Moral Deskilling – or, why you spend more time on admin than doing your job.
I raised the microphone to my mouth to say ‘that is because of moral deskilling’. But it was not my gig, so I didn’t. It would have been very inappropriate. Look at how I’ve grown. Well. Sometimes.
It was one of those Covid lockdowns. Like many others, we built nice rituals. Checking on the garden. De-slugging, by hand in the evenings (ok that was less nice). Bushwalks with such silence that the swishing of the trees seemed very loud. A drink while watching the sunset after a day of zoom meetings – sometimes from the empty outdoor cafe at the eerily abandoned theme park called Scenic World1 .
My beloved would call me in to poached eggs2 served on locally made sourdough. I’d finish typing my sentence3 and arrive still mid-thought.
One morning I arrived babbling about the changes to professional work in the 1980s. Previous breakfasts had already included an interrogation of why, in tangible terms, globalisation led to so many more managers (all that flexibility required lots more decisions) and why, exactly, they needed to be ‘tough’. And what this had to do with masculising management and feminising the professions – especially what I had come to call ‘virtue’.
