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Notes -
But Adorno already said that he has no problem with simply listing the activities he does outside of his working hours. He already said as much in the passage that I quoted. His criticism is directed towards the modern concept of the hobby specifically, as something that is distinct from "things you do when you're not working for sustenance".
Now to be clear, I'm not a Marxist. I'm not even sure that this thing they call "capitalism" actually exists, and even if it does, its power to introduce radical discontinuities in human thought are surely overstated. A concept that is at least analogous to the concept of the hobby undoubtedly predates the written word. But nonetheless, I'm sympathetic to Adorno's argument that there is a certain ideological constellation surrounding the modern concept of the "hobby" that can and should be criticized, and we can and should imagine the division of our time being governed by a different conceptual regime.
I imagine that it varies from individual to individual. But regardless, people can be mistaken about what's meaningful and what's not. It's possible that someone might think that they're doing something meaningful, but in reality they're not. So the individual's conception of their own activity is just one data point to consider.
Oh, he has a problem with it, it’s his whole problem. He worries that he doesn’t come off as cool when he tells people what he does with his time:
So when he reads, he reads ‘with all his attention’(as opposed to normal people, who supposedly read distractedly. The point is, he’s better than them, at reading) . And he doesn’t have hobbies, he has a meaningful, holistic life. Please.
We’re all nerds with nerd hobbies here, but this one unloads his inadequacies and frustrations in the most petty, passive aggressive way possible.
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