Toilings of Comfort and Joy

I began this year advocating creating art as a hobby and I tried to practice what I preached shortly thereafter.

Most people who know me generally observe I’m pretty darn busy which is one of the reasons that I feel the need to carve out time that is entirely not productive.

It’s hard in today’s “make every job a gig and make every gig a hustle” economy — and heaven help you if you want to do something creative for money yet want to do something else creative as a hobby — but I’ve become convinced carving out time for non-productive hobbies is a must.

So I enjoyed reading this piece by Hope Reese in Vox about tips for picking a hobby. I especially liked how to avoid some philosophical traps in the choice of hobby. And, yes, I’m writing this while staring at a screen and you’re almost certainly reading it on a screen, but I really like the idea of taking these hobbies and pastimes analog and offline wherever possible.

One great example of going analog is Inktober, a month-long exercise in drawing every day based on prompts. I’ve done this with my kids for a couple of years and we really got into this year (one of my kids was very into drawing and then coloring, which added a whole new delightful aspect to the activity). In fact, I went so far as to post my drawings to friends on Facebook (analog back to digital).

I was inspired to share in part because a college friend was sharing their Inktober drawings (and they draw hands far better than I). This included all the days, including the drawings which were really bad. But that was, I hope, encouragement to others to try their own hand at Inktober or something similar. Per Reese’s article above, doing something where you’re not going to excel or have an expectation to monetize it is ideal.

As I mentioned in my “Get Creative… Off the Clock” post, Molly Conway has a great article about how turning hobbies into hustles is a trap. Heed the warnings. Don’t do it. At the beginning of 2018, I was also in this reflective frame of mind, especially with the notion of “Ikigai.” That might be worth a second look as well. There’s a lot there about “dayjobs” and purpose and percentages (plus one sweet, sweet Venn diagram — and who doesn’t like Venn diagrams?).