Nobody’s NPC

A discussion about The Sims, NPCs, marriage, labor diggers, "invisible" labor, and all that “Black stuff” I was supposed to stop writing.

Every time I build a family in The Sims, I create at least one Sim who has no real ambitions outside of serving the home.

This is not because I am deeply committed to traditional family values. It is because somebody has to stay home and do all the boring shit while I play with the interesting characters.

Somebody needs to become a famous writer. Somebody needs to open a business. Somebody needs to become a criminal mastermind, have six illegitimate children, get abducted by aliens, or seduce the Grim Reaper. There are important stories happening... to everyone but one chosen Sim.

Unfortunately, Sims are needy. They have to eat several times a day. They need clean clothes and functioning appliances. Their children need attention or some government worker appears and takes them away.

Left unattended, these people will stand beside a perfectly good refrigerator and starve. They are grossly incompetent.

So, in an effort to keep everything running smoothly, I create a Sim whose sole responsibility is to keep the household intact while I am off gallivanting with the more fun, interesting Sims whose stories mostly occur outside the home.

That Sim cooks, cleans, changes diapers, helps with homework, pays bills, repairs sinks, and keeps everyone’s social and emotional needs from collapsing. Some Sims want to be president. This Sim has laundry.

If you’re a Sims player, I bet you’re wondering why I don’t just hire a butler. Butlers cook, clean, fix things, and look after the children, right?

The problem is, butlers also cost money.

Eventually, I realized that this is the key difference between a butler and most people’s expectations of a wife. A butler is understood to be performing labor and deserving of compensation. A wife is expected to provide the same labor for free as evidence of love.

This is also why I coined the term Labor Digger™. A labor digger is someone who approaches a relationship with a sense of entitlement to a woman’s labor. Not only the cooking and cleaning, but the childcare, household management, emotional support, social planning, administrative work, and all the other shit that keeps his life from falling apart while he concentrates on being interesting.

We talk endlessly about gold diggers, women who supposedly enter relationships because they want access to a man’s money. We do not talk nearly enough about people who enter relationships because they want access to a woman’s labor. Apparently, wanting financial security makes a woman a predator, but wanting a full-time domestic employee you can compensate with occasional affection is just wanting a traditional marriage.

For most labor diggers, a wife is a supporting background character and invisible laborer whose lack of a meaningful storyline allows everyone else to have one.

To be fair to the service Sim, The Sims does include traits and aspirations that can make a character genuinely happy living this way. You can create a Sim who is family-oriented, neat, domestic, and absolutely thrilled to spend the afternoon scrubbing toilets and preparing a grand meal for people who will leave their plates on the floor.

The game will even give them a little green mood boost to prove that they are having a wonderful time.

Sims family aspirations

I am less convinced that this occurs naturally in human women anywhere near the rate patriarchal standards would have us believe.

There are women who genuinely love homemaking. There are women who feel fulfilled cooking, cleaning, raising children, managing a household, and organizing most of their lives around their families. I do not think those women are stupid, brainwashed, secretly miserable, or wasting their lives because they failed to become corporate attorneys. Some people really do enjoy that.

What I so interrogate is the extraordinary coincidence that ALL women supposedly possess a natural desire to perform exactly the labor men have historically needed someone else to do for free.

How convenient that women naturally enjoy preparing every meal, cleaning every room, raising every child, arranging every appointment, managing every social obligation, caring for sick relatives, and absorbing everyone’s feelings. How fortunate that the work required to sustain human life happens to satisfy us so thoroughly that compensation, recognition, authority, rest, and reciprocity are unnecessary.

Patriarchy does not simply claim that women are capable of domestic labor. Obviously, we are. It claims that serving other people is our natural source of fulfillment, which makes it much easier to treat the work as instinct instead of labor.

A Sim has visible traits. You can open a menu and confirm that my created domestic Sim loves family, enjoys cleaning, and receives genuine pleasure from removing mysterious puddles from the bathroom floor.

Human women do not come with those settings displayed above our heads.

Instead, girls are praised for being helpful, mature, nurturing, selfless, quiet, accommodating, and responsible long before they are old enough to determine whether they enjoy any of it. Then, after years of rewarding women for serving and punishing them for refusing, society points to the women who comply and calls it female nature.

Maybe you love laundry. Or, maybe you’ve learned that everybody likes you better when the laundry is done.

Those are not the same thing.

I was married once.

I now identify as happily divorced.

Over time, I have realized that it is because I refused to be this Sim. I was a SAHM and I loved being able to be there for every moment of my child’s formative years. I filled my free time by sharing my writing online, and when I felt my child was old enough, I started seeking opportunities outside my home.

Online, on my personal page, I was building a small community of followers who thought that my thoughts were insightful and funny. It became a fun hobby while I cared for my little one and it was deeply fulfilling.

My ex-husband did not approve. In fact, he told me that I was writing too much “Black stuff”. He wanted me to “focus more on being a mother and wife”. He did not say it like someone announcing that he did not respect my interests or care about my work. He said it like he was giving me practical advice.

The mother part was never the problem. I love being a mother. I have always loved being a mother. Few things in my life have given me the kind of joy and purpose that motherhood has given me. Even as I have restarted my journey as a mother with a new baby, it is as clear to me that I was meant to be a mother just as I was meant to be a writer.

The wife part was where things are significantly less clear.

I do not think my ex was really criticizing my writing. The writing required time, attention, and energy that he believed belonged somewhere else. To him. To the home. It made me unavailable for uninterrupted wife labor.

Probably worse, it gave me an identity and purpose that did not exist in relation to him.

Labor diggers tend to become uncomfortable when the woman providing their support develops a life that competes with their access to her. Her ambition is not simply an ambition. It is time, attention, and energy being redirected away from the person who had already decided it belonged to him.

Nevertheless,I tried to make myself smaller. I tried to be less argumentative, less demanding, less visible, and less committed to the things that made me feel like myself. I tried to stand behind him because that was where I understood a wife was supposed to stand.

The problem was that there was never enough room back there. Ultimately, no matter how much I shrunk myself, I still could not fit behind him.

I would not make a good wife to most men because most men’s definition of a wife still sounds suspiciously like the household Sims I would create. They want someone who is allowed to have interests as long as those interests do not inconvenience anyone. She can write, paint, study, exercise, start a business, or pursue a career after everyone has eaten, the house is clean, the children are settled, her husband has been served, and every other living creature has had its needs anticipated.

Her ambitions can exist, but they should remain reasonably adorable. It is nice for her to have a little hobby or something to discuss at dinner, but it should not become serious enough to compete with the ambitions of the people she is supposed to support. A woman’s dream becoming important can create all kinds of household emergencies, like a man occasionally needing to locate his own socks.

She is also expected to prevent family life from interfering with everybody else’s goals. Children, meals, appointments, groceries, holidays, school projects, aging parents, emotional problems, and the endless administrative requirements of being alive are supposed to pass through her. Everyone else gets to experience a functioning home without thinking too hard about who and what is making it function.

The better she performs this labor, the less visible it becomes. Nobody notices that the house remains stocked, the children have clothes that fit, the birthdays are remembered, the paperwork is completed, and nobody has died from eating expired lunch meat.

They do notice when she stops, stalls, or slows.

The domestic Sim is useful because I can click away from the house for several in-game days and trust that she will continue doing the boring shit while I pursue the storylines that make the game worth playing.

I am self-aware enough to understand that this is kinda exploitative when I do it to a collection of pixels, so I am certainly not volunteering to have it done to me in real life.

This was never a debate about whether I could write and still wash dishes. Obviously, I still do in my lovely home with my beloved children sans husband. Women have been expected to perform paid labor, unpaid labor, reproductive labor, emotional labor, and sexual labor simultaneously since forever. We are very talented and capable.

The real question was which part of my life was supposed to count.

Being a wife and mother was real. Writing about my thoughts on the internet was something I was doing too much of.

Which is funny now.

My “Black stuff” reaches an average of 40 million people per month. I have a successful Substack subscriber base. My monetized social media bought the house my children and I live. I am happy because the life I built allows me to be the most complete version of myself instead of a more convenient version arranged around someone else’s goals.

This is not an inspirational story about believing in your dreams because I hate when people turn every woman surviving somebody’s attempt to diminish her into a decorative quote about resilience.

I should not have needed to prove that my writing could make money for it to deserve space in my life.

It was mine. I cared about it. That should have been enough.

The money simply makes the original advice look especially stupid.

Imagine if I had listened. Imagine if I had spent the years that I have been divorced treating the most alive, curious, opinionated, and creative parts of myself like distractions from my actual purpose of being a wife. I might have been more available. I might have been easier to live with. I might have made someone a very good little wife.

I also would not have been me.

I am sure there are marriages where both people are allowed to be fully developed characters with ambitions, flaws, hobbies, goals, and ongoing storylines of their own. The Sims also has vampires, mermaids, aliens, and men who autonomously wash dishes, so almost anything is possible.

I was simply never meant to be someone’s little wife within this construct..

I do, however, love being someone’s mother who writes and shares my “Black stuff.”

I am not going to be the Sim you click only when the baby is crying, someone is hungry, or the toilet is broken.

I have my own shit to do, and I love it here.