Why You Need A Hobby

You’re as much a stranger to yourself as they are to you. This is a terrible feeling. And I’ve met enough people and told enough white lies of my own to know it’s never truly because you’re a dispassionate or incurious NPC. It’s usually because you’ve let passive consumption replace active participation in your own life, or the things you really want to be doing scare you too much to start.

If we had the power to dig into the wells of someone’s mind and uncover their revealed preferences, we’d find a treasure trove of unexplored avocations. Passions left on a shelf or put on indefinite hold because there’s too little time and motivation, or because the friction of getting started is too much to bear. Lack of time, energy, and motivation are less futile problems, because they really only require a reordering of priorities to solve. A true lack of passion or interest in anything, however, is a crisis of the soul. Few people are genuinely interested in nothing, save for nihilists and depressed people suffering from anhedonia. Even then, depression is temporary, and the nihilists have an optimistic offshoot that embraces life’s “meaninglessness” as an opportunity.

If there’s anything men seem to always make time for, it’s their hobbies. Maybe it’s because women have, since the dawn of time, always been the primary caretakers of children, or because they do the brunt of domestic duties involved in maintaining a home, that we feel less of a preoccupation with “me-time.” But even those of us who are still in the dawn of our lives—without children and with ample free time to log hours of scrolling and mindless consumption— seem naturally averse to spending our time engaging in intentional, self-actualizing activities.

Most women don’t have hobbies. They have jobs, consumption habits, favorite TV shows, a 20-step skincare routine, probably a Labubu, several Stanley cups, maybe an impressive online following, but no driving passions that light them up from the inside. This has become a common observation among men, who lament that the women they date don’t seem to care about anything besides materialism and consuming content; they find this passive, zombified lifestyle unattractive. 

Nothing is inspiring about someone stuck in a perpetual state of inertia, who’s pacified themselves with distractions.

And it’s no wonder why. If you’ve ever met someone who oozes drive, purpose, and passion, their energy is contagious. They inspire you to live up to your potential, spend your time wisely, and ascend. Nothing is inspiring about someone stuck in a perpetual state of inertia, who’s pacified themselves with distractions. Some people spend their time as if their life is one big appointment they’ve been dreading.

In my cursory internet search on this topic, I found that hobbies can be quite a divisive subject. People judge you for having or lacking them, assess the quality of your hobbies, and are overly dismissive of others for arbitrary reasons, like not being “productive” enough or vague “that doesn’t count” assessments. Some people make random negative associations with certain hobbies, claiming particular pastimes are “red flags.” Others confess their shame and embarrassment for having no hobbies to talk about or identify with.

Amidst all this hobby discourse, one contrarian argues that hobbies are overrated; that not having one is probably fine. A hobby, he argues, is rarely the most interesting thing about a person. They don’t guarantee good conversation. In fact, you’ll be hard pressed to get much conversational juice out of a hobby alone. The most captivating people, he observes—people with millions of views on their podcast or who draw large crowds in sold-out arenas—people like comedians, philosophers, content creators, and other thought leaders, rarely do so for some quirky side project. It’s almost always for the quality of their minds; the sharpness of their anecdotes, or the entertainment value of their story-telling or hot-takes.

Hobbies aren’t as valuable in the social marketplace as people would have you believe, he argues. His central point is that there’s a difference between being interesting on paper and having an interesting mind. Just because you do something that’s interesting on paper doesn’t mean you have something interesting to say. You can take up a thousand niche hobbies, but it won’t magically make you charismatic, intelligent, or magnetic. And shared pastimes can only do much to bridge these gaps; they’re not magic. Even consumption-heavy “non-hobbies” like reading, gaming, or watching movies can yield richer conversational material than many “real” hobbies. I’ll grant, he has a point, if the only metric is social value.

Hobbies Are Radically Transformative

But hobbies are so much more than that. They’re about self-value. They teach patience, resilience, and give you an endless life project. They build confidence, community, a sense of accomplishment, and they cultivate happiness. Why do we treat investing time and energy into hobbies as optional, but doom-scrolling and posting on Instagram as obligatory? Developing skills, challenging yourself, having something that’s unambiguously yours—it’s transformative in a way that’s hard to articulate until you’ve felt it.

Because once you do, the value it provides is so perceptible, the idea of needing to justify why it’s worth your time is like explaining the value of water to a fish. Hobbies solve so many modern problems: boredom, listlessness, isolation, and a crisis of meaning. Even just having one makes you instantly more attractive and interesting, regardless of Jason McBason’s compelling diatribe against their social utility. It has social utility in invisible ways. Maybe they’re not the conversational gold people make them out to be or the glue holding you and your friends together, but discovering the suggestion of deeper layers within a person

Discovering the suggestion of deeper layers within a person—a glimmer into a private world you knew nothing about is incredibly compelling. No one’s ever felt captivated by someone they felt was too easy to figure out; who was so transparent that they might as well have been see-through.

As a woman, having a hobby instantly sets you apart. I’ve lost count of how many posts I’ve seen from men lamenting how fundamentally uninterested women seem to be in anything beyond Instagram or music. Developing a hobby will distinguish you from the crowd—but don’t do it solely for male attention; let that be a welcome side-effect. Hobbies nourish your soul and enrich your life, reasons enough to pursue them for their own sake.

Hobbylessness quietly fuels women’s discontent by funneling them into passive consumption loops that increase depression and loneliness. While gatekeepers who turn their nose up at “consumptive” hobbies can be overly reactionary, their instinct to challenge our collective dopamine-addicted malaise isn’t entirely misguided. Still, there’s no need for moral panic—not all consumption is made equal. Reading, for example, might technically be considered entertainment-based consumption, but it’s unambiguously a better use of your time than watching hours of TikTok.

What Even Is a Hobby? A Sociological Understanding 

Canadian Sociologist Robert Stebbins developed a categorization system for hobby identification, dividing them into three main categories: serious leisure, casual leisure, and project-based leisure. Serious leisure is the committed pursuit of an amateur, hobbyist, or volunteer activity that is substantial, rewarding, and habitual. Casual leisure involves intrinsically enjoyable but short-lived activities requiring minimal or no preparation, such as scrolling TikTok or watching a movie.Project-based leisure refers to one-off or infrequent, yet rewarding endeavors, like organizing a large themed party or creating a Halloween costume.

Stebbins emphasizes that true leisure activities are inherently rewarding and pursued for intrinsic satisfaction, not monetary gain. Side hustles, therefore, aren’t hobbies. According to his framework, our conventional understanding of hobbies usually aligns with the concept of “serious leisure.” Serious leisure breaks down into three sub-categories. A volunteer is self-explanatory; they dedicate their time and skills to serve others through unpaid work altruistically, rather than for personal recreation. 

Amateurs and hobbyists share similarities in their vocations, but amateurs typically engage in pursuits that have professional counterparts, such as art, science, sports, and entertainment. They strive for self-mastery even without the external validation of a career, in other words. They don’t merely engage in this activity for fun or enjoyment; they approach it with the mindset of a professional and hold themselves to high standards. Hobbyists, on the other hand, engage in activities purely for fun and personal enjoyment, without trying to emulate a professional counterpart. Hobbyist activities break down into five sub-categories: collecting, making and tinkering, activity participation, sports and games, and liberal arts interests. If this is feeling convoluted, this handy diagram makes a useful visual aid.

You’ll notice that sports and games can fall under hobbyist activities here, despite having an obvious professional counterpart. The distinction lies in a person’s approach to the activity. If they have grandiose visions of becoming the next Serena Williams, adhere to a vigorous training regimen, compete in actual tournaments, and hold themselves to professional standards, that’s an amateur rather than a hobbyist approach to tennis. Amateur activities are considered hobbies, but with a capital H. Hobbyists engage in activities purely for their own intrinsic joy, without any serious aspirations. In this way, one activity can be two different things, depending on a person’s mindset, motivation, and approach—Schrodinger’s hobby.

So instead of deferring to random internet gatekeepers, refer to this sociological gold standard. It’s more useful than intuition alone. Once you shake the “my interests aren’t good enough” friction, you’ll realize most excuses are just convenient cop-outs. “But I have to work, I don’t have time!” What if I told you that investing in a serious hobby can improve your career?

Hobbies Can Improve Career Performance

A 2020 study published in the Journal of Vocational Behavior found that above-average time spent on leisure activities positively impacted people’s careers. This was found to be true under specific conditions. Activities that were high in seriousness and, crucially, different from their careers produced the most substantial benefits. The seriousness of an activity was defined as the extent to which individuals identified with and persevered in the activity. The similarity between leisure activities and careers was defined by the extent to which they involved different demands and skills. 

The researchers build on Stebbins’ Serious Leisure Perspective, identifying a serious activity as one characterized by perseverance through difficulties, intention towards continued involvement, effort to acquire skills and knowledge, and identity formation connected to the chosen leisure activity. Serious leisure has been linked to a series of positive outcomes, the study cites, including a greater sense of meaning within one’s life, experiences of positive affect, increased skill recognition, improved social relationships, personal growth, and improved health. 

The researchers were interested in extending the study of positive outcomes to career-related psychological resources, such as resilience and self-efficacy, which are thought to facilitate proactive engagement in shaping one’s career and protect well-being and productivity. These are vital for career sustainability. 

Serious leisure activities build self-efficacy through mastery and achievement, and strengthen resilience by providing lower-stakes contexts (compared to one’s career, where livelihoods are at risk) that expose individuals to failure and offer growth opportunities. By overcoming challenges, you develop perseverance, which in turn increases self-efficacy—a generalized, transferable confidence that spills over into your professional life. 

As you become more competent in your hobby, you feel more competent at work. Serious hobbies also help you adapt, bounce back, and grow in the face of setbacks, directly cultivating resilience. Crucially, when your hobby is both serious and distinct from your work, it doesn’t compete for the same resources (such as time and mental energy), allowing for full psychological detachment from work and the ability to shift mental gears. This avoids burnout, and taking your hobby seriously can actually leave you feeling more rejuvenated and effective at work. 

However, the study found that recreations high in seriousness and similar to one’s career (e.g., a teacher playing educational games for fun, but not to prepare for a lesson or a chef watching cooking shows) decreased work-related self-efficacy, suggesting a conflict in resource demands when individuals increased the time spent on them. In contrast, hobbies similar to one’s career but low in seriousness produced some positive effects, though these were less substantial than those from serious, different activities.

Finding the Right Hobby for You

Chemist and educator Karen McFarlane Holman, Ph.D., expands on this in her Tedx Talk, “The Remarkable Impact of Hobbies on Career.” Her anecdotal experience resonated deeply with me. She recalls being complimented as a child for being a “well-rounded” kid and reflects on how strange it is that, in adulthood, this quality suddenly loses its luster, instead taking on connotations of aimless distraction. 

McFarlane’s college days were equally split between late nights in the science lab and rock band practice. She confesses that despite her passion for both of these worlds, she found it difficult to maintain vigor in both her science and her music, but not for the reason you’d assume. Both are energy intensive, sure, but it was the “heaviness” she carried around with her—a stench of guilt that robbed her of the ability to immerse herself in either fully.” 

Because of our career-centric hustle culture, any time spent not devoted entirely to your career ambitions is often considered a waste of time or a sign you’re not committed or ambitious enough to the grind. This mindset even encroached on the duality of McFarlane’s artist-scientist mind, and she began to feel in her adult college years that when she played in her band, she was doing something she wasn’t supposed to be doing. “I felt as if I had a finite amount of dedication to give and if I didn’t put it all towards my career, I was actively turning my back on it.”

Suddenly, all the time she spent rocking out rather than reading papers or doing science labs, she felt shame, even though she wasn’t neglecting her education or training. She started to downplay her musical side in job interviews or outright hide it. She was almost on the one-way conveyor belt, where hobbies go to die, in the place of a budding career. Thankfully, McFarlane says, she avoided that trap, continuing to play in her band despite the guilt, and her lived experience over the past few decades has validated the very findings of this scientific literature: that science is her marathon, but rock music is her cross-training. “Without my cross-training, I can’t bring my A-game to the race—it’s because of my hobby that I perform well at work.”

This might sound trite to those of you who haven’t found your calling, but I can attest to the fact that my hobby makes me a better writer. The more seriously I take dance, the more seriously I take writing. The more time I devote to attending rehearsals and performances, the more time I make for developing my craft as a writer. It’s as if I’ve unlocked a magnificent regenerative resource, fueled by soul nourishment and honoring my identity—how I truly want to spend my time. Increased time spent on my hobby doesn’t deplete me; it rejuvenates me.

It turns out that the more you do what you’ve always wanted to do, the confidence, energy, motivation, and discipline start to compound and become transferable to your career. Or, as McFarlane so eloquently puts it, “By pulling from varied parts of our lives that have different skill sets or mindsets, we gain cross-pollination between our hobbies and careers.” 

So, maybe I’ve sold you on the utility of the hobby; that the excuses used to avoid getting one are flimsy and misunderstand the cross-pollination aspect of refining a craft. But you still might not know where to start. Holman offers a litmus test. First, ensure your hobby is conventionally distinct from your paid work (that is, if you want to reap the beneficial spillover effects from hobby to career). Then ask: Does this activity help me develop a skill? Does it entail some risk or challenge? Does it include aspirations or goals? If it checks one box, you’re off to a great start. If it checks all three, it’s a keeper, poised to ripple positive effects back into your career. If you’ve been feeling guilty for investing in a serious hobby, don’t. If anything, you should feel guilty for not having one. Maybe there really is something to that old adage: work hard, play hard.