I ran across an interesting TikTok on Twitter which I think is a useful jumping-off point to some practical aspects of how to interpret low-context things on the internet:

@sheisapaigeturner

I am not alone in this experience. Many women have been in this exact same position. The work required to manage a home and a family is not something that one person should ever have to carry alone. It is possible to change these dynamics. It is hard but with the right tools and support it’s possible and it’s so much better on the other side. #marriageadvice #mentalload #mentalloadofmotherhood #divorced #divorcedmom #parentingadvice #default

♬ original sound – Paige

The first question you need to ask about anyone making almost any kind of argument is who are they and why are they making this argument. In theory this shouldn’t be necessary because arguments are supposed to stand on their own. And some in fact do. It doesn’t matter who is making the argument for God from contingency and necessity because that argument actually does stand on its own. You can simply examine its premises and the logical links in it and that’s sufficient. But for most arguments that people make, when you examine the argument, you will see that people use themselves as an authority in their argument. In technical language, their argument uses premises whose truth value can only be known by themselves, so you can only know it by trusting them when they vouch for it. The TikTok above is exactly such a thing; the premises in her argument are very much things no viewer can evaluate apart from her trustworthiness.

So the first question is: who is this woman? Of course, I’ve no idea who this particular woman is, but we do know a few things about her just from the video. First, we know that she is publicly complaining about her spouse, so we know that she has bad judgement. Second, if you’re familiar with human beings, you don’t even need the sound on to see that she is neurotic, but if you do turn the sound on, you can tell with near-certainty that she is highly neurotic. (You can also tell from how she’s dressed and the house that she filmed this in that she’s upper middle class and very concerned with status.) All of which means that she is not to be trusted on any premises she offers which require good judgement, stability, courage, or humility to be correct about.

She begins by talking about how she does all of the household work, and while I don’t necessarily doubt that she does almost all of the work that she notices, what I don’t trust her in the slightest about is that most of this work needs to be done.

Don’t get me wrong, kids are a lot of work. I’ve got three so I’m quite familiar with this. What I’m also quite familiar with is that it’s easy to multiply the work that needs to be done if you set up rules for yourself that don’t match reality. And this is where her bad judgement and neuroticism come in. It is not even a little plausible that her workflow is streamlined and matches reality. Indeed, her evident desire for status and suspiciously immaculate kitchen very strongly suggest that much of her workload in the morning is about conforming to rules that, in her mind, gives her the status she craves.

A very strong indication that what she wants is not, in fact, help with the labor is the that she complains that, when she told her husband she was overwhelmed, that he asked her what she wanted him to do (i.e. how he could help). If her actual problem was more work than she can do, the last thing in the world she would want would be someone just starting to do things without coordinating with her. No rational person wants someone to take over randomly selected jobs from them without coordinating first. Equally, no rational person thinks that another person magically knows, without communication, everything he does and how he does it and how all of the details fit into each other. Moreover, any even slightly competent adult who is overwhelmed by work and who wants help will identify which tasks they can offload with less work than doing them themselves and directly ask for help with those. The woman in this video may be unpleasant, but she’s clearly an adult and not a complete idiot, so the obvious conclusion is that what she wants is not, in fact, help with some of the household work.

(Some additional evidence of this is the particular example she cites of when she considered divorcing her husband: a particular time he didn’t take out the trash in the morning because he was running late and so she took it out and ended up being late to work as a result. Now, the odds that she was late to work because she took out the trash are, in themselves, tiny, unless their garbage cans are a quarter mile hike over difficult terrain away. But even more to the point is that she can’t possibly have needed to take out the trash in order to do anything necessary in the morning. In a reasonable worst-case scenario if she needed to throw something out that couldn’t just be left on a counter she could have just pulled out another garbage bag and left it on the floor. If they didn’t have a spare garbage bag, she could have put it in a spare plastic grocery bag. Or in a ziplock bag. Nothing irreparable or unsanitary will happen to garbage left in a bag on the floor of an empty house for eight hours. She can only have been forced to take out the trash and therefore be late to work by some unnecessary rule she has imposed on herself.)

Given that she’s got bad judgement and is almost certainly neurotic and status-seeking, what she almost certainly actually wants is someone to force her to calm down. That is, she wants someone to override her worrying so she doesn’t worry so much.

In theory this could be her husband, if he’s sufficiently manly and confident and she’s willing to trust him. Far more likely to be successful, though, is another woman that she respects. A good friend might work, but an older female relative that she respects would probably be the most effective at it. She needs to feel like she has permission from the society whose status she craves to not do these things, such that she won’t lose status for doing them. So it needs to be someone who, in her mind, can grant her that permission.

There are, of course, almost certainly some other things going on too. She’s going to want to feel valued and appreciated, but she probably can’t feel those things as long as her life and her interactions with others are dominated by status-seeking unnecessary work because very few people are any good at thanking somebody for them wasting their time, in theory on your behalf but in reality for their own sake. But this is only probable based on how human beings behave; it is less in evidence from the video.

But, to bring it back to the general: when you’re not dealing with someone wise, the problem is almost never the stated problem. As a Lindy Hop instructor of mine once put it: when you see something go wrong, the problem is usually two steps earlier.