On a surface level, I agree with you 100%: Care work is important and something that we should consider as especially important going into the future.

But as somebody who worked in care work, I can’t honestly recommend it to anyone. The job destroyed me.

I made slightly over minimum wage (still very much a poverty wage) taking care of special-needs adults. It was an absolute nightmare. Like, the actual nitty-gritty of it. Being manipulated (and sometimes outright abused) by the clients, having coworkers that couldn’t give two shits, having supervisors that scheduled me to work inhuman hours (grave shift during the week, days on the weekends, and alternating 12-hour shifts with the manager when the rest of the staff just didn’t show up over the holidays) and got angry at me for following procedure (basically for calling 911 for a client’s seizure, and for calling the 24-hour emergency line during, you know, emergencies.)

I know we need people to do the work, but God. The whole industry needs to be scoured and regulated to hell and back. And, even then, I’ll never do it again.