I can’t speak for everyone, but I can’t remember when I stopped having hobbies and replaced that time with, well, nothing.
Gone were the days of skateboarding, photography, making music and trying new things.
At some point I stopped doing things for enjoyment, everything I did had to have a meaning and purpose around it. I couldn’t just sit and code for fun, it had to have a commercial purpose. My photography wasn’t to sit and enjoy or create an album to look back in the future, I felt it needed to be perfect for my portfolio or instagram. My music wasn’t made for the joy, it was compared to professionals and torn apart before it even had a chance to get out into the world.
My perception of the world around me felt like everything I did needed to be perfect, to serve a commercial or greater purpose, to forward my career or social standing.
I’m sure we all struggle with comparison, digital overload and overstimulation by the endless doom and gloom news cycle. Our devices are always within reach, our ability to tap into someone else’s day and escape our reality takes seconds. Reaching for our devices and scrolling is a new habit we don’t know what to do about.
And don’t get me wrong, there is always a time and a place for these things, hell, i’m a developer, my computer and technology pays my bills.
But sometimes, the scrolling, endless comparison and ease which people have access to you, start to take over.
So, you need a hobby?
Hobbies are a lifeline, an escape, enjoyment. Doing something you don’t do for work. Replacing scrolling with creating something with your hands or getting outside.
We look to digital detoxes and deleting apps but for a lot of us, this doesn’t work. We have busy brains, and stimulation can ease anxiety, help us cope or just simply switch off. Cold turkey doesn’t work for everyone and more often than not we replace on addiction or vice with another. We remove the apps from our phones but sit and watch endless Youtube videos on our computers. We ditch TikTok but replace it with Pinterest boards in the guise of researching some project we’ll never start.
That’s where hobbies come in, we can switch off but continue to stimulate our brains, create something new and replace the addictions with skills and tangible results. I recently started teaching myself to hand sew, mainly to fix things i’d broken, but that quickly turned into making new things and designing my own bags. Not for any other purpose other than because I enjoy it.
Hobbies can help us get the play back. Doing things because they’re fun, we enjoy them, not to show off to others or turn them into a side hustle. At some point we lost the way, we ended up doing the 9 - 5, going out drinking to cope and then doom scrolling the hangover away. Don’t get me wrong, we all need that release sometimes but we need to regain sight of the fact that life doesn’t have to be work and surviving.
I think hobbies are surefire way to find fun again. Everyone I know that does pottery on the weekend, games on their evenings, goes off roading or backcountry camping any chance they get, have a great outlook on life and love what they do.
You ever watch your friends face light up when they show you something they’ve made? That’s the shit we all need.
Obviously, this is all subjective, but think back to when you were a kid and did so many different things, spending hours trying to beat that final boss, building cities with Lego or crafting worlds on paper. We did these things because we could and we grew up thinking work was the most important thing to do.
Work pays the bills, but hobbies feed the soul.
It’s easy to loose track of the important things and get swamped by the endless bits and bytes delivering news and content to us. This world isn’t built for us, we adapt to it. But the things that are in our control are what we do and what we enjoy doing.
So go out and find a hobby, the next time you open threads or instagram, take a beat and think about what else you could do for the next hour. Maybe dust off your paints and create something, pick up your tennis racket, just find something you can do for you. No one else. Just you.