Did you know that you’re allowed to do what you love, without turning it into a hustle? I know CEO twitter won’t let you believe it, but it’s true…you can just enjoy things. If you like to knit, you can just do that- you don’t have to start selling custom sweaters, or iPhone cosies or whatever the Instagram explore page is trying to sell us this week. Here’s the thing about hobbies: they are, by definition, something that you do to relax. They are the little bits of joy we snatch for ourselves after a long week of work, or school, or both. Your hobbies are yours. Your joy is yours-you don’t have to put a price on that.
I’m not going to pretend that for a lot of people, it’s that simple. For a lot of people, you either hustle or you die. I’m not going to tell anyone that they’re wrong for doing what they’ve got to do to survive. If you know how to braid hair, and you also need to pay your rent, you’re probably going to turn that skill into a job. All power to you. Get your money. I’m speaking more to a culture that puts pressure on you to always be working, no matter what that kind of stress will do to your mental health.
Social media plays a big part in this pressure- on spaces like Twitter and Instagram, you’ll find people your age (or much younger) sharing their countless achievements. How many times have you scrolled through posts of 20-somethings holding up the keys to their own homes, or young business owners mailing out huge amounts of product, or the classic “influencer going on a lavish vacation to an island with some blue ass water and endless cocktails” post? How many times have you looked at these images and felt like you weren’t doing enough?
It doesn’t matter that we all know that social media is a space that rewards performance- most of us don’t live picture-perfect lives, and even people who look like they do are only showing us maybe 10% of their real lives. You can know all that and still feel like you’re missing out on something like you’re not doing enough. You are.
Do your makeup for yourself. Learn to play an instrument just to play it. Learn to sew, or paint, or animate, or make short films, and do it because you want to- not because you need to sell yourself. You don’t even need to share that with anyone if you don’t want to. You can take pictures or videos, but you don’t even need to post any of them. Doing so might just add to the pressure, the feeling that you need to treat your hobbies like a competition, like a game that you need to win.
Capitalism has really done a number on us–if you catch me on a good day, I could go on for hours. We have been taught to shame ourselves and to shame others, for having free time. Even in the midst of a pandemic, people have been saying things like, “if you haven’t opened a business/bought a house/made a million dollars/build a rocket and walked on the moon by the end of this year, then you should be ashamed”. I want those people to go to therapy.
You have nothing to be ashamed of. Your time is yours- use it as you wish. You have to feed yourself if you want to live, and when you do the things that you love, you are feeding yourself. When you learn a new skill or nurture an existing skill, you are doing the work of caring for yourself- and in our work-obsessed culture, this is radical necessary work.
