04-07-2025
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.
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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.'
