Decentring work will make you happier and more interesting

The main difference between my twenties and thirties.

Hello!

Delighted to bring you an essay from Hannah Ewens for this week’s Open Tabs section. She shares her journey from workaholic to hobby enthusiast and the lessons learned along the way. I think we can all relate to the often futile pursuit that is deriving all your worth from work!

Elsewhere in the newsletter:

• News you may have missed this week

• Hot + Not with Mae Muller (of Eurovision!)

• Recs to read, watch, and listen to this weekend

Hope it’s a great one,

Holly x

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I’ve been a work addict forever. Since the age of 12, I’ve never not had at least one job, usually two or three. All throughout university, I had a full-time job flogging trainers to sneakerheads and tourists. What started as a requirement to pay for Pizza Hut and CDs became a way to fund a career in writing. But, alongside this adolescent hustle, I made a vital error at age 18. I dropped every hobby I had.

Anything that wasn’t directly taking me closer to being A Writer – a fun and glamorous pursuit I understood mostly through the medium of ‘00s movies like The Devil Wears Prada and How To Lose a Guy In 10 Days – had to go. In these movies, female ambition was a glossy inevitability in a Prada skirt – all you had to do was work hard. And I always worked hard. At least from the moment I showed myself to be a secret nerd, shocking everyone, when I opened some of the best results in the country for multiple GCSEs. I’d been more or less invisible. Then, suddenly, my family was proud of me, people at school fancied me, ‘everyone’ loved me. I had found my path and purpose!

From the outside (and the inside, too) my adult life has been dominated by work. Both ‘writing’ and ‘work’ fulfil the same functions for a demented person like me: input and output, cause and effect. My brain loves the structure of it – taking an idea from my intuition or an editor, opening the blank page, pounding through it, finishing the task, then doing it all over again the next day. That same disturbed brain has always worked fast and chaotically, playing a song or two, while simultaneously daydreaming about fame and fortune, and aggressively debating answers to an existential question. Work turns the volume down on all that noise. There are no variables, except the fact that sometimes you get positive external validation from readers or your boss, and other times you don’t. Regardless, I understand explicitly what is required of me, and I rise to the occasion. Ever heard of “open loops”? Well, writing and work take every stray lasso of psychic debris and tie them into a neat bow.

When I was made redundant from my dream job in magazines in 2022, alongside a series of losses in my personal life, something quite profound broke in me. I started 2023 with nothing, a real blank page of an existence. The one pillar that had always been there for me – work – was no longer a stable option to build my entire life around. Meaning and structure had left my world.

My sponsor, always an advocate for moderation and balance, asked me what I did for fun. I got what she was getting at – I needed something to balance out all this Catholic self-flagellation. But I couldn’t answer her. As for free time, I essentially gave myself none. Leisure felt like a dangerous lapse in vigilance. It was for hacks. Even when I saw friends and family, I experienced it as a brief, authorised absence from work. “I’m just so busy at the moment” was my obnoxious catchphrase. I was having ridiculous, fun and stupid adventures, though it all eventually fed back into the work. But it’s also true that I probably wouldn’t have done most of it, if I hadn’t believed on some level, that it supported the master task of communicating things to a reader.

I intended to start slowly when introducing hobbies into my life. I wanted to try acting first, because it was an organising principle of my childhood. Next I took up horse-riding again and went with a close friend to stay on a ranch in Montana. Then the activities came thick and fast: new styles of meditation, trance, psychic mediumship, tai chi, qigong, boxing, singing, yoga, hiking, life drawing, collaging, photography, etc, etc, etc. Nothing was outside the realms of possibility. If it was a niche activity on a random night of the week that I could just rock up to, I’d be there. Some I loved enough to pursue, some were just for a fleeting evening. I was a woman obsessed.

Almost overnight, work began to occupy my mind and my life a normal, non-pathological amount. Why had I convinced myself that every hour of my twenties had to be about “making it”? Why was there no space for anything that couldn’t be folded into an essay (beyond partying, I guess, but even then)? Hobbies had seemed embarrassing! A distraction! My artistic aspirations should have been the antidote to the millennial Girlboss attitude, but maybe I was one of them anyway – trading my existence for an identity, validation, and a pat on the back.

Mostly, though, I think I operated this way because nobody tells you that having no hobbies makes you a total 2D loser. School and society tell you to get a job and eat healthily and work out. They don’t encourage you to have a nice well-rounded life by getting strangely into making off-putting aura portraits of your friends in your spare time. That’s not serving our hyper-capitalistic overlords, unless you count the money I spent on colouring pencils from Jeff Bezos’ website.

But hobbies are genuinely so important (a meagre revelation to anyone reading this thinking, “well, duh”). They have made me happier and provided surprising anecdotes to rant about at events. Ironically, they provide more structure than work ever did for me – especially now that AI exists and the market for the written word is drying up. Even if I moved to a different city or country, I could go to a class for one of my interests. I can do them if I’m travelling or on holiday. All of them allow me to enter the “flow state” that I so long to be in all the time, the state I slip into when I write. I have started to believe that I will forever be safe and supported through the repetition and ritual of my ever-growing roster of activities.

Relatedly, I currently have an active ban on new hobbies. One thing about being a hobbyist (!) is that it is expensive. Work is now vital for funding my classes. How else am I expected to pay for a £700 week-long course in Essex? Who among us is fronting the bill for me to sway like a willow tree with pensioners in the town hall? My career might be going nowhere and my life a total shit show, but right now I’ve forgotten about all that because I’m on the back of a horse that is highly attuned to my mood and micro-movements, and now I’m on a stage responding to a stranger attempting to improv a first date gone disastrously wrong. I don’t care about “Work” anymore because I am no longer just a worker, a drone, a lump of generative AI! I am a soul with passions and interests! I am here to play and create like the creator himself! I am not a byproduct of a failing industry or the degrees I pointlessly collected – I am alive! I am alive! I am alive!

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Updates from the Capsule universe you may have missed this week:

• This week we became a Phoebe Bridgers news outlet on Instagram. See: details about the secret shows, her next collaborators, and where she might pop up next

• Sad to report that Kitri is closing its doors after nine years. Shop the remainder of their spring collection here

• Hailey Bieber is the face of many brands (rhode, Alaïa, Saint Laurent, DKNY), and now, Mango

• And another brand deal for Charli xcx, this time with Nothing, the headphones brand, where she’s also an investor

• Also here’s a closer look at the great clothes in the ‘Rock Music’ video

• Loved Chanel’s Mother’s Day campaign, featuring drawings by kids

• Why is everything black and white now?

• We should be funmaxxing like Dua

• Speaking of, here’s a peep at her bachelorette, or do we think she calls it a hen?

• Emma Chamberlain’s coffee shop just opened

• And the next Gracie Abrams album is called Daughter From Hell, which is one way of owning the nepo baby allegations

• Jonathan Anderson had his first Cruise collection for Dior. These details are amazing

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This week, Mae Muller popped into Capsule to share what’s 🔥hot🔥 and what’s not 🙅‍♀️ …

Mae is a singer-songwriter from London. Since representing the UK at Eurovision 2023, Mae has re-emerged as a frank and relatable voice for her generation by blending Y2K-inspired dance-pop with sharp, self-aware songwriting. Her latest music offers a high-energy outlet for communal catharsis, navigating everything from generational frustration to messy relationships.

🔥🔥🔥Hot🔥🔥🔥

Bibliothéque Byredo perfume, English Breakfast tea, Slayyyter, waking up early to lie in bed for another 2 hours, Jennifer Tilly, press on nails, jeans with heels, no mascara but LOTS of lip liner, Aperol spritz, voting Green

Hot Not… 🙅‍♀️🙅‍♀️🙅‍♀️

Gym selfies, hating on reality television, vaping, women’s body types being trends, aubergine, people pleasing, men terrorising women instead of going to therapy, AI artists, J. K. Rowling, colour coordination

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📺 Watching: Lady Gaga’s MAYHEM Requiem (if you’re lucky enough to have Apple Music at this time!), plus the new video for ‘Eastside Girls’ by MUNA, JADE’s Tiny Desk, and this BTS video of the making of Charli’s ‘Rock Music’ video is genuinely really good.

📖 Reading: This excellent essay by Brendon Holder on the trick mirror of making art about yourself, with references to Justin Bieber, Lena Dunham, and Lady Gaga. And Lena Dunham’s final installation of Dunhamisms, her brief advice column launched to countdown to her 40th. It’s a good one! And a last treat: her list of 40 things she wants to do after 40.

🎧 Listening to: Dancing On The Wall, the great new MUNA album, Sugar Girl, the new Little Simz EP, ‘Hit the Wall’, the new Gracie Abrams song, ‘Promise (When You Go)’, the new After song. If you like the After song, dive into After EP 2.