Why We Need Hobbies

I once did something utterly absurd, yet perfectly contemporary: I went to Wikipedia and searched for the “List of Hobbies.”

I felt like a diner at a three-Michelin-star restaurant, staring at the menu with absolutely no idea what to order. I scrolled down, item by item: birdwatching, beekeeping, calligraphy, amateur radio, astrophysics…

Why did they all look so familiar? Oh, right. I’d seen them all before — in TV shows, movies, and airport bestsellers. I used to think my lack of hobbies was purely because I wasn’t “deep” enough, that my horizons were too narrow.

It wasn’t until I stared blankly at that list for half an hour that I realized I had simply “mystified” the whole idea of a hobby.

We always think a hobby has to be something impressive enough for the “Skills” section of a resume, something that requires “talent” or an “in-crowd.” But it’s not. A hobby is just an ordinary, everyday thing that we’ve decided to actually dig into. That’s it.

So why has “that’s it” become so damn hard?

Designed Emptiness

In this day and age, our “emptiness” is, in all likelihood, a feature, not a bug. It’s designed.

Our lives, all our leisure time outside of work, have been sliced and diced into confetti by the infinite feeds of TikTok and Instagram. You’re “busy” on the toilet, “busy” on the subway, “busy” for that last hour before bed. You feel like you’ve consumed a metric ton of content, yet you’re left with an internal void so vast you could drive a train through it.

This passive, force-fed “busyness” is the source of the void. Our attention? It’s already been expropriated.

That’s just the first thief.

The second one is stealthier. It’s called “The Hustle.” We’re so overwhelmed by the pressure to build side-gigs and monetize everything that we’ve begun to examine every potential hobby through an intensely mercenary lens:

“This thing brings me joy… but can it also bring me economic value?”

If I learn to draw, can I take commissions? If I learn to bake, can I start a side business? If I’m good at gaming, should I be streaming?

See? One thief steals our attention, the other steals our purity of purpose. Before we even begin, we’re already calculating the ROI.

Hobbies: A Minor Personal Rebellion

A true hobby won’t necessarily “save” your life like some spiritual retreat, but it will, without fail, make you notice the beauty in life.

Well, at the very least, on some godforsaken Monday morning or during some late night crushed by KPIs, it makes you feel like life is still tolerable. It stops you from thinking, “Let’s just end this already.”

To put it poetically: A hobby is a minor, personal rebellion in this day and age.

It’s an act of defiance against the two dominant forces of our time: the relentless “attention economy” and the all-consuming “commodification of everything.”

And the dividends from this rebellion are richer than you can imagine.

First, it builds a fortress for your attention.

A hobby that requires “mastery” is essentially competing with your phone for you. You have to make yourself sit still, turn off those cursed notifications, and carve out a real block of time — not “fragmented time” — to deep learn and deep play.

You might spend an entire afternoon just trying to figure out how to press that damn F-chord so it doesn’t “buzz.” You might spend a whole weekend replicating a ridiculously complicated French pastry.

This is the battle for your focus. In the long run, you are leaving something tangible for your future self, not just a meaningless stream of content you’ve already forgotten.

Second, it gives you a sense of control, the rarest commodity of our time.

A hobby is a game you design for yourself. In this game, you are the only player and the only judge.

You don’t need to “monetize” it. You don’t need to “show it off.” Your only drive is that primal, “intrinsic motivation”: I just want to get this right.

When your fingers move on the instrument as an “unconscious action,” when they fly across the keyboard as code flows like water, you achieve a state of “flow.”

This is the antidote our era is starving for.

Let’s be honest, we’ve lost control over so much in our lives. Our schedules, our emotions, our futures… Our lives can be a total mess, completely fragmented. We desperately need something that makes us feel like we can still grab hold, something to stitch it all back together.

Finally, a hobby is proof of self.

Especially when work and life are so tightly bound, much of the time, we are performing as “products.” We package ourselves, optimize our specs, and wait to be appraised, turning our time into an appropriate price.

This is when a “pointless” hobby becomes absolutely vital.

Like, riding a bus aimlessly, from the first stop to the last and all the way back, just to see the corners of your city you’ve never seen before.

Can you monetize it? No. Can you post it on Instagram for clout? It’s cool, for sure, but it probably won’t get many likes.

But in that moment, you are not a “worker.” You are not a “consumer.” You are nobody.

You are just you.

So, stop thinking of hobbies as something to “kill” time.

Hobbies are for anchoring time.

In an age where everything is designed to make you drift away, your hobby is the stake you drive firmly into the ground. It’s the most powerful reminder there is:

You are still “alive.” And you are still “in control.”