How Capitalism Robs Women of Having Hobbies
It's not often (aside from, perhaps, Matt Healy and Taylor Swift dating rumours), that a tweet stops me in my tracks and threatens to derail my sanity for at least a week, but it happened to me just the other day. Twitter user @jsux had this to say: “adulthood is a slow, terrifying process of realising no matter how many versions of yourself you try, you can ultimately only pick one and then spend the rest of your life watching the other versions crouch in the dark corners of your brain”. As I sat in my flat, looking around at all my books, records, different passion projects that I had picked up and haven’t found time for since (1000 piece Moomin jigsaw, my grandmother’s old cookbooks I was determined to experiment with, a notebook with some vague scribblings about what I was up to last summer abandoned after three days), I felt the all too familiar clench of realising that I related to something, and my relation to it was making me feel things.
It didn’t stop there. Someone else had weighed in with a screenshot of a Tumblr post that read: “what are your twenties if not an endless string of the ghosts of who you thought you’d become”. I put my phone down to contemplate the haunting truth of what I’d just read and realised to be true. I, and many of my peers, have changed drastically since our late teens. We’ve left a “string of ghosts” in our wake, some of them perhaps better left in the past (I think my 17 year old phase of riding the Tube in fishnets and red lipstick ‘reading’ the Communist Manifesto in the hopes that people would see me as the cool, astute girl I was desperately trying to be was a particular low point).
But there are definitely elements of our past personalities we would have quite liked to bring with us. I was a radically different person at 20 to who I am now – and sometimes I prefer that old me, who used to nap in nightclub bathrooms so she could emerge refreshed and ready for the dancefloor 20 minutes later, instead of the 23-year-old who has lost the stamina for staying out past midnight, eleven on weekdays. She has been left behind, fallen victim to a pandemic that got some of us out of the habit of going out, and the post-graduation landscape of having to get up at a reasonable hour, feeling like you never have any time for yourself as you try desperately to prove to your employer that you’re committed and capable and not just a silly little grad dressed up like a proper adult. I pick up and drop different hobbies and interests on a near weekly basis, never having the time or energy to see them though. As always, I’m going to blame capitalism.
___STEADY_PAYWALL___
The necessity to work a 9 to 5 (and quite often take work home) for low pay in an increasingly hostile economy saps our ability to meaningfully cultivate ourselves outside of the workplace. Evenings and weekends are spent on other tasks - the endless pile of laundry, washing up and cooking - recuperating, or chasing brief pockets of a break from the monotony of the working week. For most of us, our passion projects sit in the corner, forgotten amongst the work deadlines, dishes and social commitments.
This is far from a new sentiment. There’s a reason that Sylvia Plath’s fig tree analogy in The Bell Jar keeps popping up on our feeds. Plath’s feeling of helplessness and inertia match up with the modern need to pigeonhole ourselves into one role in order to satisfy the demands of earning enough money to survive; not having enough time to even begin to explore other routes. Many of us have to choose what we’re going to specialise in at the age of eighteen and feel we have little scope to change once we’ve picked. Tuition fees and the rising cost of living mean that many of us don’t want to ‘waste’ our degree by branching out into something new. For those of us who went straight into work, it’s hard to make a career change – doing so could risk financial security. We are forced to make every decision with the knowledge that we need more money to survive now than ever before. When we’re forced into survival mode, with little spare money to invest in hobbies and passion projects, life can feel pretty monotonous.
“Free your short-lived dedication to French cinema, rediscover rowing, salvage your samba dancing class membership….”
American economist Thorstein Veblen critiques what he calls the ‘leisure class’, which “withdraw[s] from [the lower class] as much as it may of the means of sustenance, and so reducing their consumption, and consequently their available energy, to such a point as to make them incapable of the effort required for the learning and adoption of new habits of thought.” We might not be actually starving, but we’re certainly struggling for time to ourselves, to develop “new habits of thought”.
With the cost of living crisis seeming to get worse every minute, and bosses demanding more of our labour for less money, maybe there’s no hope of a chance to indulge our passions until retirement (so, when we’re 80). Or maybe we need to reject the ways in which capitalism shrinks us, and pull out those hobbies again. Free your short-lived dedication to French cinema, rediscover rowing, salvage your samba dancing class membership…. When we invest in ourselves, in our identities outside of work (and we should be allowed multiple!), we can avoid Plath’s wrinkly figs and start to feel a purpose outside of our 9 to 5.
Words: Caitlin Barr
