There is a widely circulated idea that one should not necessarily be good, or pursue excellence, in our hobbies: I remember first coming across it in this article from the New York Times asserting that “it’s time to divest hobbies from productivity” while encouraging people to adopt a hobby, and a cursory glance through Google reveals a whole millieu of articles from diverse sources, repeating this same drumbeat in syncopated chorus: our hobbies are for our relaxation and our rest, and we need to enjoy them in and of themselves without comparing them to any sort of metric that might discourage us from continuing.

This mentality, while obviously good-intentioned, strikes me on the face of it to be wrong, or at least wrong for me, because I am not a hedonist, and saying that we should enjoy our hobbies for their own sake rather than trying to be productive in them strikes me as a hedonist perspective to hold. I am a man of many hobbies not because I crave to be materialistic (although I will admit, to my own detriment, that I am somewhat materialistic) but because I want to be a well-rounded human being, and my hobbies are what profit me in being that person: having pastimes, having leisure activities, is not about simply relaxing for its own sake but in order to have facets of human nature beyond the merely professional or academic. Ultimately, part of that is not remaining static in my leisure activities, but achieving some maturation or progression through these things with clear intent, because I wish to live an intentional life in all its aspects, and simply seeking after pleasure is not much of an intention. I write not merely because I enjoy it, although I do, but because I want to be better at communicating my thoughts with clarity. I read not merely because I enjoy it, although I do, but because it gives me a greater understanding of the world. I’ve been getting into watches and fountain pens not merely because I like having them, but because they take me away from my phone and detrimental hobbies that I’ve developed.

That is, I suppose, the crux of it: I’ve had a lot of hobbies in the typical sense of the word that have grown to be detrimental to me. I enjoy being online and watching Youtube videos, but it is detrimental to my thinking and my life, something I only really understood after reading Cal Newport’s excellent book Digital Minimalism. I’ve been into collecting a lot of toys and games, and while I still enjoy this, the scale at which I do so is likewise a detriment, weighing my appreciation of individual pieces down. These things no longer interest me as much because while I do like them, I would rather dedicate myself to the things I like and benefit me rather than the things I like that are either of nilpotent benefit or worse, impact me negatively in a holistic sense, and I can find enjoyment in enough things that I could pick and choose from both categories.

I should perhaps say: I do not think detrimental hobbies are, necessarily, inherently so. Much of these practices in limited quantity can serve me profitably — for example, there are a scant few recent Transformers I have added to my collection (not many) because they inspire me, while there are many preorders for similar figures that I have canceled because they will not and I was chasing a different goal (what that was, I could not tell you), But I have to be more careful about the proportionality of their import to my life. Signed books and imported manga series that go unread for the sake of “completionist” collecting serve only to weigh me down, whereas the wristwatches and pens that I use daily instead of checking my phone for the time or taking notes down on a digital device lift me up. I imagine it would be easy to become excessive in these things: the folks who own many thousands of fountain pens terrify me, because I expect I could easily head down that route and for what end? These things that are a joy to me would then become a sorrow, because I could not possibly use all of them.

Utility, then, is the name of the game. How do we use these things we have? How are we frittering our leisure-time away? I saw an GQ interview with Jerry Seinfeld recently where he said:

The secret of life is to waste time in ways you like: you spend all your life trying to save time, but when you get to the end of your life, there’s no time left, and you’ll go to heaven, and you’ll go: “But wait, I have Velcro sneakers, a no-iron shirt, a clip-on tie!” It’s gone.

Jerry Seinfeld is exactly right: we cannot take our free time with us when we die. We do have to waste time, because regardless of what happens to us ultra articulum mortis, we don’t have a second shot at these moments we’re given. We have to take them as they’re given, when they’re given. But even more than he expresses there (and I’d like to think he’d agree with me in this, because it’s somewhat implicit in what he says in the interivew) if we waste our time in ways we like that aid our growth, then it’s not a waste. We’ll have gained something out of it, and that’s how I want to live my life.

I’ll write again soon.