The Death of Fun
The first thing I bought with my first paycheck was a Stratocaster. At the time, if I closed my eyes long enough, I could visualize the future. I’d be in a dingy bar nailing a solo, and my mesmerizing performance would entrance people. They’d even paid me handsomely for that life-changing experience. But reality rarely lives up to expectation. Despite practicing every day, I wouldn’t be closer to my vision. In fact, everything I played back then sounded like Captain Beefheart. If I played the right notes, I reasoned, people would love me. Interestingly, the most fun I had playing the instrument wasn’t when I was doing it for someone else, but when I was doing it for its own sake. I realized that the hobby you’ll enjoy the most is the one that has no “career potential”.
That’s not a popular idea nowadays. Our culture is obsessed with productivity, efficiency, and monetization. To some, if you’re not making money off of it, it’s not worth doing in the first place. Well, good luck making a profit from bird-watching, unless you’ve trained pigeons to deliver packages. The moment you turn a personal passion into a source of income, it often leads to burnout and loss of enjoyment. Leisure should be the opposite of work, not another excuse to make a quick buck. That said, you should never half-ass the activities you do in your free time. Nothing will match the rare sense of achievement you get when you do something competently. But mastery is not the point. See, when it comes to hobbies, there is no point.
Why We’ve Forgotten How to Play
The best thing a hobby gives you is that it helps you overcome your fear of failure. After all, how do you approach something you’ve never done before and expect to excel at it? Modern culture is risk-averse, though. We avoid anything that’s mildly uncomfortable or that makes us feel incompetent. That’s why everyone’s looking at their phones all the time. Social media, modern video games, and apps are designed to be frictionless experiences. Duolingo gives you the illusion that you’re learning a language, but it’ll never replace awkwardly asking where the bathroom is and accidentally proposing marriage. Not to mention that a screen will never replace the analog and tactile feeling of hobbies like reading, knitting, cooking, or gardening.
So when did hobbies become synonymous with work? While the term “hustle culture” has been around since the 1970s, it has gained significant popularity over the last two decades, largely due to the rise of social media and technological advancements. There’s an endless stream of platforms that let you monetize everything, including Etsy, Printify, Patreon, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. At some point, we’ve all consumed content about something we love and told ourselves, “Hey, maybe that could be me”. For me, it was guitar tutorials. Now I own two guitars and can almost play half of “Wonderwall.”
The idea that every interest should be monetized is toxic. The moment you monetize a hobby, that’s when it stops being a hobby and becomes work. Something that used to be relaxing and enjoyable suddenly becomes a source of obligation and stress. You might also feel pressured to meet external demands, instead of creating what you want. See, a hobby is something deeply personal. When money’s involved, you feel like you’re essentially selling an extension of yourself and your self-worth.
The Philosophy of Leisure
In Leisure: The Basis of Culture, philosopher Josef Pieper argues that leisure isn’t just rest from work, but the very foundation of civilization. To Pieper, leisure is an attitude of the mind that allows for contemplation, celebration, and openness to beauty and truth. The arts, philosophy, and what we consider “civilization” were the result of humans exploring, creating, and reflecting without economic pressure. Judging everything by its utility or productivity, Piper argues, would lead to deep unhappiness.
Although the two terms often get confused, leisure isn’t the same as laziness. The most important difference is that leisure is intentional, while laziness isn’t. In the former, you set time aside to do something (painting, writing, or knitting), but in the latter, you default to doing an activity (scrolling Instagram to see what your ex has been up to in the last three hours). From a philosophical standpoint, leisure is about being, not producing. Laziness, on the other hand, is refusing to participate in the world’s possibilities, a neglect of one’s duties and capabilities.
When John Lennon and Paul McCartney sat down to write a song, they’d joke, “Today, let’s write a swimming pool”. I think that’s a terrible motivation to make art, and it makes me dislike The Beatles even more (yes, the guy who bought a Stratocaster with his first paycheck isn’t too crazy about The Beatles). Most artistic and scientific breakthroughs come from people playing without financial motives. The Wright Brothers ran a bicycle shop but worked on gliders and airplanes largely for the challenge of flight. The risk is that some great artists never achieve financial success in their lifetime. Amazing things happen, both on a personal and cultural level, when you don’t look for public approval or profit.
The Psychology of Hobbies
The most important concept related to the topic of hobbies is the flow state. This is often described as “being in the zone”, a mental state where you’re so absorbed in an activity that you forget about the passage of time, along with eating, sleeping, or the fact that you left your kid waiting at soccer practice three hours ago. When you’re under the spell of the flow state, you experience deep focus and full involvement in the activity in question. Since the task happens naturally without conscious effort, you feel a sense of ease and flow, hence its name. The benefits of the flow state are too many, but people who experience it often have less stress and anxiety, and they experience feelings of mastery.
Similarly, hobbies boost mental health, enhance resilience, and foster creativity. They provide a healthy escape from stress, improve mood, and increase self-esteem through a sense of accomplishment. Some claim that since most hobbies are activities with low stakes, they have an “anti-anxiety” effect, providing a sense of purpose, reducing stress, and fostering social connections. Hobbies offer a break from daily routines, give you something to look forward to, and promote relaxation.
The Joy of Being Bad at Something
Here’s something important about hobbies: they give you the chance to be bad at something. There’s freedom in that because when you’re stuck at an activity, there’s no pressure to introduce money to the equation. In Zen Buddhism, there’s a concept known as the Beginner’s Mind. When we’re bad at something, we’re learning, experimenting, and open to new experiences. Since there’s no ego attached, the activity becomes more playful. Beginners often have an open, curious, and non-judgmental attitude, and since they have no preconceived notions about the activity in question, they can fully experience the present moment.
The modern world doesn’t encourage that at all. We’re obsessed with gaining expertise without putting in the effort it demands. We want six-pack abs without exercising, and we want a hot spouse without having to leave the house or learn how to make small talk with another human being that doesn’t involve an Amazon delivery. Choosing to do something badly and keeping it to ourselves is a quiet act of defiance. Therefore, having a hobby can become a cultural rebellion.
Science also supports the importance of being bad at hobbies. One of the most important concepts related to this is divergent thinking, which is the ability to generate many creative ideas. Divergent thinking is sparked not by precision or efficiency, but by playful, open-ended experimentation. Freeform activities, such as free writing, art-making, or tabletop games, encourage spontaneous idea generation and novel associations, like realizing your bread dough looks exactly like Joseph Stalin.
Furthermore, learning something new boosts our brain’s plasticity. Neuroplasticity is our brain’s capability to change. Although we associate it with youth, adults continue to build new neural connections through novel and challenging activities. Activities such as learning a language, craft, or instrument can significantly reshape the brain. Similarly, engaging in arts and crafts (such as knitting, painting, or any other form of tactile learning) stimulates the brain and strengthens sensory, visual-spatial, and cognitive pathways. This gives your brain a workout that digital activities don’t provide. Learning musical instruments is particularly powerful. Even amateur music-making or simple rhythmic actions (like using a singing bowl) have been shown to enhance hippocampal networks, language skills, memory, and overall gray matter density. So my guitar may sound like a dying seagull, but my neurons are having the time of their lives.
How to Reclaim Hobbies in a Money-Obsessed World
Our culture treats every pastime as a potential side hustle, so you have to be a little rebellious and keep some things to yourself. Here are four ways to do that:
- Choose something with no clear career benefit: if it could go on a résumé, it’s not what you’re looking for. Pick something “useless” by capitalist standards, such as watercolor, improv, calligraphy, or juggling. The idea is to avoid being strategic, so just pick something you enjoy.
- Give yourself permission to be bad at it: resist the urge to improve just for the sake of it. A hobby shouldn’t be about mastery; it should be about joy. Let your knitting be asymmetrical, your doodles be wobbly, or your guitar playing be out of tune. Imperfection is the point; it keeps the stakes low and the fun high. There are countless examples of artists who defied the rules of their discipline to create masterpieces.
- Create hobby time as non-negotiable leisure: schedule your hobbies. Treat them as something sacred, like going to work or a dentist’s appointment.
- Keep it offline (or at least unshared): once an activity hits social media, it becomes performance. Try doing it without posting a single photo because the moment it’s public, you start thinking about likes, followers, and “building an audience”, exactly the trap you’re trying to avoid.
Closing: In Praise of Pointless Joy
Some things in your life you should protect from metrics or monetization, especially analog pastimes. You’ll notice that time away from the screen is refreshing and fulfilling, so go ahead and color, paint, read, practice an instrument, or garden. Whatever you choose, keep it to yourself. It’s not for the world to judge.
Not everything you love needs a business plan. Sometimes it just needs a badly tuned Stratocaster and the joy of knowing you don’t have to get abs, a spouse, or an audience out of it, just the neighbors wondering why you’ve been playing the same wrong chord for three years.
