The Pros and Cons of Outsourcing Your Life

In this type of game, players explore an open world in a procedurally-generated universe. The player can live out their own life and build relationships with the other survivors of the apocalypse. In order to survive, they must learn how to find food, water and shelter; as well as fend off wild animals before antibiotics run dry.

Outsourcing is a common term that refers to the practice of contracting services or business functions outside of an organization. The pros and cons of outsourcing are often debated.

The desire to “outsource” one’s life is one of the cornerstones of the “lifestyle design” trend that has evolved over the last decade. Once a word used in the context of economics and industry to describe the off-loading of one’s personal work and chores to others, it has now become a term used to describe the off-loading of one’s personal tasks and chores to others. Aside from handymen and housekeepers, our modern world allows us to hire someone in the Philippines to handle your work emails, a planner to plan your child’s birthday party, a sleep coach to help your baby sleep through the night, a life coach to help you achieve your goals, and nurses to look after your elderly parents. You may order meals from a restaurant, have it delivered to your home, or have a personal chef make it for you. You may either hire a buddy or hire a professional cuddler to help you (I kid you not). You may even engage a “wantologist” to assist you in determining what you really want.

The ultimate purpose of outsourcing one’s less preferred jobs is to free up as much time as possible to perform the things you actually like in life. Tim Ferris popularized this concept in his book The 4-Hour Workweek, which outlines how to automate your company and life to the point that you can retire early and spend your days learning to dance on Tahiti’s beaches.

Some regard personal outsourcing as a net positive, but others see it as a big hindrance to character development — something that will drain the DIY spirit and self-reliance that are so important to masculinity. In reality, it’s not a problem that can be reduced to black and white. So, today, we’re going to look at both sides of the argument and weigh in on the benefits and drawbacks of outsourcing your life.

Outsourcing’s Swinging Pendulum: History, Class, and the Swinging Pendulum

While it’s easy to believe that personal outsourcing has been growing consistently since the “good old days” when individuals handled everything themselves, the trend’s history isn’t nearly that straightforward.

Slaves and servants are the first types of personal outsourcing, and such activities date back to prehistoric times. Both were available and acceptable depending on class, geography, and culture. While we today find slavery repulsive, philosophers and politicians in ancient and colonial periods saw it as a helpful tool for freeing up their time to pursue “higher” goals.

Servants were widely used by both the middle and higher classes in England and America during the nineteenth century. While we commonly associate this age with the rugged, bootstrap–pulling yeoman farmer, households in urban areas often had an entire team of assistants at their disposal. Gardeners, chefs, maids, butlers, governesses, and nannies would be employed by wealthy families. A complete area of the home would be allocated to the children’s day and night nursery, where the children and their nanny would play and sleep, especially in the United Kingdom. Nannies handled all aspects of child upbringing for the youngsters, whom their parents barely saw a few times a day. A live-in “maid-of-all-work” and a nanny were common in even middle-class homes. It was a technique of exhibiting your position to show that you didn’t have to undertake life’s fundamental responsibilities.

A more democratic, DIY ethic came to dominate Western culture in the twentieth century, perhaps as a reaction to the Gilded Age’s great wealth disparity, a result of the Great Depression’s bootstrapping necessity, and the growth of the middle class during the 1950s, and employing servants went out of style. The rich continued to engage hired labor (and do so today), but they no longer advertise it, and may even conceal it out of shame. Making things oneself, or appearing to make them yourself, has become a symbol of humility and unity with the middle class.

As a result, personal outsourcing isn’t new; it’s just become more flexible. There are many more specialized services accessible, and these services are more reasonable; you could theoretically hire anybody to do anything for for $5. That isn’t to suggest that money isn’t a factor; individuals in the middle and higher classes still have access to a variety of paid services that others in the lower classes would find difficult to purchase.

People’s motivations for using these services have also evolved. Personal outsourcing is increasingly motivated by a sense of need rather than a desire to prove that they are above getting their hands dirty. The division of labor between husband and wife, job and home, has become tangled as a result of the growth of divorce and two-income homes, and single parents and couples alike are looking for outside aid to bring more balance to their life.

Having the opportunity to outsource one’s life, on the other hand, remains a status symbol in a different sense, especially for single males. While people in the 19th century were happy to demonstrate they didn’t have to do the hard work of life, today, a guy who has automated his company and outsourced his menial jobs is admired for being able to pursue his passion more completely. While the divide between haves and have-nots persists, many young people see a clear distinction between those who have enjoyable, flexible professions that allow them to travel and adventure, and others who are “doomed” to work in a cubicle and shoulder the whole burden of life’s daily duties.

As a result, socioeconomic concerns can never be completely isolated from a debate of the advantages and downsides of personal outsourcing, and one’s opinion on this element of the topic will almost certainly be influenced by one’s cultural background. Hiring aid is generally seen as exploiting the poor and needy in the United States. In many Latin American nations, on the other hand, refusing to hire assistance is considered poor form since it deprives someone who is looking for work. This history is crucial to remember while considering one’s stance on personal outsourcing, but it is not the topic of this article. Rather, it is aimed at individuals who have the option to outsource to varied degrees and are interested in weighing the advantages and disadvantages of doing so.

Outsourcing’s Drawbacks

The Outsourced Self: What Happens When We Pay Others to Live Our Lives for Us is a book on what happens when we pay others to live our lives for us. In the contemporary world, Arlie Russell Hochschild believes, there are two ways we function and connect to others: as villagers and as outsourcers. We satisfy our needs as villagers in the same manner that inhabitants of tiny, rural towns have done for centuries: we do what we can for ourselves and depend on family and friends who come to our help out of a feeling of neighborly obligation and affection. On the other side, as outsourcers, our lives are dictated by the marketplace’s mentality, and we rely on paid services to do our responsibilities. “Market services are extremely good news in some respects,” Hochschild notes; what is concerning is that “they evoke, at every step, the specter of a deep transition in American culture: the commercialization of private life.” According to Hochschild, this change “may be the great unacknowledged trend of our time,” thus it’s worth looking into its possibly unwelcome aspects.

In several ways, the marketization of our personal lives may fundamentally inhibit our ability to connect with others and alter our sense of self:

Community Disintegration

We construct lifestyles that are more like a network than a community when we depend on hired, impersonal employees to supply our needs. We can never create deep and long-lasting connections with hired assistance as we can with those formed only out of responsibility and love. Even though we form friendships and affection for our employees, we can’t deny that the connection is really a commercial transaction: they come up because you pay them to, they may be fired, and they’ll most likely leave if a better opportunity arises.

When people are eager to provide a hand and we are prepared to take it, meaningful communal relationships are built. When we work together in metaphorical “barn-raisings” and allow people see us at our most vulnerable, intimacy is born. Too frequently these days, we only let people see the bright side of our existence, leaving the wife’s ill in the hospital and the home in a shambles to unattached employees. We have experts for every aspect of our life, but there are few individuals who perceive us as a whole. This dependence on professionals might eventually damage our perceptions of personal connections; as Hochschild puts it, “one could come to consider a sister as an inferior therapist, a friend as a clumsy coach, and a brother as an inadequate party planner, relative to their market competitors.”

Of course, we seldom ask friends and family for assistance because we don’t want to burden them or because we don’t have the kind of people in our life who would say yes. Unfortunately, outsourcing exacerbates this deficiency by initiating a loop of growing isolation: we don’t have a buddy to assist us with a task, so we pay someone to do it for us, which prevents us from meeting and building our ties with others.

Renaissance Man’s Degeneration

Outsourcing increases specialization; everyone focuses on their area of expertise. While this is efficient, it stymies our efforts to become “T-shaped guys.” Men nowadays often have depth of knowledge in a specific field but lack breadth of knowledge across a wide range of topics (keeping tabs on celebrities and faux news stories does not count). My grandpa was a forest ranger who understood all there was to know about Utah’s flora and wildlife, but he could also repair anything around the home and work on his automobile. His grandson, on the other hand, knows a lot about blogging but is about as handy as a hippo and needs to get a professional to fix things all the time. Specialization enables me to devote more time to AoM, but it limits my ability to learn other abilities.

Having a diverse set of skills is rewarding, and it also makes us more adaptive. Being a specialist may function well in our techno-industrial society, but it makes us more susceptible in the long run. While the ability to iron a shirt or rake leaves would be useless in an apocalyptic setting, some fundamental mechanical abilities would; the person who has experience writing about manliness but can’t construct a good shelter would perish in a flash.

Abstraction is increasing.

We outsource a lot of things that need us to be hands-on. We may begin to feel like disembodied individuals, divorced from the physical world, as we remove them from our life. Life is most rewarding when we live as near to its essence as possible and prioritize action over abstraction, as we addressed in Semper Virilis. We may lose our “feel” for the world, how things function, and the link between effort and outcomes if we move away from that center.

Character, self-assurance, creativity, and adventure are all eroding.

One of the most significant disadvantages of personal outsourcing is that it prioritizes the goals over the methods – the destination over the trip. We may lose out on benefits that would have accrued to us along the route if we were just concerned with the end result (“This job is completed, and I didn’t have to do it myself.”). These advantages include not just a feeling of community, but also the development of our character, our self-confidence, ownership of creativity, and the opportunity for adventure:

Character. We gain a lot of life lessons when we take on difficult jobs. Completing a monotonous or physically demanding task promotes patience and discipline, whereas caring for the weak and ill develops sensitivity and compassion. Seeing us work and then having responsibilities to perform themselves helps to shape our children’s character. They understand that things don’t simply happen to you; you have to strive for them.

Confidence. The more we delegate to specialists, the less likely we are to do anything on our own. “Oh, that’s totally beyond my wheelhouse,” we begin to think. This is true not just for “physical work,” such as doing home repairs, but also for “emotional labor.” Couples seek out marital counseling before attempting to work through their problems together. People engage a life coach to assist them in achieving their objectives rather than attempting to find out why they have failed in past efforts. We end ourselves defaulting to whatever experts say is best when we surround ourselves with experts. Expertise might make us lose trust in ourselves.

Ownership and creation. We lose out on the feeling of pleasure and success that comes with being able to say, “I produced this with my own hands,” when we consume rather than create an experience. We have less control over our lives the more we outsource them. If someone else writes our memos, prepares our meals, cleans our home, finds our dates, trains our dog, looks after our children, writes our love letters, and even organises our wedding proposal… When do we lose our capacity to look at our life and say, “This is mine?”

Adventure. “The professionally organized birthday party, picture-perfect wedding, or hassle-free vacation tour did not concentrate on the professionally planned birthday party, picture-perfect wedding, or hassle-free vacation tour,” Hochschild said when he questioned individuals about their most prized recollections. Instead, they recalled moments when things went awry or startled them in some way.” The effects of doing things oneself are often untidy, but they may lead to that often-overlooked yet crucial aspect of our lives: adventure. Companies are now attempting to replicate the human need for adventure: a trek through the mountains or a motorbike journey down the coast – but with all the maps, accommodation, food, and equipment taken care of. “Ironically, one of the things the market can offer us is the idea of being truly out of the market,” Hochschild says of the images used to promote these vacations. In actuality, with everything planned out, the chances of the genuinely unexpected happening are slim.

While it’s common to decide whether to outsource a work by considering whether an hour of your time is worth more or less than the cost of hiring someone to do it, it’s evident that such a simple calculation ignores a slew of intangible elements that should be factored in as well.

The Benefits of Having Your Life Outsourced

In contrast to the more subtle, philosophical arguments against outsourcing, the advantages are significantly more straightforward: it enables you to avoid undertaking time-consuming duties in order to devote more time to activities that you consider to be more essential and/or pleasurable. It’s also more efficient: there’s a case to be made that everyone is better off focusing on what they do best.

Take, for example, home repairs. When I do it myself, I often wind up having to go to Home Depot numerous times because I don’t acquire the appropriate item, and even when I do, I don’t always fix the issue correctly – sometimes I even make it worse! I may have saved a few dollars by doing it myself (though it doesn’t always work out), but I also invested a lot of time, and the finished product was still substandard.

Alternatively, consider cooking for yourself. Men and women both value the ability to prepare their own meals as a sign of self-reliance. However, in today’s world, it’s a very inefficient process. A dozen women in a primitive society would have been preparing food for several dozen of their relatives. Now, the contemporary man or couple spends the same amount of time cooking and cleaning, but for himself or a family of four. Restaurants, on the other hand, may specialize in serving large groups of people and create a product that is frequently superior to what can be prepared in a home kitchen.

The efficiency argument inevitably leads to the topic of whether duties are really worthwhile, and if time spent on monotonous work may be better spent on other activities. Many of history’s greatest leaders evaluated that equation and came out on the side of becoming consummate outsourcers — to the point where we moderns would be surprised and even embarrassed. Winston Churchill, for example, had a valet/butler who never left his side. The valet’s responsibilities included waking him up, bringing him breakfast, drawing two daily baths (with water that had to be precisely 98 degrees), toweling him off as he stepped out of the tub, and helping him dress, among other things. According to Stephen Ambrose’s biography of Dwight D. Eisenhower, Ike focused almost entirely on his duties as a military and president, outsourcing all else:

“He had people perform the most basic of human jobs for him to liberate his attention and time.” His valet, John Moaney, put on his underwear, socks, shoes, trousers, shirt, jacket, and tie for him. Eisenhower did not have to worry about finding a parking spot since he did not drive a vehicle. He didn’t even know how to dial a phone number. He’d never visited a laundry or a grocery before. He didn’t keep track of his own money or handle his own accounts. Only when it came time to settle up on the golf course or at the bridge table did he handle money… His travel plans were always taken care of for him.”

In a more recent interview with Bill Gates on 60 Minutes, Charlie Rose questioned him, “How do you find a balance in all of this?” How do you reconcile being a father, head of a huge corporation, a foundation, and all these other ventures?” “Well, I don’t mow the yard,” Gates said with a giggle.

None of these guys were slackers when it came to labor; Ike put in 12-hour days on a regular basis, and even Churchill, who has an unjust reputation for lying, put in long, grueling hours on a regular basis. However, they opted to devote almost all of their time and mental energy to jobs they considered to be critical. It’s difficult to argue that Ike’s time would have been better spent washing his own laundry instead of studying D-Day preparations. It’s also impossible to say that these men’s character was harmed by outsourcing their essential everyday chores. It seems to be the case that not just one kind of job – but work in general – may create one’s masculinity.

Conclusion: Getting a Glimpse of Outsourcing

At the end of the day, we’re all outsourcers; we all delegate some of life’s essential responsibilities to others. We don’t make our own clothing, cobble our own shoes, or raise and hunt all of our own food. We outsource when we send our children to school. The issue isn’t whether outsourcing is beneficial or harmful, but rather where to draw the line. We all get to a point when we say, “I’ll pay you to do this; I want to do that myself,” as Hochschild puts it.

There are no obvious answers as to where that boundary should be drawn. Outsourcing, in my opinion, makes the greatest sense when it allows you to commit more time and focus to really legacy-building activities (a worthwhile profession, raising your children); if you’re not doing hard things in one area of your life, you should be doing them in another. And the more you outsource, the more you should search for hands-on activities that reconnect you with the real world; for example, both Eisenhower and Churchill liked gardening.

Finally, the most essential thing is to carefully define your limits and consider what you gain and lose by outsourcing various aspects of your life. As Hochschild points out, we may all benefit from a better understanding of “the market’s urge to commercialize the self,” as well as a more active participation in “the ways in which we embrace, reject, and cope with that challenge.”

The “advantages and disadvantages of outsourcing your life” is a topic that can be very difficult to talk about. There are many pros and cons to the decision, so it would be best to do some research before deciding. Reference: advantages and disadvantages of outsourcing ppt.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the pros and cons of outsourcing?

A: Outsourcing is a process where an organization hires another company or individual to perform tasks that they dont have the time, resources, skillset, money to do themselves. Its important for companies to keep this in mind as it can be beneficial depending on whats being outsourced and how costs are accounted for.

What are three cons of outsourcing?

A: The three most common cons of outsourcing are the following;

What are the negative effects of outsourcing?

A: Outsourcing can have negative effects because it may result in lower wages and slower job growth. For example, a company that outsources workers to other countries might find their expenses decrease but they also lose the opportunity to utilize those employees knowledge throughout the business.