Why have hobbies?
Article • 525 Words • Hobbies, 2023 • 12/06/2023
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An overview of the relevant instrinsic and extrinsic motivations for having a hobby.
There are 544 words in this article, and it will probably take you less than 3 minutes to read it.
This article was published 2023-12-06 00:00:00 -0500, which makes this post and me old when I published it.
Introduction
I’ve tried to answer what are hobbies?, but what about the why?
Why do people not have hobbies?
- It can be hard to find hobbies. When you’re young, you might not have the agency or the time or the money to really decide and do things that you like, you are mostly at the mercy of your parents and what they know.
- People don’t understand what they do can be classified as hobbies (I talk about this in my other article).
- People don’t understand why hobbies are necessary, which is where this article comes in!
But now back to the main topic at hand: why have hobbies? There are two types of reasons: internal and external. Internal reasons are things for yourself/towards yourself, whereas external is towards others, or how you can engage with others.
Internal
You have to find ways to fill time in order to stay happy and healthy.
- You have a lot of time outside of work for your 5-9, weekends, and during retirement. You better find things that you like to do in order to fill your time and keep your brain and body active!
- Research shows that engaging in hobbies does help, but especially if you have a active hobby.
- Filling your life with joy is the only reason to stay alive, so it only makes sense that you would find things that you like to do.
Hobbies are a great way to develop new parts of your identity.
- No this does not mean make climbing your identity, but I think that everyone is multi-faceted and having hobbies and interests makes you a more colorful person.
- As you go deeper into hobbies you can learn more things and make connections between your previous knowledge or other hobbies perhaps.
External
Having a hobby or interest helps you bond with other people.
- If you are the pottery guy next time someone sees some nice porcelain or pottery they might think of you send it to you, so think of you and these kind of things allow you to perhaps.
- You can engage in interest groups in places like Reddit or in-real life meetup groups.
Hobbies give you something to talk about.
- If you have the same interests or maybe something that having something that you’re passionate and knowledgeable about just helps you have better conversations because people will be drawn to ask you questions to curious.
Something that I’ve really hated has been about focusing on the extrinsic benefits too much, like the Harvard Business Review. You should not pick a hobby so that you can de-stress and be a better worker in a capitalist system or to build up your intellect/complementary skillset to your work. I understand that the whole point of the HBR is to focus on business and work, but I think that it is incredibly bleak to talk about “finding meaning outside of work,” for I feel like implicit into that statement is that the main form of meaning for these people is found through work. I don’t think that there is anything wrong with finding meaning in your work, but value is being extracted from you.