On social media, hobbies, and the lost art of doing things for yourself.
Social media has done something strange to us. We now know hundreds of people we will never truly know, we witness thousands of lives we will never quite understand, and we see so many curated versions of existence that the real and the performed have become genuinely difficult to tell apart.
I've been thinking about this a lot lately. The constant exposure — to other people's opinions, aesthetics, milestones, routines — has a subtle but corrosive effect. You stop forming opinions because you want to. You start adopting them because they're already there, already liked, already validated by numbers. Somewhere in that process, something quieter and more personal gets lost.
What I want — what I think a lot of us quietly want — is to live unfiltered. Not to perform a version of a life, but to actually inhabit one. To sit with a thought long enough to form an opinion about it. Even a half-formed opinion, even an uncertain one, is more mine than a borrowed certainty.
And I think hobbies might be the answer. Not hobbies as content. Not hobbies as a side hustle or a personal brand or something to post about. Hobbies as the quiet, private act of enriching your own life for no one's benefit but yours.
Painting. Writing. Decluttering a room. Tending a small garden. Reading something no algorithm recommended. These things don't look impressive on a grid. They don't generate engagement. But they generate something rarer — a sense that your life belongs to you.
And yet — I've asked myself this honestly — why do I resist them? The answer I keep arriving at is embarrassing in its simplicity: I've told myself they're a waste of time. But a waste compared to what? Compared to scrolling for forty minutes? Compared to watching something I won't remember? Hobbies are not the waste. They never were. I think I left them behind as a kid and now I'm just scared to start again, scared they won't come easily, scared of the vulnerability of being a beginner at something that doesn't pay.
But maybe that's exactly the point. Maybe the things that don't pay are the things that give back in the ways that actually matter.
Further reading: The Atlantic — "How to Be Less Lonely" · Harvard Business Review — "Why You Should Have a Hobby That Has Nothing to Do with Work"