the.com/caretaking
The invisible labor that holds the world together while getting paid like an afterthought.
means The work of looking after someone or something — a person, a building, a place — by tending to its ongoing needs and keeping it functioning and safe.
from A compound of "care" and "taking," built on the old phrase "to take care" of something. "Care" descends from Old English "caru" (sorrow, grief, anxiety) — its earliest sense was closer to burden of the mind than tenderness, which tells you something about who's been doing it. "Take" comes from Old Norse "taka." The agent noun "caretaker" — the person who takes care — emerged in the 19th century, and "caretaking" follows as the name for the act itself.
- unpaid scale
- Global unpaid care work exceeds $10 trillion yearly
- mostly women
- Women perform roughly three-quarters of it worldwide
- burnout risk
- Caregivers face higher depression and earlier mortality rates
- origin word
- From taking care, literally to hold worry for
- economic ghost
- Rarely counted in any country's GDP
hospice care at home — family members providing end-of-life care in the us, with ~1.7 million patients annually receiving hospice services