Who has time for their hobbies anymore?

What is a hobby?

A Hobby is:

... a regular activity that is done for enjoyment, typically 
during one's leisure time. Hobbies include collecting themed 
items and objects, engaging in creative and artistic pursuits, 
playing sports, or pursuing other amusements or avocations.

In short, the pursuit of any activity that you enjoy, a fun thing to do with your time.

Some may also refer to their addictions and compulsions as their “hobby”. The word “hobby” is usually used for activities that are not self-destructive. Self-Destructive “hobbies” include taking in toxic substances, playing league of legends, playing gacha games (I am playing 4), or any compulsive attachment to an activity that the person cannot control. ¹

Following that train of thought, I don’t present my afflictions from the gacha lifestyle as my hobby. I present it as a problem that others can relate to, I think that’s the main appeal of continuing to play gacha games. We all identify it as a problem to bond over. How am I going to get this and this character, the nerfs, the buffs, the seasonal nonsense, losing 50/50, and everything in between.

Why do we need hobbies?

Here’s my interpretation of a Hobby:

Hobbies are one of the few ways to enjoy being alive.

Note that I didn’t say it’s the “reason” or meaning of living life. Everyone has their own purpose or meaning they’ve found in their own lives. If you want to stick around just to have a good time, that is valid in and of itself as well.

A fulfilling life is often measured by a balance of personal freedom and having a higher purpose.

Most people would agree that a good life looks like:

1. Having a lot of free time to pursue hobbies.
2. Being able to do meaningful and substantial work.
3. Being able to fulfill any societal obligations a person has towards their community and dependents.

Anyone who just works every minute of the day is usually considered someone with “no life”, no matter how successful someone is, we implicitly believe that to live a good life is to do fun things besides working all the damn time.

Hobbies usually don’t involve much meaning or seriousness, most hobbies are pursued with the sole intent of extracting as much joy as possible. Some may find meaning or purpose in their hobbies that extend beyond themselves, for self expression or to satisfy their curiosity. Regardless of the intent, a hobby is usually a trivial, casual activity that does not demand too much from people ².

Hobbies are an adult’s version of “playing”. Playing for stakes, playing for the sake of it, playing because we want to leave behind a legacy, or even playing to find and push past our own limits.

We never really grew up, we just decided to rename everything that we ever thought was childish.

Do you have any hobbies?

Social Media

No, I don’t mean sitting around and staring at boxes of light and swiping away.

Social media can be fun and engaging in the short term, but it tends to kill any possible aspirations and original thought once you get sucked into an inevitable spiral of doomscrolling.

Creating content can a hobby, but passively consuming whatever shows up in the front page of your feed cannot be considered anything but a pleasant way to stop curating the content you want to engage with, and let companies decide what you should see.

Are you scrolling because its your “hobby” or is this just a compulsive habit? What are you getting out of doomscrolling? Are you sure you’re even truly enjoying yourself?

To have a hobby is to exercise your own agency to choose to spend your time on something you enjoy. We shouldn’t confuse that with spending time on media we’ve never really chosen for ourselves.

Bad Habits

A bad habit is not a hobby. Dependent smoking and addictions are not a hobby, gaming 20 hours a day because you want to escape into the game is no longer a hobby. Doxxing, flaming or gatekeeping is not a hobby, that’s just being a silly goose online.

Obligatory Tasks

Obligatory tasks is just another way we all work in our spare time, raising kids isn’t a hobby, raising a pet isn’t a hobby (but rather an obligation towards a life you’ve adopted), but raising a tamogochi is a hobby. You can enjoy raising sentient things (we’re not too sure about plants), but we should never treat it like a casual activity.

Technically every activity we do is a form of work. Feeding yourself is work, painting something is work. But you can choose not to paint for a year, you can’t choose not to eat for a week. That’s why we call painting a hobby, and cooking for yourself expensive in this economy.

Likewise, you can genuinely enjoy the more tedious things in our lives, and call them your hobbies, like chores, or handyman work or cooking. But people should feel the weight behind the activities they deem as hobbies. If you treat these chores you call hobbies carelessly, you could cause severe harm to yourself and the people around you. Call it a hobby if you must, but be sure to treat the task at hand with the necessary attention and respect, especially if real people are involved besides you.

Is this just necessary work that you’ve romanticized? Are these really hobbies? Or are these “hobbies” just work with real risks and consequences you enjoy doing, because it lets you wind down while feeling productive? I hope you’re able to make a clear distinction between the two.

Self Improvement

I imagine that there is a group of people fighting for a better life, that may like to use the suffix “maxxing”, argue that self improvement can be a sort of hobby. You can enjoy the process of becoming a better person, but if the intent and motivation behind your self improvement is because of desperation and the fear of being left behind, that’s probably not a hobby you are having fun with.

That’s you struggling to improve your life, that’s you dealing with your own feelings of inadequacy (regardless of its validity), and that’s a healthy and adaptive coping mechanism.

To struggle is to grow, but we shouldn’t mistake growth and self improvement as a hobby if you’re just trying to live a better life, instead of simply enjoying it. You can learn about astronomy and flower arranging as a fun hobby, but pursuing anything with real stakes and an impact on your life is just work we frame as a hobby, just because we don’t receive a salary.

To work is to achieve meaning and purpose in your life, to spend time on your hobbies is to explore yourself and the world purely for the sake of having fun.

Are you working in the day, grinding in the nights and weekends to better yourself, and resting and spending all your free time on social media and social meetups in a constant loop?

According to my narrow and self-opinionated definition of a hobby, do you actually have any hobbies that you do purely for fun?

How much free time do you have to spend on hobbies?

The formula

To figure this out is quite simple:

Free Time = Your lifespan - Staying Alive - Work/Chores/Obligations 
Hobby Time = Free Time - Social Life - Rest/Recovery - Random Nonsense

Social life and commitments

Having friends, family, or a community (online or offline), is usually a large time sink. If you’re an adult, you’re more likely to have a smaller circle of friends as working life is not kind to most of us.

Having some kind of social life can be arguably important for “Staying Alive”, since it’s somewhat important for one’s mental health to have some sense of community. You are more likely to be miserable if you feel isolated, but being social is so optional to most people that we tend to completely neglect it and ruin our mental wellbeing in the process.

Having a hobby may help in connecting with other people. Social hobbies certainly exist, if the aim is to maximize socialization, while having fun, a social hobby is a good way to do so.

What time do we have left?

If you take out the time you spend socializing, staying alive, working and sleeping, what do we have left?

Hobby Time = Free Time Left - Rest/Recovery - Random Nonsense

Sleeping is not always part of rest and recovery

Note that sleeping is part of “Staying Alive”, sleeping is NOT rest and recovery. Sometimes people genuinely need to turn off their brain and watch Family Guy compilation #4 after a 16 hour shift, I’m not sure if this is a good way of resting the mind, but people naturally gravitate towards the lowest effort activity they can do besides sleeping to “recover”, even if its not always effective. This usually becomes scrolling social media or watching the same show for the 27th time.

This has some overlap with Random Nonsense later on, but we can assume that people sometimes genuinely need to zone out for a bit to recover mentally and physically.

The trap of useless busywork (Random Nonsense)

I suspect that after a long day of being forced to do a job where we have no say over our time, we feel the urge to fight back by trying to do something for ourselves at the end of the day. But can’t bring ourselves to submit to sleep, or to do any activity that requires any amount of real cognitive friction since we’re already so tired.

People still want to feel like they are doing something instead of absolutely nothing in their spare time, research shows that:

...people who have something to do, even something pointless, 
are happier than people who sit idly.

and that:

...people who are busy are happier than people who are idle. 
Curiously, this last effect is true even if people are forced to be busy.

So people fall for traps like wasting their time on things that they don’t enjoy that much, even if it doesn’t matter to them at all.

1. There is some sort of “idleness penalty”, where humans feel mentally distressed when doing absolutely nothing. (excluding sleep)
2. People naturally avoid useless effort to conserve energy, but even a flimsy excuse to do a task (E.g. Watch TV/Social Media/Getting Ragebaited) triggers action and lifts mood. (Source)
3. The human brain still rewards engagement with tasks and completion of any activity due to our ancestral roots, even if its objectively a waste of time.
4. Your time and attention is a limited resource that every company in the world is trying to grab, every single social media and entertainment platform that has your attention can advertise to you on another company’s behalf. Don’t fall for these traps, because your brain still rewards you for passive engagement even while you are aware that you are meaninglessly scrolling.
5. This is another example of local optimality over global optimality, to value short term rewards over long term fulfillment.

Where all your time is going instead of your hobbies

1. Your main gig: You probably work a day job for 7 to 12 hours, or study if you are student, most of your time goes to this and commute.
2. Your sleep: You probably sleep 6 to 8 hours a day, this is non-negotiable.
3. Your “rest”: You probably spend the rest of your time on social media or watching videos/entertainment, what we playfully call resting and recovering from the mental horrors of everything that happened in the day.

“Rest and Recovery” has a lot of overlap with “Random Nonsense”, this is because people usually do not genuinely rest. People simply cannot sit around and do nothing, they “recharge” by doing, quite frankly, random nonsense to take their minds off everything else.

You’d much rather aimlessly scroll tiktok³ after a long day and call it “Rest and Recovery” instead of categorizing it under “Random Nonsense”.

People will do anything except meditating for a bit, reflect on the day, maybe stretch a little, or even just go to bed early to rest properly. Everything I just described is another form of doing literally nothing but unpacking your mental or physical fatigue that happened in the day (you definitely need to stretch). This is something your human mind simply does not want to tolerate, because of the high cognitive and introspective effort involved.

Regardless of whether we are actually resting properly, we’re all looking for a distraction, that’s what a hobby is for. Passively consuming content is an easy distraction, a real hobby takes some level of effort, that we simply don’t want to expend, a distraction that is more difficult to obtain and commit to.

Let’s just be honest with ourselves, most people “recover” by just passively consuming content (Movies/Shows/Social Media Feeds⁴). We could all gain some mental headspace and clarity from our hobbies instead, and probably feel a lot better. I feel a lot better writing this blog instead of watching a 3 hour documentary about why I need learn about AI so I don’t get replaced in 3 years (conveniently sponsored by AI companies).

This section is not meant to chide you about watching shows or scrolling social media, or just being a coach potato in general, but to remind you that these things are probably taking up time that you could be using for a real hobby. If you really need to zone out and chill, there’s still nothing wrong with a good show.

It’s still ok to do Random Nonsense!

Lots of things have come from people doing absolute nonsense, for example:

1. Most early day scientific inquiry has come from people doing random nonsense.
2. After a random bar joke, picking up rocks at the beach to sell as pet rocks made the founder a millionaire.
3. College kids were throwing around cake tins and lids (sold by a family bakery called frisbee), the name stuck and that’s how we get the game called “frisbee” today.
4. Some scientific discoveries and inventions have come about due to happy accidents when people were doing random nonsense!
5. Whatever this is, or this, or this, or this, or this, or this, or this, or this, or even this.
6. Some startups or content creators started out because the creator was doing something random, which led to some truly life changing outcomes.

It’s hard to categorize some of these things under a neat and tidy title, to call it a hobby. What do you call spending half a day installing 4 different OS (Windows, Ubuntu, Kali Linux, AlmaLinux) in a 10 year old laptop and messing with the bootloader and GRUB menu so you can dynamically boot into any of those four OS at startup?

I can’t call that a hobby because I’m literally just messing around, it’s simply Random Nonsense™.

Everyone loves to scroll sometimes, and that’s genuinely how some of us keep up with our friends, the news, or any cool updates. I’ve started multi year long voluntary stints in different community projects simply because something caught my eye once. Social media can be genuinely “productive” if you choose to curate your feed in a certain direction, and have enough willpower to control your usage.

But I tend to find that Random Nonsense™ that are really random sidequests (that may balloon into crazy adventures) are much more fulfilling than scrolling for an entire day. These are one of the few ways you can truly demonstrate free will.

If all my time is going to my job, can your hobby be your job?

Hopefully, if you’ve read this far, you should also see the importance of enjoying hobbies and life in general. Most of us work to make a living or fulfill some purpose, but only truly live life to its fullest when engaging with our hobbies.

It’s important to understand that, any hobby or interest you turn into your job will drastically change how you interact with it.

Previously the only thing you had to account for was your own enjoyment, but when your livelihood, real stakes and the interests of other parties come into play, things can get stressful and unenjoyable, very quickly.

You may eventually find yourself enjoying your hobby less, that it just feels like normal work again, when you cannot engage with the activity on your own terms.

Most employed art professionals are forced to admit that the art they create for corporations and the art they want to create for themselves are very different, some eventually cannot spend time creating the things they truly want to, simply because they’ve been so burnt out from creating things at their jobs that they don’t really care for on a personal level.

You might think to yourself, “Nah, I can go out and do my own thing and make it my business, I wouldn’t answer to anyone.”

Don’t be silly, instead of just answering to your boss, you now answer to every single client and customer, every single stakeholder and shareholder in your business, your very own stability and livelihood. When your own skin is in the game, can you truly afford to do “what you want”, when you want it?

Yes, you would have more freedom to lead your business however you please, but you will lose the freedom to fully engage with your hobby completely on your own terms. If you are wealthy and became an entrepreneur, and have the option to not be truly dependent on your business or income, your job is already practically your hobby, so you can easily turn your hobby into your job since your livelihood is not at real risk. Most of us do not have that luxury.

You might think, “Oh I love games, I should just play games for a living, like a streamer or a game tester.”

1. It’s fun to play through a game once or twice, will it be fun if you need to jump in a corner 1000 times for 9 hours a day and come home to play games again as a game tester?
2. If you are a streamer you need a streaming schedule and engage your audience while doing something live. Can you really tolerate streaming for years to 10 or 20 people until you suddenly make it “big”? 72% of streamers don’t make money off twitch, 15% make at most 25 dollars monthly. That leaves 13% left who make more than 25 dollars. Can you really make this your main source of income? Do you have the talent for it?
3. According to the stats here, only the top 10,000 streamers ⁵ has ever made anything close to even to maybe a year of salary after years or decades of streaming. There are nearly 7 million streamers on twitch right now. The chance of you being able to make streaming your full time job or even as substantial supplementary income is roughly 0.14%. A startup has a better chance than that.

The point being, that a separation between one’s hobby and money maker is usually a good thing. Not everyone is talented, risk tolerant or simply invested enough in their hobby to make it their job, and that’s completely ok. You can be bad at your hobby, but not at your job ⁶. We’re all just trying to have fun, it’s not always worth it to let real life get in the way.

A word of advice for those who still think they have it in them to make their hobby their job, don’t chase the money first. Put in the effort over time even if you never see something come out of it, embrace delayed gratification. Keep your day job for now, you don’t need to pile stress on making your hobby your job when you don’t have the skills for it yet. Remember to enjoy the hobby, money is only the byproduct of this happy accident that you’re trying to manufacture. Even if you fail to make your hobby your money maker, you’re going to be a hell of a lot better at your hobby.

So how do we make time for hobbies?

Time is a finite resource, most of it goes to either your job, sleep, your social life, and the mundanities of staying alive.

1. Hobbies are a way to spend your free time, if you really need to “lock in” and grind for some time, it should be always be ok to neglect your hobbies for an extended period of time. The point is to have something to fall back on and identify yourself with when you do have the time to spare.
2. Do not neglect sleep to chase your hobbies. It really will impact you in the long run.
3. You can consider side hustles or jobs that involve your hobby, but you need to be ready to reflect on yourself if you really can monetize your hobbies, while also preserving any love you once had for your hobbies and passions. It’s not always a good tradeoff depending on what kind of person you are.
4. I’ve stated that the most of your truly free time is actually spent on Random Nonsense™, for most people, that’s just passively consuming content. Just reclaim this time for yourself, but you don’t have to cut this out of your life entirely. All things in moderation.

You probably have some time for hobbies, you just need to stop doing so much other Random Nonsense™.

My puritan stance towards Hobbies

Throughout this article, I’ve repeatedly stated that a hobby shouldn’t involve ugly real world concepts like material gains, or that hobbies shouldn’t be coping mechanisms for chores or narcissistic traits, or a substitute for a desperate desire to be better. You probably don’t care about these strict definitions I’ve been trying to distance the word “hobby” from.

Everyone has limited time, and if they can pretend that their coping mechanism or hustling and “locking in” is their “hobby”, if they can act as if they genuinely enjoy the activity on its own without any kind of prize at the end, more power to them.

But to me that just feels like work you’ve justified to yourself as “fun”. Are you having fun? Or are you slowly burning out because you spend your time on nothing else except activities for your own material gain and success? Would you still do the same “Hobbies” once you’ve retired? Because I know I sure as hell will.

If you didn’t get anything out of doing your “hobby” besides the enjoyment of the process itself, would you still do it?

If not, that’s not a hobby, that’s just another job you convinced yourself that you like doing. Another “hobby” you can justify to yourself as being both productive and a good example that you are enjoying a “good life” even when you don’t have the time to spend on things you truly enjoy for the sake of it.

Are you really happy? Is any of your time truly your own instead of optimized towards some goal in the future? Why lie to yourself? If you’re spending all your time grinding, just call it what it is and admit that you don’t have time to be truly happy because of it, you’ll thank yourself later instead of having an midlife identity crisis.

Be honest about what you actually like and admit that you don’t have any real hobbies if you truly have none, that’s the first step to reclaiming the rest of the time you have left in this world.

TLDR

Find a hobby. A real hobby.

Stop passively consuming content and go do/make/explore something for real, without thinking about material gain or loss all the time.

You’ll be a happier, more empathetic, and well rounded person.

Hi, I'm Brian Soh | NAIRBS

I'm a computer engineer who is always happy to learn something new. I have experience with Computer Networking, Microcontrollers, AR and Desktop/Mobile/Web Applications.
Feel free to leave a comment below!

Contact me:

sohhanyu@gmail.com | GitHub | LinkedIn