The Rat Race and People's Hobbies

People in the western world were sold the corporate/consumer lifestyle mainly after WW2. An early version of it was marketed shortly after WW1. This lifestyle was possible because of the industrial revolution and the build-out of national transportation networks. Basically people could buy everything they needed to live.

Once people could buy everything they needed to live, they needed a way to "spend their time", i.e. their free time. Really their time outside the corporate institution/prison world. The idea of productive activity like farming or gardening was replaced by "hobbies". The modern meaning of hobby, e.g. building models, is only from 1816. The ancient meaning of the word was a "small horse".

I think the notion of hobby-life was really sold hard after WW2, especially as mass media became such a dominant force. The mass media dissolved almost every link to a prior way of life and replaced people's fantasy world with a contrived one. Stupid movies and TV shows showed people in California surfing, or showed people driving sports cars, or riding motor bikes, or whatever and built a parallel universe of useless activities which people lusted after.

People work to do their hobbies, because the hobby is the thing they really love spending their time on. However, they'll be perpetually frustrated by their lack of freedom/free time. This is especially true of hobbies like sailing or boating, which are primarily about leisure... they're also super expensive hobbies that basically ensure the boat owner will have to spend more time on the hamster wheel at work to make credits to pay for dock fees and boat payments. The boater hobby is unique because it scales up or down to take as much money as a person is able and willing to spend so it's always painful. If you're a lawyer who can make millions a year on personal injury cases, there's a boat that can drain a significant portion of that money away. If you're a factory worker that makes $25 and hour, there's a boat that can drain an equal percentage of your life away too.

The consumer lifestyle is structured so people won't escape the corporate prison life, because it's non-productive activity and or is something that's difficult and time-intensive to monetize. This second point is really the critical one. I will write some more about that later.