Parenting is a job. The hardest job one can have. No wonder parents, who are working so hard, tell kids that school is their job. Once the kids grow up, of course, their job will be their job. If they lose it, then looking for a job will become their full-time job. And if they decided to get married, that will be a job, too.

In fact, life itself is hard work, though perhaps not as challenging as death. As Steve Jobs’s sister Mona Simpson claimed in a eulogy, “Death didn’t happen to Steve, he achieved it.”

Americans struggle to describe worthwhile, long-term activities without turning them into jobs. We can’t imagine a good life that’s free from workplace logic. This narrow moral vocabulary makes our lives worse: more stressful, more guilt-ridden, and less able to appreciate anything that’s not work. It also reflects and reinforces a culture in which citizens are dependent on, indeed at the mercy of, their employers. That’s why we need a new, more expansive lexicon to describe the dominant responsibilities—not to mention the neglected pleasures—of our lives.

The job of motherhood is surely the most fraught of the job metaphors, which novelist Karen Rinaldi interrogated recently after her mother said to her, “Motherhood, it’s the hardest job in the world. All sacrifice!” Rinaldi disagreed. “When we cling to the idea of motherhood as sacrifice, what we really sacrifice is our sense of self, as if it is the price we pay for having children,” she wrote in The New York Times. “Motherhood is not a sacrifice, but a privilege—one that many of us choose selfishly.”

Rinaldi’s critique could have gone further. When workforce logic pervades parenthood, then child-rearing takes on the competitiveness and status-seeking of professional culture. We shame mothers who don’t perform “best practices” like breastfeeding or initiating skin-to-skin contact with their child within seconds of birth. And because raising kids is considered a job, we judge married couples who choose not have any; they’re shirking their work responsibilities, after all.