How to Have a True Hobby, Not a Side Hustle

It’s Monday, you’ve just gotten home from work, and you’re blessedly free from social obligations for the night. You heat up some takeout, plop down on the couch clutching your phone … and start to scroll through Instagram. Then you switch over to Facebook. Then you power up your laptop and look for something good to watch on Hulu.

All of a sudden, you’ve been on the couch for three hours. Your shoulders are stiff and your vision is a little blurry. You feel oddly stressed out, having essentially done nothing since you got home.

But the next time you reach for your smartphone or tablet out of habit — or boredom — consider a more fulfilling alternative: find a hobby, or an activity that you do purely for pleasure and relaxation, not for work or necessity.

When unexpectedly facing free time, many of us choose a path of low resistance, maybe by throwing in a load of laundry, slathering on a face mask, and streaming the latest episode of Succession. It’s no wonder, with so many obligations, people, and social platforms vying for our attention. Most of us now spend our waking hours sitting at desks plugged into a computer, squeezing in time for exercise — making that a job, as well — and packing our schedules with “required” social activities, like team-building exercises, networking events, and school fundraisers.

We might want a hobby, but we just don’t feel like we have enough time. But we may have more time than we think: According to the 2019 Bureau of Labor and Statistics Survey, Americans have roughly five hours of leisure hours per day that they use to socialize, relax, or engage in activities — with men reporting 49 more minutes each day than women. Still, watching TV takes up more than half of those hours.

When we do make use of those leisure hours, our hustle culture leaves us with no moment unaccounted for — because we feel that even our “free” moments must involve the pursuit of excellence, money, self-improvement, and “growth.” So our leisure activities often turn into a race to see who can do it the best — running becomes about completing marathons, or knitting turns into a quest to become a crafting influencer. As Tim Wu wrote for the New York Times, “We’re afraid of being bad at [hobbies]. Or rather, we are intimidated by the expectation — itself a hallmark of our intensely public, performative age — that we must actually be skilled at what we do in our free time.”

Selin A. Malkoc, a marketing professor at Ohio State University who studies how leisure can contribute to our overall happiness, echoes this sentiment. The problem with finding a hobby, she says, is compounded when so many of us “do yoga because we want to be a yoga master.” Instead, Malkoc says, it’s perfectly fine to do it just because we want to relax.

But making time for non-essential activities is, in fact, essential. Challenging leisure activities — such as hobbies — improve mental and physical wellbeing, foster learning, and build communities. Oh — and it’s fun!

Here are five ways to find, and keep, a fulfilling hobby.

by Hope Reese, Vox |  Read more:

Image: Zac Freeland/Vox
[ed. I took up the motorcycle at 60. It's never too late.]