If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?
I asked myself this question continuously about the work I did alone in my tiny home in Berlin over the past four years. The time and effort I put into knowledge acquisition, contestation, analysis, and synthesis for my coaching practice. Or the time and effort into understanding myself and my experiences in moments of crying and despair, in moments of disillusionment and cognitive dissonance, in moments of loss, separation, abuse, moving to a new city.
If no one was around to witness me, did I make a sound?
The problem with that thought experiment, and with my application of it to my own labor, is that it assumes reception and subsequently an external receptor as the definitive measure of sound. And yet the thought experiment itself contains a contradiction. It argues sound has three elements: there is creation, transmission, and reception. The question then collapses all three into the last one, under the premise that without an external receptor, an eardrum or a brain to translate the waves there is only physical vibration and not “sound as we know it”.
Making reception the thing that makes sound possible.
So once again I ask, If no one was around to witness me, did I make a sound?
And if I didn’t make a sound, does that mean I didn’t make an impact? And if I didn’t make an impact, did any of the labor I did count if no one saw it?
The labor of grief processed alone, of thinking done before articulation, of calculating cost to safety in streets and rooms that alienate, racialize, dehumanize and infantilize people who look like me.
Who decided that the value of this laborious work can’t be measured without an external receptor, a witness?
And who decided that witnessing is the condition to recognition?
And who holds the power to witness? And what does this power invisibilize, sideline, and refuse to recognize?
To understand this, we need to interrogate what effort counts as labor, by whom and why.
Political economy defines labor primarily as the human effort, physical, mental, or creative, exerted to produce economic value in the form of goods and services.
By this definition, labor requires an external receptor to recognize it. It requires systems: markets, employers, institutions, to assign it value and remunerate it accordingly. This recognition must also adhere to what is “universally” considered socially important.
And while this definition recognizes effort, it measures its value only through output: the goods or services produced. Similar to the sound of the tree, the elements of sound are recognized, but sound is only validated by its reception.
Then, labor to be considered labor must produce something that is deemed – by “consensus” – worth producing.
Learning institutions like schools and universities run with the same logic: effort or labor counts only when it produces what the institution already decided matters. These institutions calculate course credit based on time: roughly 200 to 250 hours per course, including class time and independent study. Labor is recognized against a specific duration, but only “credited” based on a specific end: knowledge acquisition examined through standardized testing.
But who is that “consensus” that decides which labor is universally socially important? And who and what does this universality alienate, distort, erase and reduce?
And after being socialized for a lifetime by learning and working systems to measure the value of labor only through an external receptor that only recognizes “universally standardized” end product, how do we assign value to our own labor when no receptor is watching? And how can we understand our own labor when that universal standard fails to hold us in our entirety?
To answer these questions, we need to redefine labor across both its layers: by untethering effort from its current sole purpose of “producing economic value in the form of goods and services,” and dropping the entitlement of universality in recognition, to look at labor as something that can be recognized internally by the person doing it.
What emerges is another form of labor, one that is tedious, exhausting and at times super frustrating.
The labor of defiance, of non-conformity, of refusal of accepting the status quo without interrogation.
The labor of complaint, of being marked as “the problem”, of having to explain your point continuously and still not being heard or believed.
The labor of recovering from abuse, loss, betrayal, separation.
The labor of living dual identity to be granted access and permission in institutions.
The labor of assimilation and proving that assimilation.
The labor of understanding and orienting the self during transitions.
This is epistemic cognitive labor, and its consequent practical (physical & emotional) labor.
The labor of deciding why and what to believe, to contest, and to communicate as true, real, and correct, about oneself, communities, life, work, and everything else.
Now if what’s true, real and correct can be only reached through “consensus”, and if that consensus adheres to what is universally socially important, where does that leave everybody else whom this universality systemically alienates?
This epistemic cognitive labor is very well-known and common among those alienated bodies.
The labor of access to knowledge, producing knowledge, proving one’s own knowledge legible, and then proving that legibility again and again.
The ongoing internal labor of maintaining identity while also adapting but always calculating to figure out how much of yourself to translate, how much to protect.
The labor of networking and finding community from scratch. The labor of presenting the self in a new language and cultural code. The labor of translating habits, humor, way of knowing, into something legible.
The labor of proving you belong. The labor of proving you are competent, again, and again, and in new rooms each time. The labor of assimilation, and then of proving that assimilation sufficiently. The labor of managing how much of yourself to express, and how much to mask, and the cost of getting that calculation wrong.
The labor of understanding who you are outside of the context that influenced you, while having that context ridiculed, inferiorized and shamed.
Naming this labor is only the first move. The second is asking who carries it, and where it is required but never recognized.
Not everybody is susceptible to this labor. While we see other bodies, those that belong to that “consensus”, move uninterrupted through systems, we’re stopped, frisked and delayed by side quests of proving belonging, humanity, legitimacy. Just like checkpoints that “randomly” select bodies for a thorough strip search and interrogation, institutions treat us the same.
Is the labor of transition to a new city the same for an American and an Indian who arrived on the same day? Or a French and an Albanian? Do both carry the same burden of proving legitimacy, of cultural translation, of identity management?
Is the labor of starting a new leadership role the same for a senior woman of color and a senior white man? Do both have to “understand how we do it here”? Or does one arrive with their knowledge authority assumed, trusted, given permission to lead while the other arrives with their expertise preemptively contested as “not our way”?
This epistemic cognitive labor is invisibilized across every context where additional labor is required but never recognized.
We see it in cause-driven organizations and workplaces, in academic institutions, in feminist organizations, and in NGOs. It is the labor of employees who fully understand the weight of the mission, who genuinely believe in the work, who are called “perfectionists” or “high-performers”, who do the epistemic and cognitive heavy lifting of translating values into practice, of calling out contradictions between stated purpose and actual culture. This labor is either extracted by managers who present it as their own or dismissed because it challenges the systems in place. And in either case it is the least recognized and the most consumed, precisely because “the mission” makes it easy to frame exploitation as devotion.
And in the personal and professional development industry, this same epistemic cognitive labor is hidden behind “self-awareness”, defined as knowing yourself, your values, beliefs, fit, perception and impact in an environment. Again, defining the labor by its end product, not by the effort it takes to get there.
And of course, the labor behind this self-awareness is never recognized by this industry. Instead, it looks at the behaviors that result from it, the exhaustion, the self-doubt, and calls it mindset, or some flat diagnosis sold with a list of habit changes to become more selfish, to use the power of no, or to be the most dangerous person in the room. And in either case, this labor is denied and deemed unnecessary: a hindrance to productivity, or at best a prerequisite for it, in systems that deny any value of labor other than “the production of economic value in the form of goods and services”.
And it gets worse, because this same labor when extracted from those bodies and repackaged by institutions, is dressed as leadership competency, cultural assessment tools, and self-awareness frameworks in MBA textbooks and leadership courses.
Same labor, different contexts. Always denied to the person doing it then extracted and exploited.
So the question is: if universality relocates the problem, the solution, the responsibility, the accountability, and the fault onto the person, why does it keep the right to define value to itself?
So where does this leave us?
First: Fuck universal standards.
Second: What happens when we start recognizing this epistemic cognitive labor as labor?
Exhaustion stops being evidence of inadequacy, or “being stuck”, and starts being evidence of effort.
Confusion stops being a character flaw and starts being a reasonable response to genuinely complex work.
Self-doubt stops being proof of lack of confidence and starts being the proof of labor against erasure and reduction.
The tree fell. The vibration moved through the air. If it didn’t make “sound as we know it” maybe we should expand what we know about sound, and eliminate the entitlement of an external receptor as the definitive measure for recognition.
RADICAL COACHING 