>If the future of work is bliss, we still need to know when to put it down and pick up something else, whether it’s family game night, hockey league, or just being with nature—happiness simply for the sake of it.
I will do this once I can stop worrying about earning enough to afford a house, kids, and family health insurance while also saving enough to theoretically have a meager retirement.
The writer, Stephanie Buck, sounds like a pretty out of touch California kid with rich parents. Her other writing and Instragram reinforce this. Self-shaming about staying in on News Years at the decrepit age of 28 with her husband, oh the horror and embarrassment. Now look at my thousands of photos of exotic expensive vacations while I write about the American working class trying too hard.
> The writer, Stephanie Buck, sounds like a pretty out of touch California kid with rich parents.
I don't know about you, but I just see photos of the California outdoors, Seattle, and Vancouver on said Instagram profile. Everything looks easily affordable for someone making ~30k/year or more.
It feels too damn weird investigating a person and drawing conclusions.
Have you considered that perhaps her boyfriend or husband also contributes to these trips? Or that her employer sent her to things like fashion shows and TED conferences (after all, she was an editor at an online publication and is now a senior writer for another, indicating a level of competence "worthy" of that sort of stuff)? Or that perhaps she lives in a tiny apartment, with perhaps even roommates? Or, like most people, she posts pictures that are nothing but the highlights of her life?
There are a huge number of possibilities that you're ignoring because it fits your own narrative.
Who pays or the reasons why she travels so much isn't really relevant, is it? She gets to do it. She travels more in two weeks than most people do in a year. Whether it's her cushy job, her rich husband, rich parents - she gets to experience all of this. And of course they're highlights, but the point is that she has so many in such a short time span while keeping a job.
My point is that she's detached from the reality as 95%+ of Americans have it, and judging by her $100k undergraduate liberal arts degree and growing up in SF, maybe she's never been attached to that reality.
I find people come to the defense (although you aren't attacking her - just noting how her privilege lends to her lack of self-awareness) of people of higher means in order to feel less guilt about their own privileges/upbringing/good fortune.
I assume this is some coping mechanism because people feel attacked when you point out their opinion may be influenced by their affluence and perhaps not all their success is their own.
She probably does live in a tiny apartment, but in Manhattan where she apparently lives, those can easily cost $3000 per month or more.
And the previous poster noted that all of those "highlights" were within 1 year. I don't know anyone among my middle-class peers who gets around that much within a year.
When a person works as a writer they might be sent to many places and events to write about them. While that might sounds luxurious, the reality is often otherwise. A couple Instagrams from a given location don't mean she was on a 2-week vacation.
When I was working as a poor tech consultant's assistant, I traveled to Vegas several times, New York city several times, Boston, and a few other places. I got a few nice pictures along the way but 90+% of my time was spent either in windowless conference rooms or in my cheap hotel, writing.
I find it distasteful to try to write the story of a person's life from a few social media posts. Do you post photos illustrating your life hardships to Instagram? Does anyone?
I know professional musicians who travel the world playing concerts, but have no retirement savings and share cheap houses when they're at home. Guess which side of their life you'll see on social media.
If you want to talk about why you disagree with the ideas in the article, let's do that. This social stalking you're doing is borderline witch hunting IMO.
I only list it because someone else brought it up. I'm not witch hunting, just providing evidence for my original theory that someone questioned.
Yes, obviously, it's impossible to paint the entire picture. Maybe she was in Miami for work and the pictures of her sun bathing on the beach was only a small part of that trip. Maybe going to bars in New Orleans was just for an article, and skiing in Lake Tahoe for Mashable's twitter page, and riding an Elephant in Thailand was research for an investigative article she's doing about animal cruelty. She's such a hard worker, it must be so difficult to do all this for work. She's living the struggle. I should give her more credit.
So instead of engaging or debating with the ideas presented in the piece, you immediately dig into the author's personal life as a way of disagreeing with it? The article is specifically about the middle class having two careers, with an explicit description of this being a "middle class phenomenon".
Perhaps that's just the era we live in--where ideas no longer are relevant without the context of the person delivering the idea--where human beings are unable to research or insert themselves into mental constructs due to their lack of 'perspective', that is, their lack of having a specific and acceptable background and history. Interesting that this is the exact frustration so many people express about political correctness, where arguments, ideas, and contributions are invalidated purely based on background, decisions, or other environmental factors.
>So instead of engaging or debating with the ideas presented
The only real idea presented is that middle class people don't really have hobbies like they used to, and that maybe they should. I engaged that by saying it's unrealistic to make this blanket statement when people are struggling so much just to provide security and comfort for their families.
I am saying the principle of her article is poor completely independent of who she is as a person. I also mention that she lacks the perspective to genuinely make this argument because it's frankly pretty ignorant sounding.
>where ideas no longer are relevant without the context of the person delivering the idea
If dumb ideas are presented, it's worth analyzing why they were presented to begin with. Considering the person behind a piece of writing or speech is tremendously important. It's why we have inane quotes from famous people on posters. People care about context and always have.
Do they no longer teach critical analysis in literature classes anymore? I remember rolling my eyes, and being forced to learn about author's lives, as the author's live experiences may impact their view point.
I would think this is even more important with authors that are trying to impact public opinion or policy.
>So instead of engaging or debating with the ideas presented in the piece, you immediately dig into the author's personal life as a way of disagreeing with it?
Parent commenter did exactly what you requested, before digging into the author. Noting that people don't have the wealth this article presumes, is a valid debate against the piece.
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The article mentions that hobbies arise out of disposable income and free time gained from economic prosperity, and then was lost when the economy faltered. But the article then claims "The American economy has fared better in recent years" -- I'm not convinced that's an accurate picture.
Americans (as people) are not necessarily better off if America (the economy) does better. Today, most Americans (people) are still struggling financially, now often more than before, despite the fact that "the economy" has "recovered". But you can't see that from a desk in Manhattan, it's not visible if your only looking at census statistics or property values.
Which has created a weird disconnect where people who can sustainable (but only barely) afford housing / food / medical are routinely described as "middle class", even though they have far less disposable income and/or leisure time than their counterparts from the 1970's, or 1990's.
The recent explosion in ultra-high costs of housing, medical, and education likely play a role in this, absorbing money that previously would have become "leisure" spending. And the cash necessary to cover those costs seems to come by additional working through what used to be people's leisure time.
I feel like this is at least partially attributable to how we get our entertainment too. During the postwar era, there wasn't an infinite variety of media to consume -- TV shows were on at a set time, on one of four channels, between 6:00pm and 12:00am. Compare that to binge watching on Netflix, and you see people engaging in hobbies less regularly, less intensely.
Couple that with the fact that travel is way easier, and you see disposable income (to the extent that anyone has disposable income) being spent on fleeting things rather than the tools to engage in a serious hobby.
I don't feel like either of the above are a bad thing, but they could just as easily be contributing factors to the lack of hobbies in the modern era. I'm sure that there are a wide variety of others, too, from lack of work/life balance (hello, corporate smartphone) to the lack of hobby education (bye bye, wood shop class, metal shop class, home economics class), plus ones that I'm not thinking of. What hobbies do people engage in now? Were those things hobbies back in the 50's or just necessary chores?
I agree, most people who would have been pressing flowers like the author's great aunt are now playing Farmville all day, also "just because they like it". In fact, I think this is more a problem with older people and retirees – I don't exactly know why, but they seem to get into social media and useless games with a ferocity far exceeding that of younger generations.
I think you're premises are right but the analysis may not be accurate. As you say, travel is much cheaper now than what it used to be enabling a lot more people to travel, even if they're not upper class/rich.
The other point about Netflix: while Netflix binge watching is something that I've enjoyed on many occassions, it has changed my whole perception of entertainment from a "let me build my timetable around the TV schedule" to a "I will do what I like" one, which I find much more desirable.
There are a lot of hobbies today, in fact one of the best parts about the US being as open and multicultural is the amount of options you have for hobbies. So there's fitness, yoga, mixed martial arts. There's sports: Tennis, Kickball, Volleyball etc. There are the hackerspace/makerspaces sprouting up everywhere. The internet has made it incredibly easy to find recipes and learn cooking (youtube videos is how I learned cooking). There are multitudes of dancing styles and events. Need I go on?
This entirely depends on the demographic group in question.
If, for instance, you're wondering about the hobbies of single 20-40-something women in urban areas of the US, from what I see it seems to be lots and lots of foreign travel, especially to really backwards parts of Africa and the Middle East. And going to bars a lot. And having kids by IVF.
For single men in this age range, it seems to be working all the time, or being in a drug or alcohol-induced haze most of the time.
I looked up the definition of "hobby" and got this:
"an activity or interest pursued for pleasure or relaxation and not as a main occupation"
So yeah, it seems to fit the definition.
Remember, these women aren't doing this as part of a marriage or other relationship with a partner, they're doing it all by themselves. Unlike other people who usually find a partner to procreate with, and then share the duties and responsibilities of child-rearing, these women apparently are unable to maintain a long-term relationship, but they have plenty of money, so like some people like to buy expensive pets, these women get IVF and have a kid, and then hire a full-time nanny or au pair to raise it since they're always busy with work, going to the bar, going to cultural events, hanging out with their single female friends, etc. But for that minority of time they want to feel like a "parent", they'll have the kid there and can do something with him/her.
Sounds like a hobby to me. Not too different from some rich guy with 30 cars in his garage, and he might take any particular car out for a spin once a month or less, but he can afford full-time mechanics and detailers to take care of them in the meantime.
I don't think many women fit the image you have created. You seem to me unduly judgmental of people you don't actually know very well, if at all. I'll leave it at that.
Unfortunately, it seems like in the "old days", it was ok - maybe encouraged - to be introverted. We've lost that with increasing new technology and "ways to connect to people". I find myself very disconnected to the connected world... the extroverts are winning...
Same here but for me it's more that I'm a very shy person. It seems that the world can only have one kind of person in it and that person has to be ready to say hi, shake hands, and invite the other person/people to dinner every other weekend; no alone time allowed. Honestly, I just have to wonder what a kid with a similar temperament like me is feeling. It really has to be a terrible situation tbh.
I'm in the middle of the spectrum myself. I'm happy to say hi, shake hands, but I need my alone time. I have plenty of friends and they all get it. I could disappear off the map and be a hermit if that's what I really wanted to do. But in the interest of not being without friends I make time to do both.
My son is in college and it's a struggle for him. He wants friends but doesn't want to gladhand to meet people. I get it, but you can't have met friends without meeting people.
I think it's instructional that the examples of collectors and hobbyists who are all "doing something" are not watching television ... we have the same opportunity but now we've got many more distractions.
I think the author just misses the point - some people's hobbies (I bet a lot of people on HN) are programming or working on new business ideas, I know it's one of mine. What's important is doing things that make you happy and keep you entertained. I'm ok with not pressing flowers.
BTW, people still play basketball, I don't know why she's singling that out.
I struggle with this a lot myself. I think time to pursue some thing that just makes you happy makes you better at what you do in your day job. The pressure to constantly preform and grow. The growing difficulty of maintaining a middle class family. All these factors push you to always be earning. Some days I just want to be standing in a river throwing bit's of feathers and fur and not thinking about stress-causing real life.
First world issues, I know it really is but I personally find our modern Western capitalism driven lifestyles to really be missing a connection to anything important. I think one of the uses of hobbies that helped to smooth that over. We worry about making a new startup to "change the world" and ignore the river on fire because of pollution. I think that most hobbies in the post war era helped to tie people to something they valued, history, nature, or sport. Given our requirement to work so much I think people are driven to this new model to include that in there live.
I need my Dwight face to state with appropriate fervor, _wrong_.
There are two primary economic causes for the loss of leisure: the concentration of wealth since 1970 at the top, and, the absorption of additional income by inflation in real estate.
The stagnation of wages and erosion of benefits since approximately 1970 and the consequent accumulation of wealth into the top few percent in the US, has meant that every generation of working adults after 'our parents' (that is, from 1975 to present) has had to work harder to achieve an equivalent standard of living.
Women entering the work force had a profound and complex effect on the income of the middle class. And even when added child care costs [post my own latch-key-kid generation] are factored in, additional income was being generated.
That has masked until relatively recently the decline in purchasing power and the true long term costs for all but the most wealthy stemming from the erosion of both job security and the many benefits that used to adhere to full time jobs for the middle class and above.
Individual families bearing the cost of health care, retirement, and simultaneous full time care for children _and_ in many cases aging parents is shift of contract.
Leisure is a function of spare time and spare resources. Both have been monopolized by the mandate to maintain a standard of middle class comfort that was attainable on a single income a generation ago.
And incidentally, the rise in real estate prices in the US directly tracks the entrance of women into the work force.
TL;DR: real estate has acted like a sponge to absorb the nominal increase in resources of a two-earner family almost perfectly, leaving little or less than no additional resources for other pursuits. Like leisure.
TL;DR TL;DR: we've gone totally off the rails as a culture for the benefit of the very very few.
I would also add that as real incomes have not really increased since the 1970s the inflation in real estate has been accommodated by widespread increase in private debt, on which interest must be paid, decreasing disposable income and leading to increased insecurity.
I don't think hobbies are all that amazing. They appeal to a time when work stayed at work, and, implicitly, most work was dreadfully boring and you needed something, anything, to escape.
Most of these pursuits didn't feed back into the rest of the human world in any substantial way, had no audience and no conversation outside of the immediate family circle - all of which meant a lot of awkward "family members putting up with your weird interest".
Now we're so connected that the line between hobby and market activity blurs constantly. That can be diminishing in that you end up fighting against market incentives to pursue things in the way you want, but it also means that more of our work, in a relative sense, is work we can be engaged in, and can be done as part of a network with healthy feedback and social opportunities.
In From Dawn to Decadence, Jacques Barzun mentions in passing the book The Harried Leisure Class, published in 1970. One can probably find it in many college libraries. I remember it as an interesting and cogent book.
I am probably the age of Ms. Buck's parents, and I don't immediately see a great difference between how we and our neighbors of the same age spend our leisure and how our children do. OK, we aren't running marathons or riding bicycles across Iowa. But most of the persons I know of that age are not working insane hours; and in my generation I knew the occasional 20-something putting in very long weeks at the law firm.
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 93.1 ms ] threadI will do this once I can stop worrying about earning enough to afford a house, kids, and family health insurance while also saving enough to theoretically have a meager retirement.
The writer, Stephanie Buck, sounds like a pretty out of touch California kid with rich parents. Her other writing and Instragram reinforce this. Self-shaming about staying in on News Years at the decrepit age of 28 with her husband, oh the horror and embarrassment. Now look at my thousands of photos of exotic expensive vacations while I write about the American working class trying too hard.
I don't know about you, but I just see photos of the California outdoors, Seattle, and Vancouver on said Instagram profile. Everything looks easily affordable for someone making ~30k/year or more.
Living in Manhattan while working as a writer (in Manhattan)
Thailand
Massachusetts
New Orleans
Austin and surrounding area
All over CA
All over NY
Lake Tahoe
Seattle
Vancouver
Miami
TED2015 (tickets are thousands of dollars if I remember right)
Attended several exclusive fashion shows in NYC
Yeah let's see someone doing this all in the same year while making 30k in a regular 9-5 job. They'd be hard pressed to do ONE of them.
Have you considered that perhaps her boyfriend or husband also contributes to these trips? Or that her employer sent her to things like fashion shows and TED conferences (after all, she was an editor at an online publication and is now a senior writer for another, indicating a level of competence "worthy" of that sort of stuff)? Or that perhaps she lives in a tiny apartment, with perhaps even roommates? Or, like most people, she posts pictures that are nothing but the highlights of her life?
There are a huge number of possibilities that you're ignoring because it fits your own narrative.
My point is that she's detached from the reality as 95%+ of Americans have it, and judging by her $100k undergraduate liberal arts degree and growing up in SF, maybe she's never been attached to that reality.
I assume this is some coping mechanism because people feel attacked when you point out their opinion may be influenced by their affluence and perhaps not all their success is their own.
And the previous poster noted that all of those "highlights" were within 1 year. I don't know anyone among my middle-class peers who gets around that much within a year.
When I was working as a poor tech consultant's assistant, I traveled to Vegas several times, New York city several times, Boston, and a few other places. I got a few nice pictures along the way but 90+% of my time was spent either in windowless conference rooms or in my cheap hotel, writing.
I find it distasteful to try to write the story of a person's life from a few social media posts. Do you post photos illustrating your life hardships to Instagram? Does anyone?
I know professional musicians who travel the world playing concerts, but have no retirement savings and share cheap houses when they're at home. Guess which side of their life you'll see on social media.
If you want to talk about why you disagree with the ideas in the article, let's do that. This social stalking you're doing is borderline witch hunting IMO.
Yes, obviously, it's impossible to paint the entire picture. Maybe she was in Miami for work and the pictures of her sun bathing on the beach was only a small part of that trip. Maybe going to bars in New Orleans was just for an article, and skiing in Lake Tahoe for Mashable's twitter page, and riding an Elephant in Thailand was research for an investigative article she's doing about animal cruelty. She's such a hard worker, it must be so difficult to do all this for work. She's living the struggle. I should give her more credit.
Perhaps that's just the era we live in--where ideas no longer are relevant without the context of the person delivering the idea--where human beings are unable to research or insert themselves into mental constructs due to their lack of 'perspective', that is, their lack of having a specific and acceptable background and history. Interesting that this is the exact frustration so many people express about political correctness, where arguments, ideas, and contributions are invalidated purely based on background, decisions, or other environmental factors.
The only real idea presented is that middle class people don't really have hobbies like they used to, and that maybe they should. I engaged that by saying it's unrealistic to make this blanket statement when people are struggling so much just to provide security and comfort for their families.
I am saying the principle of her article is poor completely independent of who she is as a person. I also mention that she lacks the perspective to genuinely make this argument because it's frankly pretty ignorant sounding.
>where ideas no longer are relevant without the context of the person delivering the idea
If dumb ideas are presented, it's worth analyzing why they were presented to begin with. Considering the person behind a piece of writing or speech is tremendously important. It's why we have inane quotes from famous people on posters. People care about context and always have.
I would think this is even more important with authors that are trying to impact public opinion or policy.
Parent commenter did exactly what you requested, before digging into the author. Noting that people don't have the wealth this article presumes, is a valid debate against the piece.
---
The article mentions that hobbies arise out of disposable income and free time gained from economic prosperity, and then was lost when the economy faltered. But the article then claims "The American economy has fared better in recent years" -- I'm not convinced that's an accurate picture.
Americans (as people) are not necessarily better off if America (the economy) does better. Today, most Americans (people) are still struggling financially, now often more than before, despite the fact that "the economy" has "recovered". But you can't see that from a desk in Manhattan, it's not visible if your only looking at census statistics or property values.
Which has created a weird disconnect where people who can sustainable (but only barely) afford housing / food / medical are routinely described as "middle class", even though they have far less disposable income and/or leisure time than their counterparts from the 1970's, or 1990's.
The recent explosion in ultra-high costs of housing, medical, and education likely play a role in this, absorbing money that previously would have become "leisure" spending. And the cash necessary to cover those costs seems to come by additional working through what used to be people's leisure time.
Official unemployment numbers are so frustrating due to so many exclusions.
If GDP is up but all of that growth is going to 0.0001% of Americans, who cares?
Couple that with the fact that travel is way easier, and you see disposable income (to the extent that anyone has disposable income) being spent on fleeting things rather than the tools to engage in a serious hobby.
I don't feel like either of the above are a bad thing, but they could just as easily be contributing factors to the lack of hobbies in the modern era. I'm sure that there are a wide variety of others, too, from lack of work/life balance (hello, corporate smartphone) to the lack of hobby education (bye bye, wood shop class, metal shop class, home economics class), plus ones that I'm not thinking of. What hobbies do people engage in now? Were those things hobbies back in the 50's or just necessary chores?
The other point about Netflix: while Netflix binge watching is something that I've enjoyed on many occassions, it has changed my whole perception of entertainment from a "let me build my timetable around the TV schedule" to a "I will do what I like" one, which I find much more desirable.
There are a lot of hobbies today, in fact one of the best parts about the US being as open and multicultural is the amount of options you have for hobbies. So there's fitness, yoga, mixed martial arts. There's sports: Tennis, Kickball, Volleyball etc. There are the hackerspace/makerspaces sprouting up everywhere. The internet has made it incredibly easy to find recipes and learn cooking (youtube videos is how I learned cooking). There are multitudes of dancing styles and events. Need I go on?
This entirely depends on the demographic group in question.
If, for instance, you're wondering about the hobbies of single 20-40-something women in urban areas of the US, from what I see it seems to be lots and lots of foreign travel, especially to really backwards parts of Africa and the Middle East. And going to bars a lot. And having kids by IVF.
For single men in this age range, it seems to be working all the time, or being in a drug or alcohol-induced haze most of the time.
So yeah, it seems to fit the definition.
Remember, these women aren't doing this as part of a marriage or other relationship with a partner, they're doing it all by themselves. Unlike other people who usually find a partner to procreate with, and then share the duties and responsibilities of child-rearing, these women apparently are unable to maintain a long-term relationship, but they have plenty of money, so like some people like to buy expensive pets, these women get IVF and have a kid, and then hire a full-time nanny or au pair to raise it since they're always busy with work, going to the bar, going to cultural events, hanging out with their single female friends, etc. But for that minority of time they want to feel like a "parent", they'll have the kid there and can do something with him/her.
Sounds like a hobby to me. Not too different from some rich guy with 30 cars in his garage, and he might take any particular car out for a spin once a month or less, but he can afford full-time mechanics and detailers to take care of them in the meantime.
This is basically the thesis of the book I just linked. Its probably one of the more important politically oriented pieces I've ever read.
My son is in college and it's a struggle for him. He wants friends but doesn't want to gladhand to meet people. I get it, but you can't have met friends without meeting people.
(There is also a book by Robert Putnam called "Bowling Alone" on the decline of group hobbies, but I've not read it)
BTW, people still play basketball, I don't know why she's singling that out.
First world issues, I know it really is but I personally find our modern Western capitalism driven lifestyles to really be missing a connection to anything important. I think one of the uses of hobbies that helped to smooth that over. We worry about making a new startup to "change the world" and ignore the river on fire because of pollution. I think that most hobbies in the post war era helped to tie people to something they valued, history, nature, or sport. Given our requirement to work so much I think people are driven to this new model to include that in there live.
There are two primary economic causes for the loss of leisure: the concentration of wealth since 1970 at the top, and, the absorption of additional income by inflation in real estate.
The stagnation of wages and erosion of benefits since approximately 1970 and the consequent accumulation of wealth into the top few percent in the US, has meant that every generation of working adults after 'our parents' (that is, from 1975 to present) has had to work harder to achieve an equivalent standard of living.
Women entering the work force had a profound and complex effect on the income of the middle class. And even when added child care costs [post my own latch-key-kid generation] are factored in, additional income was being generated.
That has masked until relatively recently the decline in purchasing power and the true long term costs for all but the most wealthy stemming from the erosion of both job security and the many benefits that used to adhere to full time jobs for the middle class and above.
Individual families bearing the cost of health care, retirement, and simultaneous full time care for children _and_ in many cases aging parents is shift of contract.
Leisure is a function of spare time and spare resources. Both have been monopolized by the mandate to maintain a standard of middle class comfort that was attainable on a single income a generation ago.
And incidentally, the rise in real estate prices in the US directly tracks the entrance of women into the work force.
TL;DR: real estate has acted like a sponge to absorb the nominal increase in resources of a two-earner family almost perfectly, leaving little or less than no additional resources for other pursuits. Like leisure.
TL;DR TL;DR: we've gone totally off the rails as a culture for the benefit of the very very few.
Most of these pursuits didn't feed back into the rest of the human world in any substantial way, had no audience and no conversation outside of the immediate family circle - all of which meant a lot of awkward "family members putting up with your weird interest".
Now we're so connected that the line between hobby and market activity blurs constantly. That can be diminishing in that you end up fighting against market incentives to pursue things in the way you want, but it also means that more of our work, in a relative sense, is work we can be engaged in, and can be done as part of a network with healthy feedback and social opportunities.
I am probably the age of Ms. Buck's parents, and I don't immediately see a great difference between how we and our neighbors of the same age spend our leisure and how our children do. OK, we aren't running marathons or riding bicycles across Iowa. But most of the persons I know of that age are not working insane hours; and in my generation I knew the occasional 20-something putting in very long weeks at the law firm.