14 Why it’s good to have hobbies..but not too many!

The front burner--back burner approach  often becomes a necessity rather than just a virtue, because most of us have to get on with making a living, but often harbour other interests, or even passions, that we are forced to relegate to a lower priority. Also, there are periods in the best of careers that end up as a gap, a hiatus, in our lives, with perhaps nothing to do and no public role to play. 

This happens to the best of us: I was reading a book by an eminent police officer, who in fact even became a Governor, but at points in his career he was made to wait months for a posting because he had displeased the bosses. Often these hiatuses occur because our bosses simply aren’t interested, and not necessarily out of any malice afore-thought. So in our working lives, and in the in-between gaps (not least, after the final good-bye when we retire), we switch the pots from the back-burner to the front. Some of these pots are our hobbies and other interests.

In fact I’d say it’s essential to have a hobby or two, to tide over these dry spells, which are as inevitable as rainy days in our lives. We take them as an opportunity to develop other parts of our inner lives, our skills, our knowledge, our circle of friends and acquaintances, our store of experiences and stories. It could be something challenging like a genre of music, or an art which absorbs all our faculties, or it could be a day-to-day activity like arranging our possessions, cleaning and refurbishing our house, and so on. It could be anything, and it doesn’t have to be too intellectual or physically demanding. It could be the regular stuff we do in our lives, but taken up in a more focused, mindful, and learning way.

The one hobby which I would caution against is the consumption of over-refined and pre-digested stuff, whether it’s food or entertainment.

This brings me to the last part of this piece, the coda or tail: why would we have to guard against too many hobbies? For we often hear that there can never be “too much of a good thing”, and having hobbies is definitely a good thing.

Well, one reason is that we, normal, every-day human beings, have to maintain many types of balance in our lives. We have families, colleagues, and society depending on our carrying out certain tasks or functions regularly. That’s our mundane, day lives, which we cannot exchange entirely for a sizzling night-life of bohemian activity and self-indulgence. In the long term, purely self-gratifying activity fails to sustain and satisfy our inner desires for order, meaning and significance. Our lives become meaningful only in reference to our immediate and extended family, community and society, the absence of this being the main cause of the post-modernist sense of alienation and “anomie”. Too many hobbies will take us away from that important but mundane parts of our lives, leaving us feeling even more frustrated and futile.

A second reason is that hobbies satisfy by engaging us fully, as producers in howsoever a modest fashion, and not just as consumers. That’s why watching TV is not a hobby (it’s also not a good activity in general!). If we don’t achieve a certain level of competence, howsoever modest, in our chosen field, it leaves us unfulfilled. We like to take a brush and produce a painting, and not just look. We want to get behind the camera, not just pose for it. We want to write a story, not just read other peoples’ work. We want to travel and see new places, hear new languages, not just see it on the screen.

A certain minimum amount of time is required even to become a discerning hobbyist. It’s often said that the difference between an amateur and a professional, is nothing but ten thousand hours of concentrated application; the difference between a passive consumer and the knowledgeable amateur should be some fraction of this, but still requiring a substantial investment of time, effort, and, let’s face it, money. So it’s better to have a small number of serious hobbies, than a phrase-book worth of random diversions. Even the back-burner has to be attended to, howsoever low the flame, lest it boil over!