Do I have too many hobbies?

I’ve noticed something over the past few weeks of packing up everything I want to take to Portland in the near term. We’re not selling the old house quite yet, so the big move with the furniture and stuff is still a few months away; this is just “everything I can fit in my car that I might want in the near term.” And the thing I’ve noticed is this: I have a lot of hobbies. And it’s not like I didn’t know I had a lot of hobbies. But when you see all the materials for all your hobbies piled in one place, and you’re trying to get them into a relatively small car, it hits different.

Do I have too many hobbies? Is this abnormal?

Obviously, I don’t think there can be an objective answer to this question; there’s no maximum number of hobbies to have. As long as it isn’t disordering my life, it isn’t a problem. I don’t really want to add up all the money I’ve spent on my hobbies, but it hasn’t been more than I can afford. And they make me happy, so there. I still googled it, anyway. And I was intrigued by the questions people apparently ask Google about hobbies.

Is it okay to have more than one hobby? Are there actually people worried that a second hobby is going to be too much? If it’s not okay to have more than one hobby, then I’m really screwed. (Spoiler: It is okay. Not only okay—it’s imperative! According to LinkedIn’s The Imperative of Multiple Hobbies in the Modern Age.)

Why do I have so many hobbies ADHD? I love the way this one is phrased! There’s two questions implied here, but in typical ADHD fashion the theoretical asker has skipped over the middle part and combined them into one thought. Anyway, is too many hobbies a sign of ADHD? According to ADDitude’s When Hobbies Become Obsessions, only if they become “obsessions.” Obsession is a nebulous word for me, as someone who has experienced clinical obsessions. People have certainly made “obsession” remarks about my hobbies before. But I don’t hyperfixate on a new interest and then abandon it when the novelty wears off. On the other hand, I do need to be doing more than one thing at a time, and generally one of those things needs to be occupying my hands. Is that count as a fidget? So, jury’s out on that one.

What do I do if I have too many interests? On the surface this seems like a no-brainer: if you have too many interests, get rid of a few. You don’t have to follow every rabbit hole. But when I contemplate giving up one of my hobbies, I don’t like the way it feels. So what do I do? The answer, according to this person on Medium, is that you shouldn’t do anything! It’s fine, and maybe even beneficial in the 21st century, to be somewhere between a specialist and a generalist. I’m not a big fan of the “don’t worry, this makes you more employable” line of thinking. Must everything we do be judged in terms of how useful it makes us to other people? Anyway, this article links to another on the “superpowers of multipotenialites” (wow that word is a mouthful) and this subject is starting to depress me because we’ve moved way too far away from hobbies and way too far into personal optimization.

How much is too much for a hobby? This is a different question than mine, it’s a budgeting question, but anyway the answer is 5-10% of your take-home pay according to Maestro Associates, a financial planning company. Again, I’m not going to add up what I’ve spent, but I guess maybe I should start budgeting going forward.

You will always struggle with not feeling productive until you accept that your own joy can be something you produce.

At this point I got distracted by another question that seemed to have popped up when I refreshed the page. What is the 3 hobby rule? There’s a rule?? If there’s a rule I can follow, I need to know about it, stat. And, oh, boy, get ready to be depressed again.

No hate to the author of this piece; she’s a product of the same forces as the rest of us. But her “rule” does sort of exemplify what I hate about productivity culture.

I can’t read the entire article without signing up for a paid Medium account—which is just the icing on this capitalist cake—but the sample I can read defines a hobby as “productive leisure.” (She also says “not all hobbies are created equally” so that probably means some hobbies aren’t productive, and those are the shit ones you should avoid.) Her “rule” is that you should have three hobbies, which shouldn’t overlap and which all serve a productive purpose in your life: one creative hobby, one fitness hobby, and one hobby that makes you money and oh, God.

The purpose of a hobby is to have fun! It’s to follow your curiosity! It’s not to make you a better person, or a more efficient person, a more employable person, a richer person, a thinner person. Life isn’t about those things! It’s about enjoying your time on earth.

I come back again and again to something Hank Green wrote in his book A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor: You will always struggle with not feeling productive until you accept that your own joy can be something you produce. It is not the only thing you will make, nor should it be, but it is something valuable and beautiful.

Hank Green is one of the most productive people on earth. He’s CEO of multiple companies (or was before his cancer diagnosis). He makes videos and podcasts and writes books and does stand-up comedy, and a million other things. He’s famous for doing too many things, and making most of them remunerative. And he also struggles with feeling like he has to be productive. That if he isn’t being productive, he has no value. So even though he created that beautiful sentiment, he has a hard time living by it. We’ve all been raised in an environment that tells us that we’re worthless if we aren’t creating value, which is exclusively defined as making money, whether it’s for ourselves or for someone else.

Here are some of the things I find personally fulfilling:

• Nurturing plants, frogs and fish.
• Making clothing from yarn and fabric.
• Baking breads and desserts.
• Watching movies.
• Reading books.
• Writing pointless blog posts.
• Playing video games.

Those are all hobbies! Only two of them “produce” anything other than joy. But producing joy is the only thing a hobby needs to do! Good Lord, we all need to stop taking life so fricking seriously.

I guess one good thing came out of this little Google experiment: I’m no longer worrying about whether I have too many hobbies