Give yourself a job that only has tasks you enjoy
Hobbies are good for your well-being
The other day when I was going through a cabinet in our family room, I discovered my daughters’ old art supplies. It was a little sad to see the abandoned supplies. It reminded me of the arts and crafts supplies I used to keep stashed in my mom’s china closet cabinet growing up and all of the enjoyable afternoons I spent as a child creating stuff just for the sheer pleasure of the experience.
Neither my daughters nor I had the talent or interest to support a career in the arts, so our artsy activities fell by the wayside. Once you reach high school, who has enough free time to pursue a hobby or a mindless pastime? Attention typically turns to homework and all those extracurricular activities directed toward college applications.
I want to make a case for bringing back hobbies once you’re a full-grown adult. In fact, I strongly encourage you to take advantage of your free time to rediscover your passions outside of work.
While it's easy to set aside hobbies and mindless pastimes, you're wrong to think they are just time-wasters. Humans are not designed to engage solely in goal-directed behavior seven days a week. Hobbies that you enjoy trigger the release of feel-good chemicals, making them good for your mental health.
A 2023 study that followed more than 93,000 adults across multiple countries over several years found that people with hobbies—loosely defined as activities done for pleasure during leisure time—self-reported higher health, happiness, and life satisfaction.
One of the hobbies I returned to in my 20s was gardening. I had my own vegetable garden in my tween and early teen years. Since I wasn’t interested in pursuing a career in botany or landscape architecture, I gave up my garden once having dirt under my fingernails didn’t seem cool anymore.
But once I had my own house and more time on my hands, I decided to give gardening a whirl again. I wasn’t interested in growing vegetables, but the flowers featured in those Monet paintings I admired appealed, so I started planting seeds again.
Though I didn’t like weeding, I enjoyed researching different flower combinations and designs. The photo at the top of this post shows the garden I created at the foot of our driveway. The other picture shows the flowers I planted in the raised beds the previous homeowners had made from old railroad ties. It wasn’t much, but it looked better than what would have otherwise turned into an overgrown patch of weeds.
Gardening turned out to be a hobby that evolved as my circumstances changed. Once the kids came along, I switched from annuals to perennials because I didn’t have time to plant a whole new garden every year. And now, even though I have more time to play around, I’m trying to plant more shrubs so that I’ll have lower-maintenance gardens. It’s been nice to have something low-key to do that doesn’t relate in any way to what I do professionally.
Hobbies are also an opportunity to discover things you didn’t know you had a passion for, either because you hadn’t had a reason to appreciate them before or hadn’t been exposed to them.
In our mid-20s, my husband and I discovered an appreciation for architecture. Though neither of us had given much thought to the so-called “built environment” growing up, architecture intrigued us.
How did we discover we were architectural aficionados? When we’d hunted for our first house, we would have loved to find a charming, old house. But all the old houses were either out of our price range or were such fixer-uppers that they would have claimed most of our spare time.
So we went with a less enchanting colonial circa 1978 and saved the old house dream for another day. Since we couldn’t live in our own old house, we started visiting as many old mansions as we could to soak up some of the atmosphere we desired.
Touring grand old houses became one of our favorite things to do on a weekend. In a way, it was like our very own “House Hunters”/”Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” mashup.
We also discovered “Designer Houses,” in which a homeowner makes a spacious home available, interior designers and landscapers completely redecorate it, and then it opens to the public for tours as a fundraiser for a hospital or other charitable organization.
We also took advantage of neighborhood walking tours offered by the Preservation Alliance of Philadelphia, which allowed us to observe various architectural styles in the wild and explore regions of the city that we hadn’t visited before.
Gathering and filing away ideas for the old house that we hoped would be in our future turned out to be a terrific pastime. By the time we visited Carters Grove near Williamsburg in the photo above, we were just weeks away from settling on our own old farmhouse. We’d had six years’ worth of idea-gathering that had fueled our imaginations and filled hours of leisure time with a pursuit that had nothing to do with our daily work lives but that my husband and I both enjoyed.
So, if I were you, I’d take full advantage of the opportunity you have to choose a hobby that delights you. Think of it as giving yourself a “job” you only have to report to when you want to and that only has tasks that you enjoy. You probably won’t earn any money at this “job,” but it will benefit your mental health and well-being.
Burlap + Blue has compiled a list of more than a thousand hobbies to try. They’re categorized by type (physical/active, creative/crafty, mental, musical, collecting, food/drink, games/puzzles, making things with your hands) to make it easier to zero in on what might float your boat.
And since taking up a new hobby sometimes requires you to temporarily tolerate the discomfort of adjusting to a whole new thing, you may want to read this Self magazine article, which offers some suggestions for getting through the “I suck at this and want to quit” phase of a new pursuit.