When a hobby becomes a job

So what happens when work disappears, turning everything into a hobby? A hobby is fun. Many people spend a great deal of time trying to escape work, so they can spend more time on their hobbies. But while they may be fun, hobbies are also at some level always frivolous. They cannot give meaning to a life, precisely because they are optional. You co... See more

So much of getting good at anything is just pure labor: figuring out how to try and then offering up the hours...

...Pleople always assume I'm interested in the end result-the wonderful thing they've made-when what I'm really interested in is the process. How did you get this way and why? I'm curious about the ugliness of trying, the years and years... See more

In an age of instrumentalization, the hobbyist is a subversive: he insists that some things are worth doing for themselves alone, despite offering no payoffs in terms of productivity or profit. The derision we heap upon the avid stamp collector or train spotter might really be a kind of defense mechanism, to spare us from confronting the possibilit... See more

While baking is an unquestionably sweeter activity than any sort of grind, many quickly found this did nothing to curb burn out or exhaustion. Ca

pitalism not only defines how we spend our time, but our relationship to the things we fill our time with. Are you knitting a scarf to learn a new skill, to indulge in a pleasure, to take breaks from labor

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As a lower bound, you have to like your work more than any unproductive pleasure. You have to like what you do enough that the concept of "spare time" seems mistaken. Which is not to say you have to spend all your time working. You can only work so much before you get tired and start to screw up. Then you want to do something else—even something mi... See more

I’ve always found it especially satisfying to use my hands to create something, perhaps because I spend so much of my creative time in my own mind, becoming aware of myself, then digging for the right words to describe what I see in that inwards mirror. Baking is a nice complement to this, because it forces me outside of myself: the thing I am crea... See more

Be ambitious about the process, not just the outcome. (To use my own hobby as an example, when I bake, I put on some good music, I take my time, I eat too much batter. That way, if the recipe implodes–like when I accidentally mixed up powdered sugar and flour–the whole thing isn’t a wash.)

Let more than one thing hold your ambition, or meaning. (Th... See more

When you start to disentangle production, identity, and the matter of survival from one another, that relationship to doing can become much clearer, especially for those in the spaces of art and craft.