
Our parents discovered leisure, we killed it - pmcpinto
https://timeline.com/hobby-career-b5d199b0df18#.bn25t0977
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whamlastxmas
>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.

~~~
jmagoon
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.

~~~
maxsilver
>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.

\---

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.

~~~
whamlastxmas
Unemployment is arguably the most important economic indicator that most
people care about, and "realistic" measures of it show that it's just as bad
as, if not worse than, 2009:
[http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/unemployment-
chart...](http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/unemployment-charts)

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?

------
wcunning
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?

~~~
parennoob
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.

~~~
CaptSpify
Potentially because of having more free time, and a harder time doing physical
activities?

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aaroninsf
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.

~~~
wycx
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.

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mholmes680
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...

~~~
norea-armozel
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.

~~~
marmot1101
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.

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pjc50
The Romans 'discovered' leisure, calling it "otium". The opposite gives us the
word "negotiation".

(There is also a book by Robert Putnam called "Bowling Alone" on the decline
of group hobbies, but I've not read it)

------
smoyer
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.

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jaegerpicker
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.

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zilchers
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.

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buzzybee
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.

------
WalterSear
Our parents discovered leisure and then did their best to use up all the means
to achieve it on themselves.

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cafard
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.

