Emily Dickinson

SocietyMay 15, 2025

Help Me Hera: Am I wasting my potential?

Contributing writer
Emily Dickinson

All my friends are writing books and leading organisations. Meanwhile I’m just pottering around.

Want Hera’s help? Email your problem to helpme@thespinoff.co.nz

Hi Hera,

I am in the age group where friends are writing books or leading organisations, whereas I have given up on all that. I’ve taken a career sidestep and now have little stress and certainly no profile – the career equivalent of moving to the country. Coming from a family of creatives, I suppose it was always expected that I would do something more remarkable. But the truth is, I can’t be bothered. Good writing is very hard work, and being a boss involves big hours. Not interested.

It’s not that I’ve given up on life. I listen to podcasts, read, cook, walk, swim in the sea, wonder if there was ever life on Venus… you know. I suppose I am just living a small life and I had always thought I’d live a big one. Is it OK to just potter around like this, or am I wasting my life and not living up to my potential? 

Best, Curious

Dear Curious,

HELL YES, squander that potential. 

This is the kind of letter I aspire to write. If you’re lucky enough to be born without the specific mental disease that gives you a burning desire to write 30 identical crime novels (guilty) or invent radium for fun, then the wisest and most righteous thing to do is enjoy your life to the max, as if it were a rare piece of immersive performance art that lasts exactly as long as a human life.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think there’s anything small about the life you describe. A big life and a public life are two entirely separate things. It doesn’t take a Harvard-trained psychologist to see that there are plenty of vocationally prestigious people who live spiritually narrow and psychologically stunted lives, no matter how impressive their respective LinkedIn pages are. 

Besides. When it comes to local prestige, the stakes are hysterically low. As far as I can tell, there’s basically no material difference in the amount of fame and public adulation you can achieve as someone who occasionally appears on NZ television, and a truck driver who makes a habit of honking his horn at passing school children. Emily Dickinson got it right when she wrote “How dreary – to be – Somebody! How public – like a Frog – To tell your name – the livelong June – To an admiring Bog.” 

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Lyric Waiwiri-Smith
— Politics reporter

Obviously, comparing your situation to Emily Dickinson, perhaps the most famous and esteemed poet in Western history, is a little cooked. But lucky for Emily, she could afford to languish in obscurity during her own lifetime. If you’re in a financial position to throw your hands up, by all means, throw them up. 

Maybe the deeper existential question here is what does it mean to live without feeling as if you have a specific calling or vocation. This is a question that stresses almost everyone out, because there’s a lot of pressure to “follow your dreams” and not a lot of advice on how to know which dream to follow. It’s easy to feel like there’s something wrong with you when you meet someone who has been practising advanced neurosurgery on their teddy since age five. But there’s no moral superiority in being this type of person. Sure, we need the neurotics and the obsessives, to perfect the atomic clock, or write Moby Dick. But there are many notorious disadvantages to having this type of personality, and if you don’t believe me, read literally any biography of a historically notable figure. 

Admittedly, I’m always telling young people to follow their dreams, because sometimes people need a little friendly bullying. Your 20s are a great age for forcing yourself out of your comfort zone, and it’s healthy to intentionally cultivate a little naked ambition, if only as an antidote against future regret. 

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    But you’re not a teen with a dream. You’ve already accomplished a lot, and have arrived at a place where you know what’s important to you, and can finally get down to the serious and important business of enjoying your damn life. 

    That doesn’t mean you have to give up your Hollywood Star just yet. You might get a second wind one day and decide to write that tell-all memoir. But we’re all nobodies from the perspective of eternity. History is stacked to the tits with people who didn’t beget statues, but who enriched the world around them. In the words of George Eliot:

    “for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”

    Keep going!
    three buses with bike racks and a orange and yellow zany border around it
    Metro’s classic teal buses and bike racks now have an extra strip of LED lights (Image: Environment Canterbury/supplied)

    SocietyMay 15, 2025

    Bike racks are back on buses – but why did it take so long?

    Contributing writer
    three buses with bike racks and a orange and yellow zany border around it
    Metro’s classic teal buses and bike racks now have an extra strip of LED lights (Image: Environment Canterbury/supplied)

    Last year, bike racks on buses were suddenly put out of action due to a newly discovered compliance issue. Was it a ‘knee-jerk reaction’ rooted in overregulation, and why did it take months to resolve? Shanti Mathias reports.

    Putting bikes on the bus is a good way to encourage people to ride: it means that if it starts raining, or if you have a mechanical issue and can’t fix it where you are, it’s easier to get back home. Dozens of councils in New Zealand (but not Auckland) have had bike racks available on some or all buses in recent years, encouraging active transport. 

    “Nelson is a biking mecca – which is partially because of our gorgeous climate, but also because of the council investing in bike lanes,” says Nick Smith, the city’s mayor. When a technical issue with the commonly used front-of-the-bus bike racks was found last year, he says it had an immediate impact on both bike and bus use in Nelson. “I was very frustrated when NZTA made the ruling that bike racks didn’t comply with some complex regulation.”

    He even took the time to show Chris Bishop the out-of-commission bike racks when the then-new minister for transport visited Nelson in February. “I raised it with the minister and I was very grateful that Chris Bishop was interested in the issue and was able to help with our application for an exemption,” says Smith, who was a National MP for more than 30 years.  Nelson applied for an exemption to the bike rack rule and was granted it, meaning its bike racks have been back in operation since February 17. 

    a bus on a sunny day, two men in business casual with blue shirts and blazers stand next to the bus wearing helments and looking at a bike mounted on a rack at the front
    Nick Smith shows Chris Bishop the bike rack system on a Nelson eBus (Image: Nelson City Council)

    The issue with the bike racks was that they caused the headlights of the buses to be partially concealed. In October last year, NZTA realised this meant the vehicles were no longer compliant with the road code – even though the bike racks had not been implicated in any accident. It issued an alert which resulted in the use of the bike racks being banned across the country. “There were no instances of the bike racks causing trouble even though we’ve had them in Christchurch for at least 12 years,” says Deon Swiggs, the deputy chair of Environment Canterbury. “As a politician, it makes me wonder – was a ban the best option while we were working for a solution?” 

    On April 14, NZTA issued an exemption for daytime use of the bike racks, which will last until February 6, 2026. “This gives operators time to check their fleet for compliance, make lighting performance improvements, and apply for individual exemptions that would allow 24/7 use of bike racks,” said Chris Bishop, the minister for transport, said in a statement to The Spinoff that this would give operators time to improve lighting and check their vehicles complied with the exemption. 

    In Christchurch, Dunedin and Queenstown, daytime use of bike racks resumed once this exemption was created. Once Dunedin and Queenstown’s buses were upgraded with extra lighting, night-time bike rack use was allowed from May 1. In Christchurch, the night-time restrictions ended on May 12. 

    a teal metro bus with a bike rack that says 'out of order on it"
    In Christchurch in December, a bike rack with an ‘out of order’ notice attached. (Image: Shanti Mathias)

    In Wellington, bike racks on buses are still out of action. “While some other public transport authorities have employed NZTA’s exemption which allows bike racks on buses to be used during daylight hours, Metlink decided that all bike racks on buses would remain disabled until all 199 buses requiring modification were compliant,” said Hamish Burns,  Metlink’s senior manager for assets and infrastructure. 

    Metlink intends for the racks to be back to full operation by July 1, 2025. Burns said the delay is to ensure consistency; the time will be used to upgrade all buses to comply with the regulation. This means passengers won’t have to guess whether a bus has a usable rack or not and drivers won’t have to determine whether it’s day or night. “We understand this period of no bike racks has been frustrating for our passengers with bikes, but we wanted to make sure that when they are enabled again, they are able to function at all times.”

    In the regions that have secured exemptions, the bus modifications required were relatively simple. “The extra lighting is essentially a LED strip on the front of the bike rack,” Swiggs says. He doesn’t have a clear idea of what the costs of reinstating the bike racks were – but between NZTA, different councils and bus operators, he says that “many, many staff hours were involved”. There was a cost for the extra lights, too, which had to be sourced, safely installed and individually checked on each vehicle. “I see this as an issue of overregulation,” Swiggs says. “[The ban] was a knee-jerk reaction, not a pragmatic approach – given that there hadn’t been any issues, did we have to ban the bike racks during the day?” 

    There’s a social cost to having the bike racks out of action for months, Swiggs points out. “It’s had a huge impact for people in Lyttelton – they couldn’t get through the tunnel [with a bike] at all.” The alternative for cycling from Lyttelton requires biking over Evans Pass and through Sumner, a large hill and a significant detour. 

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      Swiggs has also seen school students who bike to a bus stop and then take public transport to school affected by the ban. “It’s really impacted that last-mile transport,” he says. While there’s no hard data showing how bike and bus use was affected in the period of the ban, he worries that some people have gotten back into the habit of driving. “Biking is all about changing behaviour, and if you go back to driving as the most convenient option, it’s hard to change that behaviour back.” 

      Smith says he received a huge volume of positive feedback once the bike racks were back in action. “The public really wanted us to know how much they use these things, it made a huge difference to the people who cycle around.”

      The saga of the bike racks – a seemingly minor issue with a complicated fix – is a reminder of why effective, multimodal transport is important, Swiggs says. “As a council, we have to be agile when issues come up – so that people have the choice to get around how they want.”

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