Nick Srnicek

the shifting focus of standards and the endless nature of housework, unpaid reproductive labour tends to fill whatever temporal container it is placed within.134 There is always something more that can be done, and the ratcheting up of standards is a key mechanism through which this temporal vacuum is filled with, well, vacuuming.

And it has been suggested that given the lack of value attached to work done in the home, women often see the performance of long hours as a way to indicate their own (non-monetary) contributions to a family.

Middle-class notions of cleanliness, bourgeois images of elaborate meals, and capitalist pressures to ‘invest’ in one’s children and to put on conspicuous displays of busyness are all part and parcel of our class-based societies.