#113. "Rage baking in my endless free time"

I don't hate men I swear

Hey! Today is an issue of Storytime™ – a series where you ask me your questions or tell me your stories, and I’ll do my best to answer them with the empathy (and humor) you deserve. Have your own story/question? Submit it here.

“I’m single, childless by choice, and in my mid-30s living in a major city on the west coast. Last month I was invited over to a friend’s house for dinner. She’s married and has a couple young kiddos. I love baking, so I offered to bring a dessert. Since I hadn’t been over to this friend’s house for dinner since before the pandemic, I treated it as a special occasion and made a slightly more involved dessert than I normally would.

I arrive with said dessert and my friend and her kiddos are oohing and aahing over it, which is of course the best reaction you can get as a baker! Her husband, meanwhile, was off playing pickleball with his buddies.

Her husband isn’t home by the time dinner is ready, so we eat without him. We’re busy entertaining the girls and feasting when her husband finally gets home as we’re about to transition to dessert time. He greets everyone, takes one look at the time-intensive dessert I made, and says to me, “ohhhh, so that’s what free time looks like!” Said in the tone of: “must be nice!!”

It took a second for me to register what he was implying. I was so shocked that this was the first comment he makes to me when I haven’t seen him in basically five years. Wanting to “play along with his joke” and not be snarky to him in front of my friend, I think I responded something to the effect of, “yeah it’s nice to go all out on the baking projects sometimes.”

But what I really wanted to say was, “my bad, sorry I used my precious hours to bake something delicious that you get to waltz in after playing LEISURE TIME PICKLEBALL and enjoy without lifting a finger. How dare I do such a thing.” – Michelle, rage-baking in my endless free time

Michelle, thank you for sharing this extremely relatable (and annoying!!) story with the class. I think we’ve pretty much all been here before, and when you sent this, my brain immediately started spinning about how many times I’ve heard something similar to this, although not usually involving a baked good, because my oven only half-works and baking in my household is as rare as me voluntarily cracking open a beer (translation: it happens, like, once a year.)

It’s time to talk about how much American men are obsessed with work.

Can I confess something? My husband is a self-professed workaholic. I’m on the receiving end of this kind of commentary often (although, nicer?) because, of the two of us, I work significantly less than my husband does. This was true even before I was let go from my job and pivoted to writing this newsletter full-time; it was true when I was working two more-than-part-time jobs and writing this newsletter at the same time. My husband worships at the altar of work. It is his religion, it is the thing that eats away at his hazy illusion of “free time,” it singlehandedly keeps him shackled to a career that he’d love to transition away from someday in exchange for more free time but… can’t.

The fever may finally be breaking, but most higher-income American men suffer from ‘workism.’ And anything you might do with your free time outside of work is something they envy. (I’m making a bit of an assumption here about your friend’s husband, which might be wrong, but let’s just go with it.)

First, a bit of history. The following is from a piece by one of my most-read journalists at The Atlantic, Derek Thompson, who has written about this topic several times over the years:

One of the weirdest economic stories of the past half century is what happened to rich Americans—and especially rich American men—at work.

In general, poor people work more than wealthy people. But starting in the 1980s in the United States, this saga reversed itself. The highest-earning Americans worked longer and longer hours, in defiance of expectations or common sense. The members of this group, who could have bought anything they wanted with their wealth, bought more work. Specifically, from 1980 to 2005, the richest 10 percent of married men increased their work hours by more than any other group of married men: about five hours a week, or 250 hours a year.

In 2019, I called this phenomenon “workism.” In a time of declining religiosity, rich Americans seemed to turn to their career to fill the spiritual vacuum at the center of their life. For better or (very often) for worse, their desk had become their altar.

Since then, the concept of workism has been attached to a range of cultural and political phenomena, including declining fertility trends in the West. I’ve blamed workism for U.S. policies that resist national parental and sick leave because of an elite preference for maximizing the public’s attachment to the labor force.

In short?

We. Work. Too. Much. And it’s affecting everything else, very possibly including your fucking peace at a nice dinner with your friends.

In the 1930s, American economist John Maynard Keynes thought we’d all be working 15 hour work weeks by now and our chief social challenge would be figuring out what to do with all our free time. Hahahahaha. He’s probably turning over in his grave, honestly. We can’t even get our shit together to roll out a four-day standard workweek nationwide, much less two. Trust me, I tried it. Then I got fired.

Do you know anyone – parent or not, single or not – who talks about long stretches of time in which they’re legitimately trying to figure out what to do with all their free time? Most people I know (including yours truly) fill their limited free time with their passions, which means there will never be quite enough time. Passions demand attention. I’ve had so many conversations with friends recently about desperately wanting jobs that don’t “follow you home,” so that work doesn’t creep into what’s supposed to be our highly coveted, highly elusive “leisure” time.

I don’t know what your friend’s husband does for a living, but I can almost guarantee from his jarring comment about your dessert that he works a lot. And he’s got kids, which means his free time is probably both rare and extremely precious to him. Pickleball is probably something he has to carefully plan and protect – which means he doesn’t even see the irony of his statement about your free time, spoken immediately after he’s returned from his. Maybe he’s fallen headfirst into the productivity trap, wherein all free time has to be productive in some way, god forbid someone wants to just chill the F out for a sec and do something that can’t be checked off a to-do list. Maybe he networks at pickleball, or maybe it also counts for him as a “workout” (look, ma! I’m multitasking!) I don’t know shit, but I’m willing to bet that if you’d come over with something that met his personal criteria for “productive,” like a 20-slide powerpoint for how to more efficiently clean your house*, he wouldn’t have said a thing.

(*One of my friends’ husbands did this once for “Powerpoint night” and it was glorious.)

You and I both know that single, childless women don’t have endless free time, but to him, he probably sees literally everyone else as having more free time than he does to spend on silly little activities like generously baking something delicious for a friend and her family. What luxury!!!

He’s envious, to be clear. I’m not saying he regrets having kids or getting married or anything so dramatic, I’m saying he took one look at your dessert and thought to himself, “Damn. Remember when I didn’t have all the responsibilities I have now?” He reached for your single, childless status because it’s the quickest way he can draw a line in the sand between the two of you. Because he used to be single and childless, too. And on some level, a part of him misses that version of his life he’ll never see again. But he’s never been you, and he’ll project his own stuff onto you accidentally because, as humans, that’s what we do.

There’s one more thing I want to say here, and that’s about time and its value. It’s easy to get caught in a binary where a parent’s free time is Sacred and Valuable and Important, whereas a non-parent’s free time is automatically frivolous.

I… hate this?

Like who died and made your friend’s husband the free time police? The beauty of free time is that it’s free. As in, you can do whatever the fuck you want with it. This time, maybe you were baking a dessert to share with your friends you haven’t seen in a while. Tomorrow, you might be volunteering to help underprivileged students with their math homework, the next day you may be binge-watching Love Island, and on the weekend, you’re babysitting your sister’s kids while she takes a much-needed moment of freedom. Let’s not judge other people for what they do with their free time, and let’s also not assume a childless person’s free time is frivolous. It’s reductive. It’s unfair. And often wrong?

One of the perks of not having children is being able to have more control over your limited free time, preferably without judgement and snarky comments. Your friend’s husband needs to pull his head out of his ass and stop being such an overworked dick about it. And people without kids, like us, need to try to remain patient and empathetic towards parents when this stuff comes up. It’s called an exchange.

I want to leave you with a quote from one of the formerly richest men in America, who was famously a royal douchebag and definitely one million percent obsessed with work. So this is a bit ironic, coming from him, but I like both the irony and the sentiment:

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.” – Steve Jobs

”Who Wants Kids?” podcast episode by

caro claire burke

and

Katie Gatti Tassin

for

Diabolical Lies

I just love listening to two smart/hilarious women talk about pronatalism, don’t you? Part of this podcast episode is behind a paywall, but there’s so much good in front of it. Lots of dunking on both political parties, also, which is a little unusual in the media I consume but actually very welcome in this context:

“In a modern capitalist economy, work culture is such that even with all of the support that you can get, it still feels like where is the time going to come from? My theory is, if you actually want people to have kids – if we can all agree that people having families is a good thing – if the work week were 10 hours and not 40? I think you would see a lot of people making different choices. As long as 40-50 hours is the norm, I don’t really care what kind of social safety nets you put in place. People are still going to be like, where the fuck is the time going to come from.”

“How I Demolished My Life” by Honor Jones for The Atlantic

This essay is a few years old, but it bangs. It’s a home renovation story, but also a divorce story:

I had wanted, I thought, soapstone counters and a farmhouse sink. I had wanted an island and a breakfast nook and two narrow, vertical cabinets on either side of the stove; one could be for cutting boards and one could be for baking sheets. I followed a cabinetry company called Plain English on Instagram and screenshotted its pantries, which came in paint colors like Kipper and Boiled Egg. Plain English cost a fortune, but around a corner in the back of its New York showroom you could check out the budget version, called British Standard. But it cost a fortune too. I wished there was a budget British Standard. I wished there was a room behind that room, the cabinets getting flimsier and flimsier until a door opened and let me back into my own shitty American kitchen, just as it was.

My husband talked to the architect; my husband talked to the builder. And I kept paring the plans down, down, making them cheaper, making them simpler. I nixed the island and found a stainless-steel worktable at a restaurant-supply store online for $299. I started fantasizing about replacing the counters with two-by-fours on sawhorses and hanging the pots from nails on the wall. Slowly, I realized, I didn’t want this kitchen. Slowly, I realized, I didn’t want this life.

I didn’t want to renovate. I wanted to get divorced.

“Women Are Drinking More – and Doctors Are Worried” by Brianna Abbott for The Wall Street Journal

This is less of a good read and more of a PSA – apparently there may be a connection between heavy drinking and breast cancer risk:

Women are likely drinking more for a number of reasons: They are more likely to attend college, where heavy alcohol consumption is a staple. They are earning more and have more discretionary income. And women are also getting married and having children later in life or not at all, extending their child-free social lives.

Breast cancer rates in the U.S. are also rising some 1% each year, with greater increases for women under age 50. Some researchers point to the increase in alcohol use as a potential contributor, along with other known risks including obesity and childbirth at older ages.

“We don’t fully understand why we’re seeing this, but alcohol is definitely playing a role,” said Dr. Amy Comander, breast oncologist and cancer survivorship expert at Mass General Brigham.

Yes, I am absolutely a Hunger Games fanatic, so I binged Sunrise on The Reaping in a single day last weekend. I’ve been on a dystopian kick lately for ~personal reasons~ and this book absolutely fit the bill. This is the story of Haymitch’s games, told from his perspective as a 16 year-old. I definitely cried, if that’s the kind of mood you’re in. If you’re not a crazed fan of the original series, this book probably won’t hit as deep for you, though; there are about a bazillion easter eggs from the original series and President Snow’s prequel. Can’t wait for the movie!

In other news, as per our conversation last week, the Chicago Sun-Times published a summer reading list full of books that… don’t exist. One writer took 100% of the blame for the error and admitted to using AI (yeah, dude; we know.) The best part is that the list was printed in an actual paper newspaper, lol. Irony 17,000/10!

callherdaddy

A post shared by @callherdaddy

Queen Alex Cooper had one of her best friends, Lauren, on Call Her Daddy to talk about calling off her engagement last fall. Their conversation reminded me so much of what I went through when I was the same age (30). Here’s what Lauren said:

“I think that – the timeline, the time clock, the biological clock and children, and really sitting and thinking about that – has been one of the most freeing aspects for me. I’ve never felt more zen and peaceful in my entire life. And awake, and confident, and sure. I think it’s because I’ve been having really honest conversations with myself about what was fueling that urgency and that rush and that countdown [to get married.] And it’s children, and motherhood. If you would have asked me 6 months ago, a year ago, my whole life, I would have been like – no question I’m having children. And I don’t feel that way anymore. And it’s a little surprising, but not sad. If anything, almost freeing.” – Lauren

Have you ever been on the receiving end of snarky “free time” commentary? Have you ever clapped back in the moment? (How did it go?) Do you have another story to share or a question for me to ponder chaotically out loud?

Last week, I talked to my friend Cass about abortion rights and the threat of the unoccupied woman (ahem, single and childless women enjoying their free????)

On Sunday, I have a very special and unhinged treat for you, which is MY HUSBAND(!) – workaholic and child-free by choice king – coming to talk to me for issue #4 (I would have invented boyfriends) of the Sheila Heti Summer Slow Read. See you there! :)