What would be different in this world if everyone felt cared for?
This is a paraphrase of a question posed by astrologer [Chani Nicholas](www.chaninicholas.com] in her podcast about the recent full moon in Cancer.
I’ve been musing on this question all week.
Cancer is a sign that’s about care: how we care for others and how we allow care for ourselves.
Care lays the foundation for anything we venture to do in life. It can give us our rooting, our confidence, our self-belief and self-esteem.
When we feel cared for, we show up differently in the world.
There’s no question that care is crucial.
Yet our culture doesn’t value it the way we value other things — like time, money, results. We tend to pay for things we can measure, and care is hard to measure.
Consider how many industries set fees by valuing time.
Most providers who charge by the hour base their fees on the assumption that all hours were equal. (Unless they are charging different rates based on which part of the day it is.)
Spend an hour with someone who truly cares and compare it to an hour with someone who is just showing up to do a job.
Which hour is worth more to you? Are you willing to pay more for the person who cares?
Imagine hiring someone to care for your kids. You have two candidates:
One person is attentive, interactive, and communicates effectively with you and your children. You can feel how much they care. The other person just clocks in and does the bare minimum necessary.
Which person do you want to hire?
Most likely, you want the person who really cares. But are you willing to pay a premium for that care?
As a culture, we tend to be dismissive of caring when it comes to compensation. Perhaps because it’s harder to measure.
What would be different if we made care our currency?
What would that even look like?
What would the world look like if we compensated our caregivers and service providers based on their caring rather than based on time for money exchanges?
I don’t have any answers yet.
But I care enough to consider the challenge of how we can change the conversation about the value of caring.
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