Do you remember when you were a kid, a really young child, and you were presented with a new activity? Finger painting was exciting and new! We didn’t care if we were good at it yet.

When You Were Young

We didn’t have these notions that we had to be productive and good at our hobbies. We enjoyed it simply because it was enjoyable. Somewhere along the line, we start to lose that, and as adults, it feels like if we say we’ve been playing guitar for five years, we need to be good at playing guitar.

I think that’s a real shame. If I want to pursue a hobby for myself, I don’t want to focus on being productive the whole time. I want to focus on enjoying myself for the sake of stimulation and, to be blunt, fun!

Obviously, if I want to improve, I can, but it shouldn’t be a source of pressure and shame. That last word is really important – I find that when I talk to people in their teens and twenties, a lot of them have this idea that if they have a hobby, they need to be good at it, find a way to monetize it, or join a community of people with that hobby.

I’ve asked a few friends (in context and without being aggressive or invasive, I promise!) where this comes from, and it ultimately comes down to the same thing: people feel like their time is a resource being spent, and they want to make sure they’re “getting their value for it.”

Time as a Resource

I can empathize! Time is limited and in the modern workplace, it’s exhausting just existing. We have a lot of responsibilities in our individualistic society:

• short-term necessities (taking out the trash, cleaning the house, laundry, doing the dishes, vacuuming/sweeping, bathing, groceries, cooking, etc.)
• long-term necessities (renewing your registration at the DMV, visiting the dentist, visiting the optometrist, etc.)
• parents/guardians, caretakers, and pet owners have a whole additional set of chores involved around taking care of another creature (health visits, additional insurance, transportation, etc.)
• and more!

Maximizing Time

With all these responsibilities, we want to make the most of the free time we do have. More collectivistic societies often have community/family members dedicated to some of these things, but in a more individualistic society, the freedom comes with an associated cost: either pay someone to do the above or use your time to accomplish them. - Side note: as a result, that adage around “we all have the same 24 hours” in reference to poor vs. rich folk is a bunch of malarky to me. - Rich folk have the luxury of paying others to take care of issues for them, don’t have a sword of consequences of financial instability hanging over their head, and ability to weather consequences of failing to accomplish these things more easily. - I grew up in a fair amount of financial instability, and the stress levels between then, when I started out my career with virtually no money and no safety net from friends and family, and now? They’re worlds apart.

Learning to Enjoy Things for Themselves

So, if you feel or have felt similarly about things, how do you break free of this? I don’t have all the answers because I still fall prey to this line of thinking sometimes, but here are some thoughts:

• My first suggestion from my own experience is to stop looking at the clock so much. Set aside some time to do what you want without considering the time involved.

  • On a larger scale, every time I took a vacation in my early twenties, I’d be fixated on how many days I have left. I wasn’t living in the moment: I was living in the future where I’m disappointed the vacation is over early. In doing this, I lost my vacation!
  • To relate that back to the topic at hand, by keeping a clock in mind the whole time, we’re waiting for the time to be over instead of enjoying the activity. You can keep an alarm if you have something you want to stop for (e.g. bedtime, meeting with a friend for lunch, etc.), but let yourself sink in to the activity! Get into the flow of it all!

• My second suggestion is to let go of the notion that you have to be good at things. It’s okay to be bad at things! Failure is a great teacher with a bad name. A lot of those friends I asked about this mentioned they didn’t want the feeling of being bad at something they identified as part of their personality.

• My third suggestion is to do things because you want to do them, not because others expect you to or because you want to impress others. At a certain point, who’s the one doing the activity and has to deal with the time and money and effort spent? You! You don’t owe being good at any activity to anyone (though I’d say you do owe being a kind person to others in general).

  • Also, we only have a certain amount of time on this planet, and we never know when it’s going to be over, so why waste time avoiding the things you want to do out of fear of what others will say?