A few weeks ago, I was sitting on my sofa playing one of those hidden object games on my daughter’s Kindle.
I’d spent the morning writing for an impending deadline, the house was tidy, my daughter was at school, and dinner was prepped. So why couldn’t I relax and enjoy finding random items hidden amongst other random items?
It was my guilty pleasure, after all!
Everyone has guilty pleasures. It’s the bit we whisper when our friends ask us what we got up to at the weekend. ‘Oh, you know, I weeded the garden, cooked a roast, made some homemade Playdoh with the kids, and ate a whole tub of Ben and Jerry’s watching Strictly.’
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Maybe therein lies the problem.
If we can’t own our pleasure time, if we have to denigrate its existence by whispering it and labelling it as guilty, then how on earth is it going to serve its purpose?
And why do we do this? Is it because we feel our guilty pleasures aren’t respectable because we don’t monetise them?
New YouGov statistics cite over 15% of the workforce is now self-employed.
The Office of National Statistics says the entrepreneurial market is growing—it would seem—almost exponentially.
Lockdown has seen a huge majority of us unemployed, furloughed, or working from home, a place we once enjoyed, escaping the pressures and stresses of our jobs.
Instagram hits me every day with amazing women who not only work full time but run side hustles, are amazing mums, and have the most gorgeously curated homes.
We fill our time to the brim because we feel that’s what is expected of us as ambitious people who are in control of our own lives. The idea is exhausting, let alone actually living it. And as a result, there has been a rise in the notion that we must look after ourselves; you can’t pour from an empty cup, give the best of you not what’s left of you. Pinterest is rife with positive quotes about self-care, and so it should be.
But on the other hand, we’re told too much screen-time is bad for us. There’s research into the negative effects of social media. The Insta mums are flaunting how they’re always on the go; baking, tidying, decorating, so I should be too. So, if our guilty pleasures are having a detrimental effect on our self-care then what good are they?
I used to love immersing myself in a game on the tablet. Those detective games where I could switch my brain off for an hour or so and wander around made-up worlds fighting crime. But increasingly I was finding myself trying to hurry through the games, my mind not switching off, but instead reeling off the million and one things I should be doing instead of that. My stress levels peaked in a way they never did when I was busy working. It was useless, I just couldn’t relax.
Friends, too, were exhausted. They would fill their free time with purposeful activities. The kind of activities that were deemed acceptable to shout and not whisper about. The PTA, gym classes, side hustles. No-one spoke of reading with a cuppa or going to bed with a pizza and the TV remote, because surely that’s frowned upon in a world where everything we do should have an end goal and a profit.
I was reaching burn-out and needed to come up with a solution.
So, I decided to take ownership of my guilty pleasures. Easier said than done as a working single mum, but each time I did something that didn’t involve work or children I would remind myself that it’s okay to take time out. Important, in fact. I stopped whispering when I spoke of how I spent my time. I stopped rating my relaxing pastimes as less worthy than those spent activity filled. It took time and dedication, but I loved it.
It’s the preface of the pleasure. The guilty; snuck in to allow us to do the things we love. The things that don’t have added purpose, the simple, enjoyable past-times. Let’s remind ourselves that not everything we do must have a goal, that it’s okay to just be. Let’s all remove the guilt from our pleasures and start reaping the rewards.
