Something To Do On the Way To the Grave: Fisher's "Depressive Hedonia" and Getting Some Hobbies (Fisher's Ghosts, part 2)

I got this version of this image from a job recruitment site, in a piece about making your job match your hobbies. That is aggressively not what this piece is about.

It’s happened, the terrible question still so ubiquitous in “let’s all go around and give our names et cetera”-type introductions, in workplace meetings, in classes, in “team-building” exercises of all kinds: “What are your hobbies?” Or, more recently, “Do you have any hobbies?”

So I’m asking now: Do you have have any hobbies?

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I suspect we all know what a hobby is, or we have an idea, but because I feel it is only appropriate to define terms first, when I say “hobby,” I mean something that is for personal enjoyment or fulfillment, without an eye to eventual profit but that specifically involves active engagement of some kind. More simply: it’s not a job or a side hustle per se, and you have to actually do something.

This definition is intentionally broad. Engaging in the creation of transformative media — which is, I understand, what people who don’t want to admit that they know what fandom is are calling fandom now — would be an example. I’m not interested in leaving anyone out. But what I am interested in are things that you or I or your coworker with suspiciously good Halloween costumes are doing for ourselves, without a particular interest in the profit motive.

So, do you have any hobbies?

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In Chapter Four of Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism, he offers a striking portrait of British youth in the mid/late Aughts, specifically focusing on the interpassivity engendered by capitalist structures as they encounter the disciplinary structures of the college setting. After a frankly unsettling exchange with a student who first leaves his headphones in with no music playing, and then leaves his headphones out with the music playing so quietly no one, including the student, can hear it, he writes, “The consequence of being hooked into the entertainment matrix is twitchy, agitated interpassivity, an inability to concentrate or focus.”

I haven’t read this book, but I was forever scarred by the cover image.

While Fisher locates this as something, to an extent, particular to then-contemporary youths, in the ten years since Capitalist Realism dropped, the “twitchy… interpassivity” Fisher remarks upon has only spread across further demographics — indeed, for many of a certain age it was already there. I have visited a number of people who themselves rail against cell phones and “millenials’” (though really at this point they’re talking about even younger people) supposed-aversion to reading books who literally never turn off the radio or the television in their homes. The matrix, as Fisher calls it, has always been there; we’ve just dragged it up to the front.

If anything, George Trow identified Fisher’s Matrix some twenty years prior in his discussion of “the grid” in Within the Context of No Context (another brief, punchy little book that’s been very well-thumbed in the Edgar/Cameron household). For Trow, “the grid” was a web of social connection that existed at several distances from an individual; in Context, he bemoans the collapse of what he calls the “middle-distance” grid in favor of “the grid of two hundred million” and “the grid of one.” To put it in less esoteric terms: social clubs no longer exist because television does. Fisher’s matrix, to me, seems to be the natural outgrowth of the people to come after the ones who collapsed the grid. Having come of age within the context of no context, as it were, “the grid of two hundred million” in its purest, most direct form becomes a mode of situating themselves in that broader grid, as well as an “ahistorical, anti-mnemonic blip culture,” as Fisher characterizes it.

Fisher characterizes this frankly all-too-relatable need to remain connected to the matrix as depressive hedonia. He writes, “Depression is usually characterized as a state of anhedonia, but the condition I’m referring to is constituted not by an inability to get pleasure so much as it is by an inability to do anything except pursue pleasure. There is a sense that ‘something is missing’ — but no appreciation that this mysterious, missing enjoyment can only be accessed beyond the pleasure principle.”

A bit further on, Fisher distinguishes between boredom as it is typically defined from the boredom of which his students complain when faced with, in his example, Nietzsche: “To be bored simply means to be removed from the communicative sensation-stimulus matrix,[…] to be denied […] gratification on demand.”

So?

The face I make when it’s noon and I’m opening up Insta for the thirteenth time.

So how many times have I personally spent literal hours of a precious day off, a day I anticipated using to pursue my hobbies — I’m getting there, I promise — lying in bed and fucking around on my phone, switching dully between Tumblr, Facebook, and Instagram, not doing anything but aggravating my already long-suffering ulnar nerves with my incessant scrolling and double-tapping to like? The answer is, a lot of times, up to and including times when a book that I was reading was literally lying in the bed right next to me, simply because I could not muster the energy, the fortitude to break away from the dull distraction of social media to go toe-to-toe with someone else’s thoughts. How many precious breaks at work have I wasted to the same anaesthetised consumption of algorithmically-optimized content? Again, a lot. It’s just so easy, and breaking away from it means actually having to do something.

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If there’s one thing the late capitalist hellscape encourages, it’s doing things — but only in specific contexts, and only to specific ends. Those contexts and ends being, of course, the service of a job, and the voracious maw the job has become for so many. Otherwise, all we are supposed to be allowed is passive consumption of that same algorithmically-optimized content and the latest Netflix original. And, like, shopping, I guess.

This both looks like a scene from Coupland’s novel and comes from an article in the fucking Mail, so I feel all right taking it. That wineglass is making me nervous, though.

As an aside, I’m reminded of Douglas Coupland’s debut novel, Generation X, in which Andy, the narrator characterizes his as the generation that confuses shopping for creativity. But while Andy locates this propensity in the titular generation, it certainly impacts subsequent generations, too, and the problem can be extrapolated: buying stuff can feel nice, but what if you have no money? Look, these other people bought some stuff and placed it tastefully in their homes; I shall save the image of the item I’d like to have bought to a Pinterest board about how I would like to decorate my living room if my living room were meaningfully distinguished from any of my other rooms because my apartment does not have that many rooms and also it doubles as my dining room because I eat dinner in front of a TV series every night.

Where I’m going with this is, if you’re not actively doing your job or engaging with your job, you are encouraged to entertain yourself only to a certain degree and only in certain ways, all of which are passive and consumptive both in the economic sense and in the sense that they ultimately break a person like getting tuberculosis in the 1840s. If you’re not doing stuff for your job, it is preferred that you not do stuff to a substantial degree outside of it. Also, you probably can’t afford it. Why? Because fuck you, someone else is getting rich.

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I’m about to go down a well-trodden path here, at least in certain discursive circles of the Internet and its many microcultures, but please bear with me.

Please, for fuck’s sake, get a hobby.

I don’t care what it is. Engage with something that is purely for individual benefit, preferably in which the end result is not only acquisitive. Think about it on purpose and preferably on the clock, because fuck them, we’re getting personal fulfillment.

Obviously, I have biases here: I have a number of hobbies, and I have certainly considered how I might turn them into actual money, because that’s what our society expects of us. I mean, hell, I’m writing this blog post in part because I’d very much like for writing to pay at least some of my bills. But that’s not the only reason.

The biggest reason is that it makes me feel good, and I have the time and energy to do it right now, and in taking that time and energy to do something that matters to me, for me, at little cost to me — that pulls me away from the grid of however many people are on Facebook — makes me happy. I did something. It’s the same reason I knit stuff, and the same reason some people construct model ships in bottles and other people get excited about insects (and unintentionally provided everyone else with a rich cache of data detailing the demise of one hell of a lot of them) and still other people do elaborate cosplay or write hundreds-of-thousands-of-words-long fanfictions.

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Not to name names or anything — but if you’re in KC and like yarn, go to this place.

Obviously, these things require effort. These things frequently require financial outlay. God knows, I have spent kind of a lot of money, proportionately, at the delightful yarn store that opened up dangerously close to my house. Obviously, getting supplies to make stuff typically requires money, and the physical ability to do so; finding the time to write stuff requires time and writing materials; consuming media critically and thoughtfully requires the emotional energy to engage meaningfully with that media. I am very aware that there are barriers to entry, both quantitative ones like money and time, and qualitative ones, like having the emotional and mental energy, and the absence of physical or emotional pain, to consume media thoughtfully.

I’m not making a moral judgement here. I have spent a lot of time without one of the several resources mentioned above for various things; I read maybe three or four books per year for pleasure for several years after finishing college and entering the workforce (at Gap, Incorporated as a sales associate, for $10/hour, and an OSHA-violating car wash, for minimum wage and tips) because I simply lacked the emotional energy to do so. And really, I only started prioritizing it as I now do because I noticed that reading books made me feel better: they provided some relief from the mental health issues with which I continue to struggle, and, as someone who is extremely prone to defining my self by the stuff I do, they reinforced a key aspect of my identity that was forged in childhood.

Basically, I started reading for pleasure again for medicinal purposes, is what I’m saying, which I feel does something to the barrier to entry for me personally: because I had long identified myself as “a reader,” it was easier for me to want to return to that particular hobby. I don’t think my experiences there are universal, but maybe they rhyme.

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In the chapter of Capitalist Realism I’m discussing here (and really it’s just the first couple of pages of that chapter), Fisher quotes Deleuze’s famed “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” He cites Deleuze’s delineation of the difference between societies of discipline and societies of control, with the intention, of course, of demonstrating that we currently live in a society of control, in which we police ourselves with never-ending “training” or “education” that really only serves to move the bar ever-farther along. I’m reminded of Hugo William’s delightful description of deadlines: “the light under the door that isn’t there when you open it, only another door, another deadline.” Such is life in the society of control.

But in that same essay, Deleuze suggests that elements of liberation and oppression vie with one another in any kind of system, and that’s the part that I want to talk about.

I’m going to go out on a limb here: in spite of all my involvement with a variety of crafts over the years, to say nothing of my semi-mystical relationship with words, these things alone cannot cause the kind of change that, at this point, is not only desirable but absolutely necessary. We’ve got ten years on a good day, and no amount of craftivism or emphasis on the value of the humanities is going to turn that around on its own. I wish they could.

But if these things in and of themselves will not save us, what will? Despite the social emphasis — discussed by Fisher, by Deleuze, by a bunch of conservative dickbags as well — on kicking responsibility down the road, it’s ultimately going to be us who save us. We have to do it ourselves, however that can be made to happen.

The various forces — so nebulous that they seem to exist purely in the realm of the spirit, manifesting on the physical plane through bad bosses and rising costs of living — that control and contort our lives in myriad ways are invested in us not doing our best unless it is to their benefit. It’s an old saw, but they want us sick, sad and tired. They are invested in throttling the sources of fulfillment in our lives, and roping us into Fisher’s matrix so thoroughly we cannot see outside of it.

So I’m saying it again: if it is within your power, do something. Do something without an eye to profit, because it makes you happy, and do it on purpose. I’m not talking about political activity, though that is of course necessary. I’m talking about doing things that are for personal fulfillment alone. I’m talking about doing this because political burnout, activism burnout, and just regular old burnout like mom and dad used to get, mean that we cannot be as sharp or as resilient as we need to be. And as much as we are told to, my sense is that many of us do not have the means to reduce stress in our lives. Further, “self-care” as commonly constructed has some real issues (and many of the same barriers to entry I mention here, if not more), to say nothing of the way the entire movement, such as it is, offloads responsibility from a society that is crushing us to the limited means of individuals.

Really digging GD’s hat here. Looks like he’s about to look for new weapons Indiana Jones-style.

I’m not trying to do that here, and I want to be very clear: having or acquiring a hobby, as I broadly define it, is not a magic bullet. This is an individual-level item. It is not one of the “new weapons” to which Deluze makes reference in his “Postscript.” Again: those weapons are us. But snatching personal fulfillment from the jaws of those who would crush us might be said to be ammunition.

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