We need a better popular understanding of "hobbies," because it conflates a bunch of highly sophisticated activities, and dismisses them as neutral distractions from laboring for the profit of others. The underlying presumption is that your identity is labour you get paid for, and anything you don't get paid for is somehow inessential to who you are. It's an impoverished worldview based on scarcity and ignores growth.
A hobby is only a distraction if you have internazlied an identity as the subject of some supervisor, and that "free time," comes as a treat or a reward from some other unspecified party, as though you were just a pet doing tricks for approval. Treating them diminuitively is just a polite way of not embarassing other people who are unable to manage their time as well or enrich their own lives to the same degree. Personally, I don't have hobbies, I just do a lot of things, and so I manage my time to do them, and adopting that worldview lets you do more of them.
I have a theory, all the "high quality" hobbies are challenging in one way or another, thus require some level of will power to push yourself to do it.
If you've been pushing yourself hard at work all day, then you have likely depleted your will power. Passive activities become the only ones you feel like doing.
I agree that often certain hobbies require a push to get started. That initial barrier is what I found the hardest to overcome, but once you start going - it becomes easier and easier. Similar to how one can attempt to overcome moments of procrastination - you need to get started and push through initial discomfort.
I think it's more that after 8 exhausting hours, I don't have energy anymore for anything. The 8 exhausting hours would be a day full of meetings, after which my brain is a mush and doesn't work anymore.
I don’t believe this, if you push yourself to bike through a forrest, run until you’re out of breath, talk a long walk after work… You’ll come back with more energy then when you spend that time on the couch binging Squid Game. There is just no doubt in my mind about this.
But it may start out feeling like a diet for the mind, that I am willing to believe. But like with a healthy diet you’ll benefit immensely over time. But it requires discipline.
I took a 60 mile bike ride yesterday in perfect weather, much of it on a beautiful forest road, and afterwards I was exhausted and it took a huge amount of effort even just to feed myself, and it was totally impossible to summon any motivation to spend 5 minutes to do the dishes afterward. I've been riding a bike for a decades, have crossed continents by bike, and have bike commuted my entire career pre-COVID.
I slept pretty well and feel healthy and energized today and doing the dishes was easy this morning, but it's totally contrary to my entire life experience to claim that doing something physically tiring gives you more energy afterward.
Not that doing nothing all the time feels good— humans just don't have unlimited capacity for output. Taking a leisurely morning walk (or a moderate-distance bike commute) certainly gets my day started on the right foot, but going harder faster longer at physical activity makes me physically tired and less capable of doing other things.
I'll bet there is a curve. My own experiences cycling suggest that a little bit isnt helpful. A good amount is energizing, and too much is exhausting. For me those attachment and detachment points are probably [0;8;20]. Your mileage will absolutely vary.
A great exercise would be to find some causality from Strava data and git commit, both of which I have fairly extensive data on.
Human metabolism, and also the brain, needs rest after exertion in order to be able to do more work. Some people have it easier in that regard, but everybody has their own limits. Discipline in that context means pushing limits, which is not advisable long-term. Every system eventually fails when put under too much ongoing stress - burnout (/overtraining) is one of the lesser problems this can create.
Pushing limits in terms of the brain is binging garbage in stead of looking at trees, listening to birds.
Pushing the limits of a body is sitting in a chair for 8 hours, barely moving, in stead of walking around doing stuff with your hands, taking a swim, climbing a tree picking some nuts.
We should make no mistakes about what the natural actions and states of our minds and bodies are.
Yes and imagine an intense level of stress when your partner asks what kind of movie you want to watch. Because, your brain just cannot process a single new decision.
You wrote it as a humour. But I learned that if I minimize an amount of decisions I have to do in my life, that makes me more productive at work. I believe that making a decision is the most exhausting activity, at least for me. I can spend my daily decision limit to choosing a movie or choosing a framework.
I read that Steve Jobs chose one outfit to wear every day. One less choice to make. Rituals/Habits help too. I learned the hard way that organization actually frees yourself to do stuff.
Consider keeping a list of media you want to watch for occasions like this.
Exhausted or not, you’re probably more likely to come across something unexpectedly and write it down than remember them all and offer up something fitting from memory.
Having a 15 to 30 minutes nap when my brains is mushy usually allow me to reset and get my mind in a more energized state, might be worth trying for you too.
> once you start going - it becomes easier and easier
This may hold for activities like programming, where every decision follows almost logically from the previous ones. But if you're doing really hard research, with setback after setback, then it's much harder to "ignite" a work appetite.
I used to push paperwork and send out emails, sometimes analyzing drawings, but not actually use my brain too much as a construction project engineer. As a data engineer, it definitely feels more taxing on the mental side.
> once you start going - it becomes easier and easier.
It isn’t just getting going makes the project (hobby) easier.
It is the ability to organize the project into small steps that are relatively easy and yield novel artifacts.
Giving light structure to a hobby or side project (such as using GitHub issues even if it doesn’t involve code) let’s you pick up where you left off and see the incremental progress.
This administration is a practice of itself but the more you do it, the more natural it feels and easier it becomes to see progress.
> Ego depletion as a concept has been challenging to prove, if at all
Isn't this just a problem in trying to reduce the phenomenal experience of self into some objective reality, a quest that reduces to something adjacent to the hard problem of consciousness.
After switching careers to software engineering, I find that I appreciate high intensity / action oriented video games less (DMC, Monster Hunter, etc.).
My browser history is now filled with "chill or relaxing games", "games that don't need thinking" or something to that effect.
You seem to be seeking proxies for the effect of not thinking, putting your mind and body at ease, and letting go. Have you given meditation a try? Anecdotally, it can fulfill these needs in a way no other semi-conscious activity seems capable.
I started meditating when I was in university and have done it on and off since then. However, I've stopped a couple of months ago and haven't had the will to do it again. I find other activities more compelling, like reading everylayout or about rails performance.
My experience has been that if work is exhausting, then I turn to games that don't have much of narrative, but which rather on the mechanics. Like racing games, one does not have to think too much, but one has to be alert and focused on it.
Doom Eternal was that kind of game for me. After a long day with another pointless meeting with the usual assholes, slaying demons left and right was almost therapeutic.
Same, I have a bunch of games like Nier: Automata, Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, Bloodborne, Control and I found that I can only play them on the weekend. After work, I can only play game like Dirt Rally, Trials Fusion and Apex Legends’ Arena. Where you don’t have to strategize that much and only rely on learnt reflexes. Anything that requires decisions or deciphering clues is impossible.
When you get better at this kind of technically challenging game, there is a kind of flow that happens when you try to get better at previous challenge. The thinking is very minimal as you are only observing where you can improve. And it's a good feeling when you have indeed improved.
Presenting an alternative perspective, I have a high pressure job that requires deep thought (I'm in infosec) and my hobbies are pretty much all about skill/intensity. No judgement if that's what you like, but I find chill/relaxing games to be boring and can't play them for very long without having to go find something more meaningful to do. I enjoy being alone with my thoughts, I just find low-stakes games to be a weird in-between area and while I know they're super popular I just don't get it.
As a sibling comment says, ego depletion research is pretty low quality in terms of reproducibility. Anecdotally, I have never found it to be true for me.
Last time I worked in infosec, it was quite slow, depending on what you're doing. AFAIK you're either monitoring things, in which case it only gets interesting when there is an incident, and/or you're doing projects, but they are slow moving because they involve approvals, physical hardware, etc. If you're writing code all day I guarantee you'll feel drained.
As I said in the post you replied to, my job is high pressure and requires deep thought. My team writes a ton of code, and there's an on-call rotation where you're dealing with incidents and grooming training sets for our models.
> ...I guarantee you'll feel drained.
You'd lose that bet. Maybe you are, I however find writing code just as interesting and invigorating as I did over a decade ago in university. I do it at work, I do it in my free time both for purpose and for fun.
I'm just saying that from experience, I highly doubt there is an infosec job where you have less free time than the average coder. If you have time for deep thinking about problems, you have the kind of time I'm talking about that is super rare _on average_ in the industry.
> ...I highly doubt there is an infosec job where...
I understood your point, you're just incorrect. Different people are different, which was my point.
Now that we have that out of the way, I have to ask; are you ok? You seem really invested in this idea that programming is some kind of exhausting, herculean endeavor and that anyone who is a real coder must be exhausted at the end of a day of coding. That is not normal. If you don't enjoy your job I strongly recommend that you look around. Programming is a super valuable skill and I'm sure you can find a job that's more inline with your life.
I'm more speaking for the average junior dev -- I part-time as a mentor for a coding bootcamp and get to interview thousands of 1st year junior devs on a yearly basis, and the burnout rate is incredible. Contrast that with my time working in infosec, where I had 20-30 hours a week of free time in which to work on random side projects, play call of duty with my boss (literally), etc., while we wait for X thing to be approved or wait for an incident to occur (which might take a whole quarter). When I did the same for the DoD, things were amusingly both less lax and slower.
Now as a CTO at a YC startup, I've created an environment where devs have good work/life balance, time off is encouraged, engineering has significant say and sway on product decisions, etc., but this is by no means the industry norm.
On the infosec side, the industry norm seems to be infosec is largely consolidating as the industry switches to outsourcing everything to public clouds (read: disappearing), and what remains is pretty relaxed unless you are chasing bounties all day, which is typically a self-driven situation. Penetration tests for example seem to have longer timelines these days even though most of the tools are now automated (our startup just went through SOC-2, and I can tell you from the server logs almost all the checks on our staging server happened in the last 72 hours of the evaluation period). My assumption is for the other 26 days of the evaluation they are indeed playing call of duty, and so it goes for the whole infosec industry.
I have similarly found that all of my activities are not things you can do when you're recovering from food poisoning and have massive thick brain fog all day. So I got into gardening, cooking and then baking, improving my own work clothing and putting up shelves around the kitchen and house.
And walking alone. Which is amazing, if you leave your phone at home.
That's not the case for me. After working on annoying software tasks all day, I like to do a 34-mile/2-hour bike ride. I do this same route very frequently. It's refreshing because it's so completely different from my job.
In contrast, a lot of games feel like work - guess where you're supposed to go or how to solve a problem, fail due to some trivial mistake, retry many times.
> Passive activities become the only ones you feel like doing.
Very true. But changing your lifestyle to a high degree is about turning the activities that you like into these “passive activities” like going for a morning run doesn’t feel like something you need to mentally or even physically exert yourself to do for someone who does it regularly 4 times a week.
Even, predictable difficulty is key. Too easy and it's boring; too hard and it's frustrating. Suddenly, surprisingly difficult is so challenging it's the kind of thing that gets you riches and fame.
> Passive activities become the only ones you feel like doing.
That's not the case in my experience. After a full day managing teams, solving problems and coding, I find it "relaxing" to do a physically and mentally challenging instructor/coach-led activity.
For me, that means swimming, water polo or other team sport, dance classes learning a complex choreography, etc.
It's relaxing switching off the "I'm in charge" part of my brain, while still getting the flow and enjoyment of improving a skill, especially with others in a non-tech environment.
I've been seeing a lot of these sorts of articles recently (time online is ruining your life; here are 17 ways to disconnect), and I have to say I simply reject the premise. Once again, it's binary thinking creeping in and human brains generally being far more receptive to arguments along the lines of "this technology/concept/ideology/whatever is bad and you should reject it" over ones that say "this technology/concept/ideology/whatever is a tool and its value is dependent on how its used and when it's applied".
I've seen the binary thinking problem applied to the internet/online life quite a bit recently, and it bothers me because growing up my experiences of the internet/web were almost overwhelmingly positive, constructive, and developmental in nature. It was instrumental in my development as a person because it's a tool that allows you to read constantly. For people with lots of innate curiosity there really is nothing more powerful than that. The encroachment of the social media/video streaming/adtech companies into the space doesn't negate that use case, so I'm extremely hesitant to say if everyone would just unplug the world would magically be better.
This may seem snarky but you should apply similar thinking to the article itself. It might be written in a certain but you don’t have to read it as it’s intended.
I’ve learned, grown, and profited a lot around screens but now I’m looking for hobbies outside screens. While I reject the premise that time spent looking at screens are wasted, this article may help with finding my next hobby.
While I agree that completely "unplugging" is not the ideal solution, doing so occasionally helps you understand how to use technology intentionally (i.e as a tool, not an escape). You realize what you miss and what you don't, which allows you to reallocate your usage.
What's missing for most people is some structured way to reflect about this, so I created a free* accountability group program [0] that helps them do this alongside others who want to use technology in a healthy way. (Very open to feedback!)
* Free to join, but requires a credit card to enforce financial accountability - we donate money to charity (not us) on your behalf if you don't complete the program. Time commitment is only 15 min/week.
I've actually found video games is one of my high quality leisure, but only the single player or local multiplayer experiences.
My low quality leisure are my consumption (or constant checking for new content or upvotes) of blogs, articles, news, social media posts of people that aren't my real close friends or family, and all of my online commenting, including this one.
Probably also consuming things I didn't actually want to consume count as well, so like watching random things that Netflix recommended or just showed up on TV versus watching a movie I'm actually interested in and want to watch. This is same for randomly playing video games like say on GamePass (like trying a bunch of games quickly).
I'm trying to cut a lot of that out, and instead focus on playing only the games that truly interest me, watching only the shows and movies that truly interest me, only the books I really want to read, etc. Once you cut it down to just that, you'll find you still have a ton of free time, and you'll slowly be forced to also take a walk, go for a bike ride, work on your hobby projects, call a friend, grab a coffee, do a workout, cook something from a recipe book, play with your kids, take your partner out on a date, or go to bed early, etc.
Yes. High-quality games like Factorio or Machinarium are quite good fun. Also helps if a game is finite, not infinite. For example, while you can play Factorio endlessly, the rocket is the goal and it gets less fun once you've done all the things - which is good. You play it, you enjoy it, you move on. That kind of play is quite healthy.
What is even going on here? Scroll to the bottom and this low production self-help book (which looks like it should be happy to be free) has three tiers of pricing and subscription crap?
Learning is not a leisure activity. I'm not saying it can't be fun or engaging or a great pastime but it requires as much focus if not more than work. It also requires constant attention (even if its in small amounts). It gives people a feeling of accomplishment and purpose but it is no way relaxing.
I am sort of tired of these articles about procrastination, etc that equate like watching a movie and going to the gym or hiking. The activities aren't in the same realm at all. Basically shaming people for sitting around doing nothing with your brain off. I don't think you should be living your life like that all the time, but having an hour or two of straight mindlessness is not a bad thing. Pushing yourself to always be doing the activities you "should" do because some online guru says thats the right way to spend your time leads to burnout too.
I found the article useful, maybe it is not for everyone but I would try to use some of the tips to reduce the mindless surfing time.
Eg. today I mindlessly surf for 2 hours, but maybe I do that for 20 minutes and then take a 15 minute walk - that might recharge me the same amount but still give me time to do something healthier or more mindful in the remaining time.
I disagree with that. I agree with the rest of your comment, there's nothing wrong with turning your brain off for however long you want, but leisure doesn't have to mean "turning your brain off". I program for leisure because that's what I like to do.
I sometimes do it on the weekend, mainly because then I can program in new and more interesting areas. But after work feels impossible, I just don't want to sit in front of the computer still.
I definitely tend to spend all my waking hours in front of a computer coding. If I am going to do something other than coding I would prefer to allocate an entire day to it than bother with a coding session that isn't going to benefit from the flow state that comes from coding for 16 hours straight. (Maybe you just hate your job? I work for myself.)
FWIW, I turn 40 next month, which is apparently "old" in this field. With the exception of a few months in grad school when I became so utterly demoralized by how all of the software we use on a daily basis is horrible and I quit computers entirely (even doing a "powerpoint presentation" using physical cellophane slides that I carefully drew to look like a stereotypical powerpoint presentation with markers) I have kept up my excitement to use and program computers until the whee hours of the morning for three decades.
I could easily program after my previous jobs (small teams, relaxed atmosphere), but at my current job (large enterprise, constant crunch) it’s impossible.
I’m just mentally done when I come home. I think about programming anything and my brain just screams No!.
My main non-scrolling hobby is music. Parts of learning to play better are hard work that require conscious effort, but the majority of time I spend on it is practice, which I find to be very relaxing and fun. I imagine the same is true for lots of other hobbies.
> Parts of learning to play better are hard work that require conscious effort, but the majority of time I spend on it is practice
If you practice without conscious effort then you aren't practicing, you are just playing and almost surely isn't improving. There is a reason hobbyist stop improving early and then never improve even after years or even decades of practice, it is because they spend their quality focus and effort on their job rather than their hobby and therefore can't improve like professionals who gets paid to focus on it.
> If you practice without conscious effort then you aren't practicing, you are just playing and almost surely isn't improving
This is true to an extent, but at least with music there's sort of a spectrum of difficult -> automatic (i.e. hard work -> pleasure) as you build up muscle memory.
I played piano for many, many years without making conscious effort to improve, and, like you described, I didn't get any better. Once I decided to get serious and start taking lessons again things changed; it gave me an external incentive to make progress each fortnight and practice daily.
There's an element of it that feels like pressure at first (its easier and more tempting to play something I already know than to work on a new song/exercise), but once I get the basics of it right and enter the phase of repeated practice to improve, that's where the fun part comes which I genuinely enjoy. With a bit of practice it becomes automatic and I can just enjoy the process and experiment with whatever comes into my mind (this is with jazz, not sure how it applies to other genres) I find it an extremely therapeutic experience.
For a lot of people doing manual labor, learning can absolutely be a leisure activity. It is a refreshing way to relax your tired body while stimulating a restless mind.
If you spend your days in an office, then going to the gym and doing deadlifts may feel like a leisure activity. It conversely allows you to relax your tired mind while stimulating a restless body.
What constitutes relaxation is dependent on what part of you needs to rest.
Maybe there's a pedagogical setup where learning becomes .. smooth. What's hard is grokking very different and abstract notions in one go. But if someone can walk you slowly through fun smaller instances of it, let your brain adapt (<= maybe 80% of learning) in a happy mood, then come back the day after to do that again. Which puts the pressure on the environment (reminiscent of people saying focus on the process not the results).
Everything can be insufferably hard when approached the wrong way, vice versa.
And to nobody's surprise, it turns out humans are different from each other. Learning is for me one of the highest forms of leisure. But I know not everyone feels that way.
depends on what you are learning, I can casually watch documentaries or YT videos about a topic and still take away some facts with moderate focus when I'm tired after working all day. On the other hand if I'm trying to learn something really technically/conceptually complex I need a fresh mind and full focus on the task
At some point in life, usually when we see people around us dying of age-related or chronic illness, we start giving importance to our physical health – usually the heart, liver, kidney, joints etc. If we think of the brain/mind as another critical organ, then we should start caring for it similarly but it is hard to spot chronic illness of the mind around us.
Mental health is important – now what constitutes good mental health regime is under considerable debate. But nevertheless, if we care enough to proactively do something about it, it is already better than nothing.
Reminds me of an episode of Queer Eye For the Straight Guy. The guy had a mess of a house. Clutter everywhere. He had no style to speak of. Didn’t really seem interesting either. Of course the queer guys fixed things up for him.
What was mentioned kind of in passing was that he worked two jobs. I don’t think the makeover was lasting.
> he was scared of stopping playing video games and surfing the Internet
For me it depends on the utility I get out of games. Minecraft is like Lego 2.0 and players often share custom maps they've built so there's a community there too. Minecraft is also hackable and I've seen many videos on Youtube of people creating exceptionally creative things with it. It's not just a time-sink: people derive pleasure out of sharing their creativity with the world - something difficult to do with Lego or board-games.
As for surfing the Internet: well yes the Internet can be an endless rabbithole if you let it. I've stopped treating it as a rabbithole though, and casually glance at the Hackernews frontpage in the morning, see what tools / services / products I can leverage going forward, then close the tab, after bookmarking a link or two which I will revisit later when I'm feeling creative. Same for Reddit, Twitter etc
You can either scroll mindfully or scroll mindlessly. It's your choice.
"meet new people" is missing from the list. I wonder how diverse a 20-something's circle is these days vs 20 years ago. I used to talk to as many different people as I could: motor cycle mechanics, Johns Hopkins post docs, NSA engineers, actors, set dressers, woodworkers, painters, business owners. Does the opportunity to get out of your "social bubble" still exist today?
Sincerely, as a person between 25 to 35 years old, i don't know how to get out my social bubble outside friends, family, or co-workers instroducing me new people, specially as an introverted and "interested in things"[1] kind of person.
[1]: Here I'm talking about the spectrum between those who are interested in other people and other who are interested in things.
Tomorrow, when we will work less, have basic income, and have more leisure time,
this type of list will be very important.
Otherwise, we will be human in Wall E movie
I know lots of people who both have kids and engage in tons of the items on this list. One of the most active, well-read people I know is a mother of 5.
My father's solution was to set aside every Saturday to play a full 18-hole round of golf. I grew up in a family of three children and he kept this up since the beginning (and still does). It did him wonders as a way to de-stress from his work, get physical exercise, and maintain a healthy social life outside of work, while still leaving time on the weekend to spend with family.
I don't have kids myself, but if I did I'd imagine I'd try to find something similar.
Our 4 year old wakes up about 6am (give or take 45 minutes) and as soon as she knows I'm awake, wants to read, talk, play together. Our 7 year old gets to bed at 7:45 in the evening, which is early compared to his friends. All the time outside of work between 6am and 7:45 pm is dominated by them. In the nicest possible way - but it's full on. All the time. My wife and I are both very tired by 7:45pm, need some social / couple time, but have so little mental energy to do anything beyond chores / essentials that all pre kids hobbies are waaaaay deprioritised.
Say we have friends over once a week, a date night once a week, a social / community engagement once a week, a rest evening, it's like 4 evenings (8pm until 10pm...) max available for anything - with brains like mush. Add in chores, finances, shopping, contacting relatives and others...
What kind of planning would it take for you to have a detox week? Do you have to call someone, tell them you won't be answering the phone this week? Do you need to notify your employer, work something out for that week to only come in on Thursday?
I think there are at least three notions of "high-quality" conflated in the article:
- leisure which also satisfies longer-term goals (e.g., listening to an educational podcast, practicing a skill), vs leisure which is only pleasant in the moment
- leisure that you had to make some deliberate effort to initiate and with a clear end time (e.g., going out, going to the movies) vs leisure which starts automatically and ends when it does (e.g., binge-watching)
- leisure that gets you outdoors and/or with other people, vs leisure that doesn't
And of course you can find many kinds of activities along these dimensions. Binge-reading Wikipedia can be instructive even if it's an impulsive behavior and indoors/alone. Sitting down to play a short video game and finish it in a few hours can be actively chosen fun even though it's indoors and only pleasant in the moment. Walking in nature can be pleasant and outdoors but not instructive. Ambient chatting with a friend can be social even if it's indoors and impulsive...
I'd add a scientific bent to those pursuits, if you are so inclined. Get into the habits of thinking like a naturist in the Age of Humboldt vein. A local library, for example, recently held a "DIY Telescope" night. And I always get personally nostalgic whenever I see a young child of today heading out to the fields to test an Estes Rocket ;)
What distinguishes streaming podcasts from the internet different than "spending time online" such that the former is good, while the latter is ruining your life?
How is consuming some of these other digital products better than "surfing" the internet?
Most of the time I'm learning things on the internet. It also helps one find new hobbies. For example, I've been researching ultralight aircraft recently. I dont think I'll actually get one due to price, storage, spouse, etc. But it's fun to learn about.
