Last week I found myself standing barefoot on the hardwood floor of the fourth story of a brick building overlooking a small city, nervous and excited. New smiling people were warmly introducing themselves to me. I didn’t have the right clothes, the knowledge, anything. I just wanted to feel that feeling I’ve been chasing since my first martial arts class at 12.
I was there to try an adult traditional karate class, something I dearly loved and have not done outside a home practice in over a decade.
I’d been talking about with another farming friend for a year, both of us needing to do something that got us off the farms we wake, work, and spend all our time at. Both of us felt we were missing out on socializing and a third place (or in our case, second, since work and home were the same address). Finally, I was attempting to step outside my comfort zone and into a dojo…
I had to convince myself to do it. Had to tell myself it was a free class, that no one was going to demand I sign a contract or write a check. I was there to simply audit and participate the best ways I could.
I tried. Turns out a lifetime of Tae Kwon Do does nothing to prepare you for Okinawan stances and blocks. My 2015 black belt wasn’t useless, far from it, but it wasn’t the fast pass I was hoping for.
It was all new and exciting. To be vulnerably bad, to be hungry to know more, to have little goals of learning skills, history, exercises—to be a part of something that wasn’t about making money or counting grams of protein; gods bless.
I drove home that night under the waxing moon and a sky full of stars feeling the happiest I felt in years.
I don’t know if I’ll join the class, or can even afford it. What matters is I spent hours getting back into something I loved, truly loved, and felt like myself again.
Happiness, it does wonders for the spirit. Who knew?!
As someone who has made their passions the center of her life, I find the subject of hobbies a sore one. Not the practice, the perception.
I think they are the most important part of our personality, character, and growth and yet many people tend to keep them close to the vest. As if learning you are taking saxophone lessons twice a week is a secret I find out 6 months into sitting across from you at work.
I find myself asking, “Carl, why didn’t you lead with wanting to learn the saxophone!? I would have invited you to trivia night 5 months ago!?” And the response is always, “It’s just a hobby. I’m not even good at it.”
This is why I hate the word hobby. There’s a subtle condescension every time I hear it. Even the sincerest conversations about peoples’ passions are tinged with amateur preciousness, as if caring about something that doesn’t help you lose weight or make money can’t be taken seriously. Or even if it is, it better come second to work.
I understand the need for money more than most. It’s been the most stressful and rare necessity in my adult life. But I have never let money get in the way of the activities that make my life worth living.
I think avoiding hobbies is bullshit. I think it is dangerous to your health, relationships, larger community and soul. I think neglecting them is a recipe for a miserable life.
What you love to do should be in the top tiers of import. It’s what makes life worth living, yet we are taught it has to be something done after the dishes are dry and bills are paid, never something we do to encourage us to keep living a life of dishes and bills.
If you put your passion to the forefront of your personality it’s called eccentric, childish, or weird. I remember office culture and hearing nicknames like “Oh, here comes “Pilates Kim” or “British-Bake Off Steve” As if the things that truly makes a person excited are cringe-inducing compared to what gets your bag.
Getting your bag is overrated.
Sewing your bag is criminally underrated.
Here in America, where hustle culture reigns and everyone is trying to earn more to keep up, there is an undercurrent of monetization in everything we do.
We’ve all had that depressing moment when you show your friends or family your newest watercolor, painted miniature, or perfectly caramelized-onion burger and someone will undoubtedly say: “WOW! That’s really good! Have you ever tried selling this?!”
They mean it as a compliment. For a lot of people, the highest form of praise is telling you you have the potential to turn your creativity into currency. But if you truly love something, money has nothing to do with it.
On a side note, I think people with severe depression might lean into their hobbies even more, even at times when it may seem detrimental to their overall quality of life from the outside. What you don’t realize is that weekend half marathon or opening night of the next movie in a franchise is what is keeping them going another day.
I am urging you to spend more time doing what you love with zero thoughts of calories or currency involved. It will save you. That is not hyperbole.
The world is scary right now. Scarier than we want to admit. Being aware of current events, from international politics to local weather forecasts, will cause you stress. And if it doesn’t grocery and gas prices will.
These are things we need to be informed and engaged with. I am the last person to tell you to ignore politics (in fact, I despise people with the gall to claim they “aren’t political”) but if you expect people to fight for a better future, it’s not the one where everyone can work themselves to death. It’s the one where we all have time to sit with a book, knit a sweater, watch birds, or drive to chorus practice.
(my apologies for Arlo’s purring in my lap at this point in the audio. I couldn’t move him. Cat owners get it.)
Here’s why: in the coming years we are going to need sane, compassionate, and healthy people more than ever. Yet we put off doing the things we love in service of what we’re told is most important: money.
The point of being alive is to enjoy that life, not work to earn the permission to be happy. Whatever you love to do that requires you to put down your phone and interact with others that feel the same way is so much more important than you realize.
Our hobbies break up the drudgery, give us something to aspire to and builds true friendships. I have met my chosen family in karate dojos and draft horse clubs, not marketing meetings. And the more we worked together in these sports or clubs, the more we learned about each other. The more we fell in love with each other as impactful parts of our lives. It’s something to talk about over the dishes before we bring up the hard stuff. It’s comfort. It’s consistency. And for some, it’s the closest thing we have to therapy.
Hobbies might be the only thing that can save our attention spans. I can tell you right now that I can not concentrate on an online workshop about improving my skills with Adobe Illustrator for more than a few minutes. I can sit down with Stephen King’s newest collection of short stories for an hour without remembering I have matches on Hinge or what people are saying on reddit. Diving into what actually makes you happy or interested reminds you of what an attention span is. Builds that muscle back. Use it or lose it, right?
If you are finding yourself stressed, tired, distracted, or simply going through the motions of life, I am asking you to reach back in your memory for what it is you truly love, and to get involved again. If you are skilled in an area, consider teaching others and lighting a spark in their hearts.
Been putting off a dream? Join that ballet class for beginner adults. Buy that pottery wheel instead of new kitchen cabinet fronts. Sign up for that single parent group hike on Meetup.com. Stop seeing what you love to do as something to earn, or to finally dive back into in some fantastical future of supposed leisure.
If you do so within responsible means, I promise you find yourself feeling more alive. You will wake up excited about something, driven to get better at. You’ll be happier, better around the people you live and work with, and dammit, more interesting.
The whole point of life is to fall in love with living, over and over, and I don’t care if it’s collecting baseball cards or joining a Shibari workshop. What matters is what motivates you. The rest of life is finding the people that understand, and sharing the road with them for a while. Nothing you are forced to do for health insurance or a paycheck will match up to what makes you feel human.
What I do know is how it felt to be in that class. How it felt be smiling under a thousand stars and not once think about my fears the whole drive home.
I can’t remember the last time I felt that. I truly can’t. And all it took was leaving the farm for two hours and being brave enough to be bad at something no one is paying me to do that I can’t get enough of.
Will I join that dojo for the long haul? I don’t know. It comes down to money and time away from my responsibilities, like it does for most of our hobbies. But I am thinking of work arounds.
I may be able to trade my design skills for a few month’s tuition, or I might get lucky and find the $7500* from the Anthropic lawsuit in my bank account tomorrow. Or perhaps I can pay a class at a time, whenever I can swing it?
What I know is I am not shutting down my joy with shame or negativity. I am trying to see if I can do something I love within the means I have.
Money is not important. It is necessary. These are different philosophies, and one is slow motion suicide and the other is practical application.
Adjust your priorities accordingly.
You are spot on with this, Jenna. I am so inspired to go to my fiber art studio room right now that I didn’t even finish reading the article! PS: “hobby” does indeed connote a throwaway use of time. I like “leisure time passions” better.
This is so true, so wonderful and so beautifully written. ❤️ One of the best things I've done in the past year is to join a queer craft group that I found out about through our local advocacy center. Just a bunch of assorted queer people who bring whatever it is they are working on and get together in a church hall once a week and hang together while we stitch/draw/knit. They are rapidly becoming fam.