I don’t exactly know when it happened, but at some point in my early adult life I think I accidentally stopped having hobbies. Can you relate?

For one thing, I think the word “hobby” has kind of a weird connotation, especially as you grow up and start actually working.

For me, the word instantly brings to mind images of Deb’s Caboodle case of flourescent braided keychains s in Napoleon Dynamite, and those spiral bound Nail Art books from the 90’s that actually came with a row of nail polishes.

Also, hobby horsing.

No one’s denying that Deb’s keychains were awesome - but I think the issue is my knee-jerk tendency to think of hobbies as something a middle school kid has, a pastime that even if I’m nostalgic for it, is…well…past.

I also feel like the term ‘hobbyist’ is used in such a condescending way, as if to suggest that if you do something ‘just as a hobby’ then you don’t really do it well enough to be taken seriously. People are snobby about hobbies, what can I say?

I’ve been wanting to write about hobbies and why we should be deliberate about having them for awhile, because it’s a topic that gives way to an even bigger conversation about how we choose to spend our time and what’s important to us

In my never-ending quest to overthink how I should be spending my time, I spent a decent amount of it last month reading Oliver Burkemann’s Four Thousand Weeks (Time Management For Mortals). In addition to being a great read that I highly recommend in general, it also touched on the subject of hobbies with a perspective that I really loved.

Without going too deep down the rabbit hole and giving a full-on book report, the idea that’s conveyed over and over in Four Thousand Weeks is basically that we’re guaranteed to miss out on most of the experiences life has to offer.

Even though that sounds initially pretty depressing, from a logical standpoint it makes sense. There’s a mountain of possible things we could spend our lives doing, and it’s unrealistic to say the least to expect that we’ll get to do them all.

After laying the groundwork and establishing that fact of life, Burkemann then goes on to talk about hobbies and how they can give us a pretty great indication of how we actually enjoy spending our time.

Like most normal people, I have found myself uncertain about what the hell I’m doing with my life more times than I can count, so any advice that promises to help point me in the direction of what I actually like doing with my life is always welcome.

I think it can get even more complicated when you work in a creative field too, because it’s often the case that we are among the lucky few whose former hobbies actually became our jobs.

And while I’ll always be grateful that my high school hobby of singing and songwriting became something people actually started paying me to do, it also changed my relationship to singing and songwriting. Not necessarily in a bad way, but there’s no denying the shift took place.

I have to imagine that professional photographers, content creators, and makers of just about any kind have felt the same way when their hobby became their job. The stakes change when the art you used to make for fun is now the art you make to pay your rent.

I used to feel terribly guilty that I didn’t have the same hobby-like relationship to making music anymore, because I thought it somehow meant that I loved it less. But after spending over a decade as a professional artist, I now realize that everyone goes through this in some way or another.

Once I had finally reached the goal I had worked so hard for, which was turning my love for making music into my job, I realized I still needed something creative to do just for fun. Just for me. Finding new creative hobbies that didn’t need to ultimately manifest into my next album actually helped me chill out enough to be able to write my next album.

It might sound obvious, but I realized that doing something fun that isn’t subject to the pressure I normally put on myself to do an excellent job is so freeing.

No one is probably ever going to see the travel scrapbook I made of our last trip to Italy, but putting it together was so much fun and so creatively satisfying. And I didn’t make it in order to create some kind of internet content out of it, I made it just because.

This Christmas, our mom got Courtney and I got a bunch of styrofoam cone trees and random stuff from the craft store to hot glue gun the daylights out of to our heart’s content, and it was AWESOME. It made me realize how little time I really spend doing stuff like that, with no real end goal or pressure to be something other than it is.

Even my French language learning journey has mostly been a hobby, because I don’t even get to speak French all that much living in California. To some people it might seem pointless, but I get so much joy out of it that I really don’t care.

In need of some potential hobby ideas? Why not try macrame, or beginner sewing, language learning or an easy recipe?

What are your thoughts on having hobbies as an adult? Which ones should we all try out next??

The Best Life Advice I Got? Get A Hobby