Casual Conversation

Most of the hobbies I unexpectedly enjoyed had something in common: I learned about them in real life rather than online.

Online hobby communities seem fun to participate in, but they suck the fun out if it very quickly because you're immediately interacting with and comparing yourself to people from all around the world who live and breathe that hobby.

You suddenly find yourself in the midst of a dedicated community where you're a nobody. The pride and sense of identiry you felt about being the only one in your social circle who could do The Thing is gone, because now everyone does it, and everyone is also better than you. You get overwhelmed with tips, tricks, a whole roadmap of how to improve, and tons of inspiration everywhere that just suck the individuality out of the hobby.

For instance, I really, really enjoyed sewing recently. I took an old pair of jeans and a terrible flannel shirt and crafted custom bunny ears for a hat I had lying around. I was so proud of myself! I even figured out on the fly how to make them look more thick and organic – I used some cotton pads I usually use for my make-up to stuff them.

It also felt really good to show off my spontaneous little crafts project to everyone I know. Nobody else had sewn stuff before, so I felt like I truly came up with something cool and unique! It was part of my identity for a brief moment, something that I came up with.

Then I briefly checked sewing communities online to see what others were doing – big mistake.

I was so proud of my ears and was planning on finding inspiration to work on similar projects in the future, but suddenly I felt like I was on step 1 of a 300 step ladder to climb to "get better" at sewing. Even though I wasn't comparing my own to others' work, it suddenly felt like a chore: I would eventually have to 'graduate' to new stitching patterns, good quality fabric, more complex projects, I'd get helpful tips and techniques, fun projects to put in a 'backlog'.

It made it all feel so exhausting.

If I had not figured out the trick with the cotton pad stuffing on my own, I would have probably read it somewhere online captioned "if you're just starting out, here's a hack" and it would have felt like I was settling for something suboptimal someone else came up with. It would have been utterly unrewarding. No creativity involved, just copying what others laid out for me.

It's like a cogitohazard. If you want to enjoy a hobby, block its online communities. Don't look it up. Try to invent it from first principles. Learn about it yourself.