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The Spinoff
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Spinoff
The Weekend: A tribute to everyone's favourite stranger
Madeleine Chapman reflects on the week that was. We had an unlikely hero on The Spinoff this week. The anonymous 23-year-old who featured in Tuesday's Cost of Being described herself as 'broke with expensive taste' and didn't hold back when describing how she spends her, admittedly, little money. Savings? Forget about it. 'Given that the planet seems like it's a couple years away from plunging into a full grim dystopia, I'll be using every dollar I have to assert my vivacity and joie de vivre while I still can.' Grooming and beauty expenditure? Limited, but 'I buy a pair of falsies [lashes] pretty regularly since I'm always crying mine off.' I love this woman, and evidently so did readers. The comments are wholesome, asking for a full column from this anonymous legend (note: she is real, but even we don't know who she really is, she just filled out the form). I personally received two texts from different friends asking for more entries like hers. This is all very wholesome but a little surprising to me. In my four years in this role, it has proven impossible to predict how readers will react to other people's lives. In another year, I would've bet safely on Tuesday's readers scoffing at a young person living at home for free and spending $400 on boots. What was it that so enchanted readers? We've had 'spenders' feature in the series before, and plenty of participants have thrown in pithy one-liners about their situation and the world at large. But there was something beautifully hopeful in this young person's attitude to living her life (despite the dystopian view on saving money). I suspect many readers with full-time jobs and mortgages and responsibilities delighted in knowing that at least one young person was out there making the most of their early 20s. And most importantly, she was funny. Trust me, you can get away with a lot if it's decorated with humour. Nearly 700 New Zealanders have filled out the Cost of Being questionnaire and all are beautifully unique, but the majority inevitably fall into the 'doing my best to be responsible' category. So if you're someone who is living your best fun life and has a story to tell, I invite you to contribute to the series. Maybe you too could be someone's hero. The stories Spinoff readers spent the most time with this week Joel MacManus uses 10 graphs to analyse why homelessness Is worse under this government The cost of being: A retail assistant who's 'broke with expensive taste' Alex Casey rounds up all the celebrities* running in local elections around the country this year Former race relations commissioner Joris De Bres responds to the renaming of the Rongotai electorate Chlöe Swarbrick was barred from the House all week – is that even allowed? Andrew Geddis explains Feedback of the week 'As a 19 year old, I don't think education about the internet is enough to prevent harm (because I had internet education). In an ideal world, parents would be able to monitor what their children are doing on the internet, but they can't and most won't. It feels like a significant chunk of the internet is designed to make you feel worse, especially now with the polarised political landscape (see Andrew Tate). I personally think a restriction of the internet for youth is in order, but then the hard part becomes actually doing it without privacy concerns (like giving ID to private corporations who might sell or leak it) or the government caring enough to not half-ass it. I do think a ban is too extreme, but I think people need to consult youth more who actually are growing/ grew up with it.' 'It seems like an important point is being missed that Chloe didn't call anyone spineless, she called for MP's to have a spine. They are very different things, one is an insult, the other is an invocation to show courage. '
The Spinoff
04-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Spinoff
The Weekend: The illusion of choice
Madeleine Chapman reflects on the week that was. Over the past two years, The Spinoff has published more than 130 entries in our Cost of Being series. We got off to a shaky start, with a number of readers believing that presenting poor people's spending habits was glamourising poverty (bad) and presenting rich people's spending habits was celebrating wealth (even worse). Thankfully, as more and more New Zealanders – and yes, they are all written by real people – shared their financial realities, the real reason for the Cost of Being's popularity has revealed itself. We are all nosy and we are all judgy. What a joy it is to get such a peek into a stranger's life, and then to be able to quietly judge all of their financial decisions. We all make so many decisions every day that it can be equal parts comforting and aspirational to see how others choose differently. And that's the key part: choices. We aren't judging people, we're judging their choices. As if all choices happen in the same reality. This week's Cover Story was Alex Casey's excellent deep-dive into why so many New Zealand women get botox. She spoke to dozens of women who got the treatment and was surprised by how positively they spoke about its effects. But even those who had no regrets and were happy to keeping doing it questioned whether or not this choice they had made was really a choice at all. Did they really want to have a smooth forehead or had societal conditioning, ageism and sexism all combined to give the impression that this just had to be done? The judgement and shame around 'cosmetic' spending is perhaps only rivalled by judgement about alcohol. If you used the Cost of Being as a sample of the population, you'd think New Zealanders are all sober. This is obviously not true but I suspect no one really wants to reveal how much they spend on something as 'non-essential' as alcohol lest they be judged, albeit anonymously, for it. Two days ago, while launching Rotorua's first ever 'beat team' to patrol the city, police minister Mark Mitchell questioned how many of the city's rough sleepers were really homeless. 'From my own experience many of the rough sleepers have got somewhere to go,' he said. 'It's more a lifestyle choice for them.' He's probably right. Many rough sleepers technically have other places they could go. But I wonder if Mitchell has considered what sort of choices are out there if the preferred one is to sleep on the street in the middle of winter. I love reading every Cost of Being entry and, yes, I love to scratch my head at some of the random choices people make. But every once in a while I have to remind myself that no choice is made in a vacuum, and sometimes a 'choice' is just a means of survival. Want to contribute to the Cost of Being? Fill out the questionnaire here. The stories Spinoff readers spent the most time with this week Feedback of the week 'I'm in my late 30s and feel really similarly about all the points in the article. I'm really fucking vain and I want to look my best, but I also feel really strongly this is yet another patriarchal and capitalist pressure on feminine-coded bodies. I'm also a high school teacher very aware of all the shit that is pouring through the sponsored social media posts peppering my girl students' algorithms and I am rebelling by allowing my age to see seen on my face – side note, my frown lines are hard won and can be weaponized against a class of unruly year 9s or 10s.'
