You are not a vending machine

What convinced you to act like one?

Reminder: you are not a vending machine!

It hardly needs saying, you would think? And yet…

Last week

Pooja Lakshmin MD

wrote movingly in Doctors Orders

I’m sheepish that even as a psychiatrist, after writing a book called Real Self-Care, I’m still guilty of dismissing my needs, and only stopping when I physically CANNOT do more

A week earlier

Rae Katz

wrote in Surprising Lessons From 1 Year of Writing on Substack

I actually really love you guys and also I’m never going to publish every day

I told both serial over-achievers, wonderful human beings, now rejectors of grind culture, slow laners and writers-of-substacks-I-subscribe-to: you are not a vending machine. (And because it’s Substack, both replied, thanking me. Fan girl squee!)

A few days later, in the midst of coordinating care for a frail elder, I was beating myself up for my lack of ability to Get.Everything.Done.™, when I applied this logic to myself. oh. Cue blinding flash of the obvious.

Perfect, Please, Perform and Produce

From our families to our schools, our employers, our community volunteering, the message is: GIVE, and GIVE RELIABLY and CONSISTENTLY because of COMMITMENT.

I don’t have an answer for exactly who added (OR ELSE) but I’m pretty sure we didn’t ‘do it to ourselves’ despite the insidious inner mean voice that keeps telling me I did. But

Kate Manne

maybe does. In her book Down Girl she talks about the difference between ‘humans’ and ‘human givers’. I’ve not read Down Girl (yet) I came to the concept via

Emily Nagoski

’s old podcast episode Human Giver Syndrome:

[T]here are the human givers who have a moral obligation to give their full humanity…. They have a duty. To give everything they have- their time, their attention, their patience, their love, their rest, their bodies, their hopes and dreams, their very lives sometimes, sacrificed on the altar of other humans' comfort and convenience. 

Thanks to misogyny and patriarchy, the humans are mostly men or their ancillaries. Some human givers are men, of course. I suspect it gets murky and complicated when their romantic partner is a human giver too. A reciprocating circuit might be lovely, a dual outpouring, less so.

Human Vending Machines

Combine a culture that encourages Human Givers with Hustle Culture and it gets truly disastrous:

It creates the assumption that the only value we have as human beings is our productivity capability — our ability to work, rather than our humanity.” Aidan Harper

If you’re only as good as your current deliverable, the drive to keep delivering come what may is real and potent, even if we don’t always recognise that.

It gets even murkier when the boundaries between work and personal life erode, and the same standard of productivity gets applied to our relational and care tasks. Of course we want to ‘be there’ for the people we love, in ways big and small. We want to listen, we want to provide practical help, we want to share joyful experiences, or create joyful experiences, and we want to do it generously, intentionally and - apparently - without limit.

I have several identities: I’m a writer, I’m a carer, I’m a wife, I’m a daughter, I’m an aunt, I’m a friend, I’m a business owner, I’m a cat custodian, I’m a disabled person (I prefer that construction to ‘a person with a disability’ as a believer in the social model of disability, YMMV). I can’t perform all those identities at the same level at the same time, but somehow I think I can, or at least that I ought. It feels like a personal failure when I can’t, rather than my misunderstanding of how humans work.

All of this is so much easier to see in others than in myself. Especially in people who appear to be able to conform to the standards of Hustle Culture most or some of the time i.e. people who are deserving of my empathy. Urk.

Just to be clear, neither you or I is a vending machine. I’m pinning the above photo near my desk as a reminder. Let’s not hold ourselves to that false deliverable, or anyone else either.

Thank you for reading, your time and attention are a gift.

Over to You

• Do you ever feel like a vending machine? What do you spit out on request? Clean laundry? Work projects? Validating Conversations? Art?

• When do find you expect other people to be vending machines to you? (Hint: anytime you think “but surely…”) Which people? Your subordinates? Your colleagues? Your partner? Your kid/s? Your favourite barista?

• Do you need an “out of supply, please come back later” signal? When would it help to give yourself that permission?