Make Home Economics Redundant
And don't settle for a home life of nothing but entertainment.
The word economics spreads a wide umbrella over many concepts. Scarcity and choice, production and distribution of resources, and more.
The origin of the word, however, betrays how much we have lost.
It comes from two Greek words.
Eco – home
Nomos – accounts
It had to do with household management and keeping accounts of all the productive work that happened within a household. The word we use to refer to all the productive work of a society originally referred to the management of all of the productive work of a household.
How far our households have fallen.
The word “economics” now needs the qualifier of “home” to have any semblance of its original source, despite having the meaning of “home” in the word itself!
Modern households have become places of personal fulfillment and entertainment, centers where people stare at the TV together and rest from the “real,” actual work that needs to get done. But even that is generous. The average person spends almost 4 hours per day watching TV, but not even all of that time is necessarily spent together. Our devices have fractured us further.
But households used to be the core productive unit of society.
If you wish to build a lasting legacy for your family, you must commit to giving your household a mission.
It must be productive.
Your entire family must contribute in some way to this productivity.
It must make “Home Economics” redundant. The wife’s role becomes more critical in this paradigm.
The modern makeup of our industrialized society makes it difficult to focus our households on productivity. But since when has difficulty been a disqualifier for doing the right thing?
It won’t look like households from the ancient world. It certainly won’t look like the strange limbo of the 1950s. We won’t be able to unplug completely. A push and pull exists between new technological and social realities and more traditional desires. You must live in reality, not your imagined utopia.
Many who now live more traditional lives in the modern world can only do so because of remote work. The internet makes it possible. Still admirable, but do not let the social media mirage dazzle your eyes. Very few people are raising large families with nothing but a small, self-sustaining farm or homestead.
But you can do more. You can form the types of familial bonds that can only be formed in the grind of working toward a common purpose. Expand your imagination beyond what is traditionally seen as “trad.” Opportunities abound. To do anything less is irresponsible.
I’ll end with another quick study of words.
Go back far enough, and dominion and domestic have the same root word. The idea of domain, house, and the right to rule. The work done inside the home feeds into the overall mission of a man. Women filling their homes with beauty, taming some of the residual chaos, is just as important as men conquering that space to begin with.