Even consuming itself has become work. At the self-checkout, you can buy the best item for your needs—as identified by Consumer Reports or The Wirecutter or The Strategist. When you’re drowning in the condiment aisle, Serious Eats will tell you which mustard to buy. When we buy items sight unseen, drop-shipped from distant warehouses, buying guides and five-star reviews come to stand in for the reputation of brand names and union bugs. Review webpages are a cottage industry. Yet such overwhelming choice often deprives us of real agency when it comes to what fills our lives. Products are designed not for our needs but by the unfathomable logistics of a supply chain an ocean away, are sold via algorithmic data mining that clutters our digital lives, and arrive preposterously packaged to suit the needs of shipping and branding. Managing all of this is, increasingly, work, right alongside managing our identities.

This is work in the fullest sense, vital to keep us working and consuming, to keep systems of production flowing. Sociologists Kathryn Wheeler and Miriam Glucksmann have explored this at length in a study of household recycling, as we consumers warehouse and sort all the stuff that comes into and clutters our homes. Glucksmann identifies this as consumption work, a massive category of labor: “all work necessary for the purchase, use, re-use and disposal of consumption goods and services.”

Add in the work of our jobs, our commutes, care for our families, etc., and it’s little wonder that our houses are a mess—especially as capital makes them into waste transfer stations. It’s worth remembering that maintaining a household was once a (deeply gendered) full-time job for many, even as it was unpaid—this is still often the case. The promise of automation often fails to trickle down the economic ladder, leaving the richer more able to outsource this work to both maids and machines. A personal assistant can research and buy the best robot vacuum for your needs.