Thoughts on hobbies

There is an optimal intensity range for doing hobbies or anything hobby-related. I suspect this also applies to things outside of hobbies.

For example, if you’re reading a book, there’s a speed that’s too slow: you don’t get immersed enough into the book, you lose track of what it was that you read about last time you read the book, and it’s a sort of a protracted pain, in which the very act of reading the book feels like a chore.

Then on the other end, there’s reading a book too fast. You blaze through it so fast that it doesn’t feel like you savored it enough. It feels like you could have gone a bit slower and enjoyed the process of reading. This applies both to fiction and non-fiction; as a child, I once read Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (~700 pages) in a day, and felt sad because I didn’t get to properly experience the emotional ups and downs. I remember setting the book down in the afternoon and saying to myself: “well, this sucks, I should have taken a week to read this”.

Similarly, I once read Peter Singer’s Practical Ethics (~100) pages for four entire months. It’s not that the book was bad, I just had other things going on in my life and, as a result, it took me a great deal of time to go through a relatively short book. I remember saying to myself: “wow, this took around 10 times longer as it should have”.

In other hobbies that I’ve done: I’ve both done too much jiu jitsu and too little jiu jitsu, in different periods of my life. In the first instance, I was preparing for a tournament, so the extra effort was understandable, but there was a sense in which it had become an obligation, a pain in the ass, something I had to go through because I had previously committed to the idea of competing and representing my club. And in the “too little” era, I’d go once a month, or twice a month, and I’d just feel guilty for not going more, and then the class would progress without me actually building my game in a systematic way.

There’s something rather disheartening when you do too little of your hobby, you get back to it, maybe due to a moment of inspiration, and you try to do the last thing you did when you were actually doing the hobby more frequently, and you realize that you can’t. You’ve regressed. Your skill has dropped considerably and you now have to relearn the thing you sort of mastered a couple of months or years ago.

Every once in a while I’ll pick up the guitar and realize that I always have to relearn the same song (Malaguena). I’ve become really really good at the first 30 seconds of it, and everything after that is a pain to go through. To be clear: I can play it, it just isn’t masterful or fluid, you can hear the stutters and the attempts to remember (except certain passages that I can’t play at all because I never got to them).

I started learning this song… oh, it must be five years or more now. And it’s annoying because after five years of technically trying to learn it, I feel partially like a failure (who takes five years to learn a single song?) but on the other hand I know that if I learned it appropriately – spending a couple of hours a week instead of a couple of hours per quarter – I could probably nail it in, I don’t know, a week or two. I give myself a month for proper mastery.

The “doing a hobby too rarely” thing stings even more when it’s a social hobby like the aforementioned jiu jitsu, because you train alongside guys who are roughly at your skill level. Then you go off and do whatever you do in your life that makes you not adhere to a reasonable training schedule of three sessions a week, you start coming in once a week, then once a month, then you skip a couple of months. And once you decide “ok it’s time to actually come back”, you meet with the same guys that were on your own level, or even below, such that you were regularly beating them, and you just get crushed.

This is all a tradeoff between width and breadth; you can’t do everything, and you can’t get better at everything at the same time, and you can only get good at a limited amount of things anyway, because to remain good, for any definition of “good”, it takes continuous investment of time and energy. Obviously this only applies to hobbies where there is a skill ladder, but most hobbies are like that. I guess some people do things for enjoyment alone. Listening to music and going for walks are such activities. You can’t really become better at listening to music or better at having a walk. Yet even in those situations I will find myself exploring the edges of that activity. I’ll try to figure out a piece of music, or I’ll listen to more bands or more obscure genres, sort of “expanding” my listening repertoire, and thereby improving my taste. Same for “going for a walk”, the most harmless, non-competitive, enjoyment-only hobby, I will at the very least try to map out my neighborhood, see as much as I can of any given place, explore different trails, and then I’ll really go overboard and start rucking (putting a weighted rucksack and doing more of a military march than a relaxed walk).

One thing that does bring me comfort is that sometimes explicitly setting a hobby to “maintenance only” brings a sort of peace of mind. It’s like: I no longer wish to improve my skill in this area, and I am satisfied with doing the minimum work necessary not to lose all progress that I have accumulated.

Another thing is redefining the goal of the hobby. I keep going back to jiu jitsu but it probably applies to many other hobbies; I have redefined my whole game to ignore 90% of any standard jiu jitsu curriculum, instead focusing only on Just Standing Up ™️ in every single situation, doing a couple of mount escapes, having almost no offense, and literally only two or three strangles, with zero locks of any kind. My “game”, if it can be even called that way, is so stripped down to bare essentials that it would have looked silly to me from seven years ago, but here I am, discarding almost all of the curriculum because I have redefined the goal of what the activity means to me: I want to be able to stand up in any single situation, I want to never be pinned down, and if I do attack, I want to do only attacks that work against bigger opponents with very high pain tolerance (even pain-resistant heavyweights will go to sleep from a stranglehold). This is similar to my current drumming “game”, where I don’t really care about fills or… whatever you’re supposed to be learning. I just focus on hi-hat-snare-bass, turn on my metronome, and build up my precision and grooviness (this is even visible in how much less wear and tear there is on the rest of the drum kit).

Finally a third thing is learning that there is indeed such a range, where doing anything below or above it will have its own set of problems. This will allow me to say “no” to many things, which will help me concentrate my energy on one thing, doing it well rather than watering down my efforts by doing too many things poorly. This has paid off the most I think. I’ll give anything a go, really, but I will not give a second go to most things. I’ve thus far successfully evaded three attempts to be recruited into a band, a tennis school, and a skiing trip.