anything.
But that's probably a normal reading speed. But to me, I'm like, I CAN BARELY READ OMG.
Mmm. This is frustrating i imagine. My advice is... Don't take advices from men for that. You will break something 😀. Oh i am a man... 😀
Yeah, some mother advice is definitely needed here...
