‘I have a hobby’: do you really?
An attempt at understanding what using your time well means
Hobbies
Are you someone that spends your free time watching movies and scrolling social media? Maybe most of your time is spent catching up with friends. Or maybe your new year’s resolution was to be more ‘productive’ by spending your time learning something new. Do you ever feel guilty that you aren’t making the ‘best use’ of your time? Trust me, you’re not alone in feeling this way.
Just last week, I had a conversation with a colleague about what it means to have an ‘interesting hobby’. What we agreed upon is that an interesting hobby has two properties:
- Some degree of uniqueness → Fulfils the interesting property
- Should be an active pursuit (not passive) → Fulfils our definition of hobby
On further reflection, it’s not that common to find people who are actively pursuing a hobby and thus the property of a hobby being interesting is already self-fulfilling. However, let me further refine my interpretation of the definition of a hobby:
- Should be an active/intentional pursuit
- Should be motivated by intrinsic, and not extrinsic factors
Some scenarios that I wouldn’t consider hobbies to clarify this definition:
- Someone who enjoys a daily cup of coffee → There is an element of passivity here, more of a routine than a hobby
- Someone who spent $5000 to buy the best coffee equipment so as to pursue a certain identity → While this might be an active pursuit, it’s motivated by the extrinsic factor of wanting society to perceive them in a certain manner
- Someone who reads a lot of books or spends time learning new things to feel productive → Another active, even intentional pursuit, but the extrinsic factor here is escapism
Admittedly, it’s difficult to ascertain whether one’s motivation is extrinsic or intrinsic. Furthermore, it’s also possible for one to initially get started because of extrinsic factors, but later on, those reasons morph into intrinsic ones. For example, I’m currently writing this because I want to be perceived as someone who thinks clearly. If nobody read my articles, maybe I wouldn’t write as often? Some examples of intrinsic motivation could be as simple as the enjoyment of the act itself, and if you were to isolate yourself from society as a hermit, you would probably still do it.
I wouldn’t yet call writing my hobby, nor would I identify as a writer. But hopefully, my motivations for writing in the future become intrinsic ones. This is the distinction I would draw between spending time on your hobby and how you spend your time in general.
Productivity
Now, remember that feeling of guilt some of us have when we aren’t spending our time well? Well, spending time on your hobbies is likely to reduce those feelings of guilt. But you can’t possibly be spending all your time on your hobbies, could you? I would posit that these feelings are a result of the culture of toxic productivity as well as an obsession with pragmatism — too much focus on applying, too little focus on exploration, enjoyment and doing things ‘just because’.
Chris Dixon mentioned in a podcast [09:15] that if one were in the early 1900s and tried to find the least practical academic field, it would have been logicians, but it was exactly this ‘useless field’ that led to the invention of computers half a century later.
Who are we to judge what is “productive” or “unproductive” today? What we perceive today as a waste of time, could prove useful in the future. This is not just some hypothetical ideal, but something that you’ve probably experienced yourself. Think about all the things you learnt in school which you thought useless at that point, but later applied and found a use for it later on in life.
Thus, judging how well you make use of your time is independent of what you do with it. It is not an inherent property of your actions. Rather, it is dependent on the value that you ascribe to it — the intrinsic factors which motivate you to do it. Nobody has the right to tell you that what you enjoy doing is useless. A caveat is that this doesn’t mean you act impulsively, or relinquish control to your senses, but that there is some notion of intentionality in how you spend your time.
Something I haven’t fully resolved is how one goes about finding a hobby and spends time on it in a guilt-free manner. I don’t think I really have the answer myself, and I acknowledge that I’ve defined a rather idealistic definition of hobbies which I myself don’t even adhere to. I’ve definitely been motivated by consumerism, making money or just pursuing an idealised self-image when I was picking up some of my hobbies.
Nevertheless, what I hope you come to conclude is that making good use of your time isn’t about being ‘productively unproductive’ like watching ‘educational’ videos or reading books. It is more about pursuing what you intrinsically want to pursue and not feeling guilty about that by acknowledging your own limitations in evaluating the usefulness of such endeavours.
Your actions do not have inherent properties that make one action ‘better’ than another. Instead, your actions are defined by properties that you ascribe to them which are itself dependent on your motivations in doing it. This is the true determinant of a ‘good use of time’.
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