Collecting Interests: Capitalism, Dracula, and the Immortal
“To be interesting, be interested.”
— Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People
It seems we live in an age where there is every impulse to discard one’s interests and hobbies in favor of wealth, production, and internalized capitalistic behaviors. These behaviors keep us on the hamster wheel spinning as we run toward something ‘more’—only to end up exactly where we began. Why write, paint, or make music, for example, when you could make something of “more value”—money?
This is especially true for the working class, oppressed into a state of perpetual servility by a capitalist economy. Often, the low-middle class systemically purge personal interests and hobbies under the fictitious guise that someday, when they are finally ‘self-made’ in their success, they will overcome exhaustion and be spoiled themselves like the upper class.
But even the privileged, too, must relinquish their interests to maintain a status they see as precarious, and as they are yet to be limited in their exercise of power, there is always some additional spoil they seek. Everyone suffers, from servant to spoiled, from the want of more. No one escapes. Why spend time cultivating our hobbies and interests when we could instead direct all excess energy toward our work? Time is money, after all.
But it is precisely because time is as valuable as money—if not more so—that we must examine how to best utilize it. Through an analysis of Dale Carnegie’s quote and behaviors in Dracula, coupled with the desire to be immortalized, I propose that the ideal way to spend our time is to resist capitalist desires and invest in our interests.
American author Dale Carnegie (1888—1955) believed the best way to win people over is to be interested in them. Make them think that you are interesting, when really it is your expression of interest that they find interesting. Thus, we may regard Carnegie’s quote, “To be interesting, be interested [in someone else]” as synonymous with “[in something].” As such, cultivating our interests would make us more interesting; it would be as if he were saying, “To be interesting, be of interests.”
Being “of” interest suggests that our identities are created by our interests. Just as a child is born of the mother, so are we, too, ‘born’ of our interests. They—our hobbies and responsibilities—come to define our identities. My hobby may be in philosophy, for example, which I have adopted as an integral aspect of my identity, but I may also have a responsibility to maintain my identity as a student. My identity is born of these interests—my hobby and my responsibility—and I hope to be made interesting.
It seems our interests are somehow attached to our identities, as if we are able to “have” them. I may identify as a painter, for instance, and would therefore have an interest in painting. “Having” interests suggests a possession—a ‘collection’ of interests, if you may. We ‘have’ these various interests that develop in quality and quantity with time. Not only do we collect photographs, trinkets, souvenirs, clothes and so on, as if they are tokens of memories, but we collect hobbies and responsibilities—interests.
Regrettably, the act of collecting interests has strategically become another mechanism for capitalist exploitation. The offense is committed when ‘having’ interests becomes synonymous with ‘having’ material possessions. It is not the objects that make us interesting—not the photographs, trinkets, souvenirs, clothes, and so forth—but rather our character dispositions that prompted us to collect these items in the first place. Despite the capitalist drive to hoard ‘things,’ we need not collect material possessions in order to collect our interests. The material goods do not at all matter if they are devoid of personal interests.
The idea of ‘collecting interests’ is demonstrated in a most peculiar—most interesting—way in the novel Dracula. Mentally-ill patient Renfield would lay sugar on the windowsill of his cell to catch flies. He would catch spiders by feeding them these flies, and would then catch birds by feeding them the spiders. With great horror, administrator Dr. Seward saw him eat an insect—one of his ‘pets’—alive. When Renfield asked Dr. Seward for a kitten to eat birds and was denied, it is presumed that he desired it so that he could feast on the kitten himself.
Dr. Seward notes that it appeared as if Renfield had fantastically devoured the birds while they were still living. He would rarely eat the ‘lower,’ ‘less evolved’ creatures, and would repeat this fly-spider-bird catching scheme hoping to lure a ‘higher,’ ‘more evolved’ creature—like a cat—so that he could feast on it. Renfield became manic as his efforts to breed and consume his ‘pets’ were thwarted, as if his life depended on the ingestion of these life forms. The doctor classified Renfield as “… a zoöphagous (life-eating) maniac; what he desires is to absorb as many lives as he can…” (Stoker, page 61, Dover edition). Later, Renfield cut Dr. Seward’s wrist and began licking up his spilled blood, as if he could consume raw human life to supplement his own.
To Renfield, his life did—quite literally—depend on absorbing as many lives as possible. By consuming the lives of others, he believed he could multiply his own life and thus prolong it. It is as if other creatures’ lives would accumulate within himself, such that he would be ‘more alive’ after his feasts. His fixation on transferring blood from a living creature—be it animal or human—to himself is a direct parallel to the primal drives of his master, Dracula. Both Renfield and Dracula wished to ‘collect’ lives through the consumption of blood in order to achieve an eternal extension of their own.
Their obsession with collecting lives is in a way, albeit more violent, not too dissimilar from our wish to collect interests; we are selective over the items, memories, friends, companions, places, events, ideas, hopes, and dreams we integrate into our identities. Every interest we collect is a modicum of experience we come to identify with as we devote our lives to the sustaining of our multiple interests. If one had no interests—no hobbies or responsibilities—what purpose would there be for life? What would they spend their life doing if there were no reason to do anything at all? Even our jobs are responsibilities, and provide a direction to our lives. I am suggesting that because our interests encompass both responsibilities and hobbies, and because we inevitably come to identify with these interests, one could strive to view their job as they would their hobby.
Because we are directed toward the continuation of our interests —be they hobbies or responsibilities—our life takes on the purpose of dutifully executing and cultivating these interests. Whether I am a student or a painter, these are my identities and my life is composed of activities that prolong them, lest I am no longer a student or a painter and my identities as such are lost.
The entirety of our lives, then, are led with the aim of cultivating our interests so that we can continue refining them. The more developed our interests are, the more purpose there is to practice them in our lives, and the longer we may wish to live to provide a platform for these interests to flourish.
Perhaps we also collect interests so we can live on throughout time as interesting—transcended into the sort of ‘higher, immortal being’ Renfield and Dracula so hoped to become. How wayward they were, though, in believing that crude violence was on the path which would crown them with their chief desire.
Before us lies a path to extend our own lives, through the collection of interests. Collecting interests makes us interesting, and positions us to ignite interests in others, so that they, too, will nourish interests in others, and so forth. As we endeavor to collect interests in oneself so that a wave of interests and interesting people will follow, we enable peaceful immortalization. Life is not to be transferred—removed and annexed. Nay! Life is to be created, as we enliven ourselves and our society with passionate interests to devote our lives to, so we can all seek the immortal through the creation of sustained interests.
We collect our interests—items, memories, friends, companions, places, events, ideas, hopes, dreams… Our interests provide purpose for our lives, and the more committed we are to our interests, the more committed we are to our lives. We collect interests, so that we can collect life, so we can live as interesting people—forever!
Whether servant or spoiled, depart from the capitalism-spun hamster wheel. Free yourselves! The only want of more should be the want of interests, more in quality or quantity. Remember that the more invested we are in our interests, the more invested we are in the purpose of life.
Roxana Grunenwald
is a student at Yale University, in the field of philosophy and molecular biology. She enjoys analyzing pop culture, politics, media, and literature through a philosophical lens and learning from the theory derived. Topics of philosophical interest are epistemology and theory of mind, metaphysics and time, truth, and bioethics.