Arlie Hochschild
Emotional labour
That smile isn't hers
The Managed Heart, 1983; fieldwork with flight attendants, waiters and debt collectors
Some jobs ask you not only to do the work but to feel the right thing. What that requirement costs.
What actually happened?
In 1983, after fieldwork with flight attendants, waiters and debt collectors, Hochschild named emotional labour: work that requires you to display a prescribed feeling — warmth for the attendant, hardness for the collector. Her central observation was alienation. That smile is not 'her' smile, and over time the worker becomes estranged not only from the expression but from what she actually feels, unable to tell which happiness is her own. She placed it beside physical labour: required feeling is workload, only nobody clocks it.
Surface acting and deep acting cost differently
Surface acting is putting the face on while knowing you're putting it on. Deep acting is persuading yourself you really feel it. The first exhausts through tension; the second exhausts because afterwards you can't find yourself again. Both have a bill. They arrive at different times.
A day on the support line and no words left by evening — that's surface. Years in and feeling hollow is the other bill.
Only once you count it as work can you schedule recovery
As long as feelings are treated as your own private business, no rest can ever be arranged for them. Admit that it's workload and you start scheduling recovery the way you would after physical work, instead of expecting the feeling to bounce back on its own.
Twenty minutes of not speaking to anyone after a run of clients is maintenance, not slacking.
The cost rises with the distance from what you feel
The further the required feeling sits from the real one, the more expensive it is. Being asked for warmth while you're grieving costs far more than being asked for calm while you're calm. The most damaging roles aren't the busiest — they're the ones that most often require the opposite of what you feel.
Straight off an abusive complaint call and into the next one in the same bright voice. That second is the most expensive.
How do I use it today?
Where you are: you got little done today and can't face saying a word this evening.
Ask first: how much of today was spent holding a required feeling? Was any of that counted as part of my workload?
Where it goes wrong: using it as licence to drop basic courtesy and professionalism; or the reverse — using 'it's the job' to push yourself into deep acting until you can't tell what's real. That's precisely the cost she documented.
Lines to keep
In time you're estranged not just from the face but from what you feel.
Required feeling is workload. Nobody clocks it.