Are There Any “Good ”Hobbies?
The joy of being called a writer sometimes outweighs the joy of actually being one
People have various outlets for creativity. People also have different cycles on their creativity. Personally, I’ve only started casually writing post high school. Until then, I didn’t have a “marketable” hobby I could flaunt in my applications. “Writing” is just vague enough to sound cool, you could be anyone from a self-help maverick like Gary Vaynerchuk or super creative like Neil Gaiman. At face value, it’s really alluring to say that you’re a writer because you’ve written like 6 blog posts on an anonymous Wattpad account. In fact, the joy of being called a writer sometimes outweighs the joy of actually being one.
Why do I bring this up?
At the risk of sounding like a self-help guru, there’s this overwhelming pressure to have a “thing”, a side-hustle. The world has shifted from only praising those who follow their passion 100% all the time. Now, the ones who have a side hustle, who get paid for a hobby but also have a stable 9-to-5 are the real superstars.
You might have the most menial job like working in sales at some tech company but if you have an art account on Instagram you suddenly appear a lot more layered.
Sometimes, the praise is warranted. If anyone can make money doing something they love, it’s worthy of praise. However, there comes this overwhelming pressure on every other 20 something to suddenly hunt around their repertoire and proclaim to the world, “See! I do this, I’m an interesting person!”.
Monetize your hobby
People start blogs, YouTube channels all sorts of outlets to essentially “monetize” their hobby. You might read an article that tells you the algorithm loves consistency and you would force yourself to do your hobby all days during the week, even when you might not even want to.
I definitely felt like this, as I started writing more. I felt this urge to “monetize” my hobby. Start a blog, start a newsletter, sell your words. It felt like a dream I had somehow imbibed because it seemed meaningless to do something for the sake of doing something. People had to see my hobby, and they had to see it consistently all the time. Even today, I always try to calculate the ROI for trying to pick up a new creative activity. I can’t do something for the sole sake of doing it.
As I write this, I do struggle with figuring out how this could even be feasibly possible. We’re obsessed about results as a species, everything has to be quick and seamless. Why would I pick up a guitar if not to play a couple of songs, learn a couple of chords and post them online to just repeat the process?
I don’t really have a coherent answer. But as for writing, I’ve come to realize I’m only doing this for myself. That’s why I started and that’s why I keep on writing, frequently or infrequently. Sometimes, I do feel this pressure to write but I would like to take my own time doing things I like because why else am I doing them, if not for me?
Find a “good” hobby
During the pandemic, it become chic to try and discover a new hobby. It wasn’t enough to scroll on Instagram for 2 hours daily, you had to start posting/creating content because you know the inner workings of what works and doesn’t. It wasn’t enough to just watch films, you had to start a YouTube channel critiquing all the films you like. You get the gist. You couldn’t just do something to kill time, something meaningful had to come out of it.
A hobby can be one of two things : something you do for yourself to ease tension and stress and/or something you do to get better at, to diversify your skills. These don’t need to be exclusive, sometimes they overlap and that’s fine. On this hobby “spectrum”, on different days I want to be a marketable writer who has an online presence. On others, I want to write because I have something to say.
Essentially, I just want to do what I want, when I want with my free time. This is definitely a mental struggle and if I wasn’t hyper aware of the pressure of what society wants me to do, I would do these things unabashedly. It’s just a little harder to ignore the signs when “wasting” your time is the biggest crime you can commit.
