I am thrilled when I try a new hobby. I’m sure part of that is the hit of getting to buy a few new things, but I also appreciate the initial challenge and the excitement of any initial progress. Yet I often drop hobbies if I feel I can’t devote enough time to become “good” at whatever skills it involves. This post is a message to myself that sometimes a hobby should just be a hobby.
This tendency manifests itself in a few ways. Frequently it results in dropping a hobby completely because I don’t feel I have the time to learn and enjoy it to an acceptable degree. That’s a fuzzy line, but if I find myself struggling unproductively without some driving force to work my way through those moments, I’ll decide to spend my time elsewhere.
Oppositely, the desire to get better becomes part of the hobby itself. I find myself enjoying some aspect of it to such a high degree that I want to continue to improve so I have more excuses to spend time doing it. This happened quickly with disc golf, and has ebbed and flowed with writing.
In the middle are those hobbies where I managed to obtain enough foundational skills that I enjoy them, but don’t actively attempt to drastically improve. Piano and guitar fall into that, as does podcasting and audio work.
I want to be in a healthy spot with my hobbies, where I’m only concerning myself insofar as I’m taking it seriously, and acknowledging that not every hobby has to be serious. If taking it seriously is enjoyable, then that’s great. But if I enjoy most of it, but worrying over my abilities detracts from the experience, I want to work on getting to a place where I can simply pursue the hobby devoid of any frustration or shame over not attaining a strong skill.
In a way, this has been my relationship with math over time. I majored in math in college, and spent so much time learning new ideas, solving problems, turning myself into the best math student that I could be. Now five(!) years later, I only give thought to school math while writing curriculum; any advanced math is mostly gone from my head. It’s not that I’ve lost a fascination with many of the topics—I still read various online communities and publications meant for an “advanced popularization” of the topic, so to speak—but I’ve made a conscious decision to put it to the side and let other interests that I couldn’t pay attention to in college take center stage.
I don’t know where I’m going with this post, or how I’ll edit it. But I think it’s important to introspect about what we enjoy, and why we enjoy them. This gives a clearer view into what turns us off from the activities we once enjoyed but now find ourselves avoiding.