The Unmarketable, Completely Real Hobbies I Make Up
Embracing aimlessness
Article by Leigh Rose Walden, art by Isabella Hageman
“What are you studying in college?”
“What do you do outside of school?”
It feels like in conversations with anyone unfamiliar these are the two questions I get asked. And I know from experience that if my answer to the first one isn’t interesting enough (and let’s face it, my answer is sociology, so it’s usually not to most people) the latter will be the one most heavily relied upon to gauge what kind of person I am.
I know when I graduate those questions don’t go away, rather they’ll shift to “what do you do?” and “what do you do when you’re not working?” In a market society, our time is split into our working and our non-working hours. The things we do when we’re not working however, are feeling more and more like they are types of work.
When someone asks you what you do in your free time, what your hobbies are, there exists a feeling of pressure, for me at least, to say something impressive. At CC, impressive hobbies are not hard to bump into:
“I rock climb some of the world’s largest mountains.”
“I ski some of the state’s most out of bounds peaks.”
“I’m teaching myself graphic design.”
Very rarely do you hear someone answer the question “what are some of your hobbies?” with “I generally prefer to completely dissociate from reality while staring blankly, albeit accidentally, at total strangers.”
My hobbies (and I know they’re hobbies because they are things I do habitually as a form of rest) are seriously unimpressive when compared to some of my peers. I take extremely slow electric bike rides that don’t require me to pedal very much through the fancy homes in the Old North End. I pick out new and weird flavors of chips and candies from the C Store and tweet my impressions of them to my whopping 118 Twitter followers. I eavesdrop on strangers in coffee shops and give them names and try to imagine what it would be like to have brunch with them.
My hobbies are partially a reflection of what I have access to. They’re things I can do without spending much money or time, but they’re also things that feel like genuine rest. There’s no real goal in doing them, no one to impress or even to share them with. I’m not getting more fit, or smarter, or more interesting or more hirable by deciding that the new banana flavor of Sour Patch Kids is an abomination. The things I do when I rest are things that I genuinely enjoy.
In that respect, I think I’m lucky. I have experiences of friends coming up to me and grumbling that they’re having to do work on their non-work. That their hobbies are taking up too much space and creating too much pressure. However, feeling lucky and knowing I enjoy my hobbies doesn’t stop me from questioning whether my hobbies are “real.”
There are some signs that point to them being distinctly unconventional, the most glaring of which is the fact that I don’t bring them up when someone asks me what my hobbies are. I don’t jump to tell people that I’m going to take a break from my work by going on my phone and adding things to my Etsy cart that I will never buy. Instead I tell them things that sound vaguely impressive like reading or crocheting or hiking. Let alone the fact that I read mostly fantasy novels, have 5 unfinished crochet projects, and genuinely enjoy hikes only if they have a pretty view and snacks are involved.
For people who enjoy those things and find rest and reset in them, that is fantastic and beautiful. But for people like me, I wish there was more acceptance for rest that really isn’t necessarily productive. All that it is is rest.
I think those kinds of hobbies are radical. I think it is one of the most revolutionary acts to truly do unproductive things. To do things purely because they make being human more bearable, not because they’ll make us “better,” because what the hell is better anyways?
It feels like I’m being sold “better” in every direction. Do this to have a better body, this to have a better relationship, this to be a better student; commonly these suggestions are attached to products. “Buy this to look cuter, go to this event to be a more interesting person, oh and come on, only the worst people are not buying this product that saves trees through yoga, do you hate trees?”
It honestly makes me mad that my rest has become something that someone wants to market to me, and even more mad to think that they’re doing it by telling me that even in rest I am in deficit.
The way we engage in our hobbies ought to be unique to ourselves. In such a fast paced world and especially on the block plan, the times when we can rest and engage in things purely for enjoyment are truly invaluable. I'm tired of wasting it trying to do things that other people think will make me a “better” person.
I’m getting to a place where I’m more comfortable being real about my rest. Right now, being vague but honest has been working. “I enjoy trying new foods” and “I like to learn about old homes.” Maybe there will never be a day where I’m completely honest about what I do when I rest, but maybe there doesn’t have to be. The things I do are for me, and these useless, unmarketable, silly things are revolutionary anyways.