Why Abandoned Hobbies are Worth Revisiting
If you quit based on how ‘good’ you thought you were, this might help you reconsider.
Hobbies — we all have them. Or, if you’re anything like me, had — they’ve gradually disappeared over the years and you draw a blank every time someone asks you something like, “So, what do you do to pass time?” I’ve given up a good number of hobbies in my time, and that includes the ones I genuinely loved doing. I never thought much of it until recently, when I realized that I’d unknowingly deprived myself of years of joy and learning, and eventually being as ‘good’ as I once hoped I’d be.
While cleaning out a particularly disorderly section of my bookshelf, I found a crumpled booklet that turned out to be one of my test papers from school. The timing could not have been more perfect — it was one of those days when I was seriously doubting my ability to string a coherent sentence together, let alone write something substantial. I read my essay, which I fully expected to be laden with trite observations and frequent digressions, but it was a surprisingly vivid description of a walk through the mall.
It was also crystal clear that I’d written the whole thing with unfettered enthusiasm, and without any of the unnecessary nit-picking I do today. Reading it felt like stepping into my 14-year-old brain after close to a decade, and I can honestly say I miss the way my neurons were wired back then.
The thing that stood out was that I apparently knew how to make a seemingly mundane topic worth reading — I found myself chuckling at what I clearly thought was witty commentary at the time (to a certain extent it still holds up, but I will keep my juvenile sense of humour between myself and my then-teacher). Nostalgia is a fun emotion until you realize how much things have changed — I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had such fun writing something. In fact, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d written anything at all.
As we grow older, we stop doing a lot of the things we enjoyed as children either because we lose interest in them, or because we just don’t have that kind of time or energy anymore. While that’s fair, we sometimes stop for a very different reason: the fear of being disappointed by how we’re not ‘good enough.’ For me, writing is that one thing.
But that crumpled old test paper helped me challenge the idea that you have to already be good at something in order to enjoy it. If you can replace ‘writing’ in the next two paragraphs with something you loved doing but just don’t anymore, you may have abandoned a hobby for the wrong reasons.
I have spent the past two years wishing I were a better writer without once putting pen to paper, because I’ve been dreading the idea of writing something and looking at it only to see that what I’ve come up with is absolute garbage. The root cause was my tendency to constantly compare myself to other writers. I spent hours in my head trying to emulate styles that didn’t resonate with me, resulting in obvious failure, then a whirlwind of disappointment, and finally settling in a miasma of despondency.
What I failed to see was that this was a self-fulfilling prophecy — I kept thinking I wasn’t a good writer, so I never wrote anything, and well… A person who writes nothing isn’t a very good writer.
An activity that I couldn’t get enough of when I was younger is now something that I fear, dread, and avoid vehemently. The only difference between then and now is that now, I hold my writing up to some vague, inscrutable standard, and it never seems to be good enough — because I don’t even know what I mean when I say ‘good enough’.
Back then, I gave little thought to how people perceived my writing. I wrote because it was the one thing that came the most naturally to me — there was an ease with which the thoughts came and my hand wrote, with minimum second-guessing. I stayed true to my way of doing things and never tried to be someone I wasn’t. I also knew the difference between being inspired and being discouraged by the work of others. The line that runs between the two is very, very fine.
For those of us who choose to share the products of our hobbies with other people, the tendency to underestimate our abilities increases tenfold, especially when we see millions of others doing the same thing we do and convince ourselves that they’re doing it so much better. We often find ourselves venturing into questions like, “What’s the point of me doing this when so many others are doing it better than I am? Does my work even matter?” As children, we rarely ask questions that result in such crippling self-doubt; we just do things because we feel like it. I wouldn’t want to revert to this latter state, but the former is hardly more appealing. The two feel like the opposite ends of a spectrum, and the ideal state of equilibrium seems impossible to achieve.
We pursued hobbies as children because they brought us enjoyment and contributed to our discovery and understanding of the world. Following a significant paradigm shift, our willingness to continue these activities depends largely on one factor: how “good” we think we are at said activity, which includes what others think of our work, and how well we think it does in comparison to others’.
As the motivational gear shifts from intrinsic to extrinsic, the original purpose and process seem to be forgotten. Every day, we lose a tiny speck of that spontaneity and carefree attitude that is so apparent in children. Each speck seems to be replaced by a rather ugly lump of self-doubt and unhelpful self-criticism, until one day it weighs us down to such an extent that we’re afraid to even pick up a pen. 14-year-old me would be so disappointed.
Our interests are constantly evolving and expanding, and this may mean hobbies that used to interest us no longer do. But if, like me, you’ve abandoned a hobby solely based on your inability to do it “well” (whatever your definition of the word is), it might still be worth revisiting. There are bound to be a million others who write or paint or tap-dance or (insert your lost hobby here), but that shouldn’t matter. It’s axiomatic that there will always be people better or worse than you in one way or another, but there’s a space for you somewhere in between — and no one can fill it quite the way you do. Be mindful of how and why you consume content: don’t let the fact that someone is better than you cloud the possibility of being inspired by their work.
If you’ve endured my rambling until this point (first of all, thank you), I hope you go back to the things that brought you joy when you were younger. Specifically, the hobbies that kept you happily occupied for innumerable hours, but now reside in the desolate corners of your memory. Pick them up, dust them off, and give them another go.
Dance even if your limbs might be less coordinated than those of an intoxicated monkey (this is in no way a reference to the way I dance), paint even if all you can come up with today is a two-dimensional flower, and write even if what you end up with is somehow worse than what you were capable of 7 years ago. The fact that the process makes you happy should be enough to keep you going, and eventually, you’ll be ‘good enough’, or better still, realize that it was an arbitrary standard to begin with.
You can continue to pursue a hobby solely for the purpose of amusement, but realistically speaking, there will always be a part of you that wants to be better than you are today, to match a more concrete and well-defined standard, and to share your work with pride. But to expect to immediately be as good as people who’ve been doing it for years is unfair, and frankly, ridiculous. Be assured that you’ll get there, but only if you’re consistent.
There’s a quote by Ira Glass that I always come back to whenever I feel like my writing isn’t up to the mark. I hardly ever think it is, and probably won’t for a very long time, but it’s this quote that made me go from not writing anything to haphazardly recording my thoughts and ideas on my phone. Hopefully one day, some of them, like this one, will see the light of day.
Here is Ira Glass explaining something he calls the ‘Taste Gap’:
“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not.
But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know it’s normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work.
It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”
