On the topic of hobbies

Should you make your hobbies the biggest part of your life? Or should it just remain a small part of your life? I've struggled with this my whole life and wouldn't mind even the most brutally of answers. It seems to me as if the latter just makes people miserable, as I've seen many who have been consumed by work slowly lose themselves and their identity. On the other hand however, it seems to me the first option comes with it's fair share of issues especially relating to financial health.

yes. what is the point oif living if you are not doing what you are enjoying. work is only a tool to gain the freedom to pursue what you enjoy o. why are you living if you are not enjoying living. people do not believe hobbies are important because they dont see being with people as a hobby but it is. do what makes joy

No. Your life should revolve around greater goals and aspirations of independence and innate fulfilment, not the inability to separate what you like from who you are.

>>83779 (OP) I mean, if you have the possibility to do what you like as much as possible, just do it. Most people can't, because of work, money or whatever. That's it. Doesn't mean they don't want to. I assume, maybe I'm wrong here, that you are young and have not realized how stupid life can be, some random event can fuarrrk your life up and you have to take the first soykafty job you can. Then you are stuck in it because you are just too tired or you don't have enough money to afford moving to get your dream job, etc. It's (mostly) luck. I hope you can find a job related to your hobbies, anon, that way you will never feel like you are working. Or a high paying job so you can afford a lot of free time for your hobbies :)

>>83779 You should make your own decision about what you want your priorities in life to be and then act on those priorities. One issue I see with "hobbies" is that for some people they might exist mainly as a way to kill time while not working, as a vehicle for consumerist purchases (cashing in feeling of "I deserve this" from misery working), as an identity substitute or as a shallowly idealistic fantasy of the life they could have if they could get away from their hated obligations. The concept of hobbies exists as a gap filler that complements jobs, and I think that concept is much weaker without jobs because it is symbiotic with them. I say this as a dedicated neet; I have built my life around avoiding jobs, and have no regrets. But I see the idea of hobbies as an alternative to work as a trap; it isn't enough, because they are conceived as only a brief, self-contained reprieve to cope and recharge and unobtrusively not affect anything outside of yourself. What we lack, and what we need instead, is a more developed culture of non-financial work and endeavors and things people can seriously devote themselves to, which ideally would not be self contained and would entail some way of meaningfully interfacing with community and society. The concept of a hobby is the wrong direction.

>>83779 I'm too autistic to make sense of this. I can only do things I enjoy anyway, so my profession is in one of my passions, and my hobbies are all my less monetizable passions. My hobbies are me, I am my hobbies. There is no separation.

only do hobbies full time if you are being paid fully and fairly, there is a chance you will be 'picked up' for your thing, but you are competing against 10,000 other 'hopeful' people, ambiguously and you have to pay into it first

>>83873 >you are competing against 10,000 other 'hopeful' people its worse - you are competing with people who dont even even consider profit and thus happily work at a loss. That's why you need to be so crazy good that you leave the comparison circle with "im doing it for fun" people. The first example that comes to mind is miniature painting. Prices are like $20 for 8h work. >>83779 Rationally you should do the best job available to you and pay for what you want to be most efficient. The question is merely if you can execute. If you cant then obviously a pointless goal to set. Im a fellow retard who works 10x harder if its something i like so i too didnt go the sensible path.

>Should you make your hobbies the biggest part of your life? > It seems to me as if the latter just makes people miserable, as I've seen many who have been consumed by work slowly lose themselves and their identity. I mean... "both", I guess. Only partake in those hobbies which you might seriously consider operating a business around. I don't mean that you should necessarily actually "sell out" and turn your hobby as it stands into a business enterprise. But it should be something that is at least remotely possible. Why? So-called "hobby" classification might be done in the following way, and ranked in order from spiritually lowest to spiritually highest. 1. "Mere" consumption. Reading fiction books, especially lowbrow, but past a certain point, "classics" also count. Television. Anime. Video games. 2. "Mindless labor", usually of questionable value, often performed in terms of memes. Painting figurines. Knitting. Distrohopping. Installing (but not contributing to the development of) coreboot. Trying out new gizmos. Here, you already know what the conclusion of the work will be. I would say that buying and using products is a form of this category. Certain forms of homelabbing also. Of course this can be genuinely useful: setting up a RAID array is basic, probably involves consumerism, but ultimately provides something of at least some utility. Working out (past a point) goes here also. 3. "Labor". You start a project, but you don't know where the end result will take you. You transform the mere consumption of reading with the mindless labor of programming/EDA/CAD/Spreadsheets/writing/printing into something entirely new. Never before seen. You participate in the dialectical world-historical process. It might be at the personal scale, or the broader one. Hobbies of type 3 are the kind which is most worth doing. Naturally they are kind of a synthesis of types 1 and 2, plus some thinking. It should be something that at least one other person around you can appreciate. Share the result. Do it in public. If it's good enough, sell it on your own terms.

A Swiss patent clerk made his hobby the central part of his life and discovered relativity. Two American bicycle repairmen made their hobby the central part of their lives abd invented the airplane. A young English student confined to idleness in the countryside because of the plague made his hobby the central part of his life and discovered the fundamental laws of classical mechanics and gravity. Later he invented calculus and the reflector telescope and didn't even tell anyone for years. You never know.

>>83904 >>83881 Doing Labor is important. But as I sort of indicate in my post on the subject, there is a lot of conflation and blockheaded equalization when it comes to the quality of hobbies which derails discussion of it. Are the Wright Brothers, Einstein, and Newton's "hobbies" comparable to a hobby like whittling, or riding a bike around? No, there are distinguishing features. In general I'd say that it needs to be something that you'd be proud of having seen by others (in the end). Really this acts as a dead-simple litmus test for the quality of activity. Would you be OK with the whole world knowing that this is what you do, this is who you are?

>>83905 A hobby is something that you do for fun in your spare time. Einstein, the Wright Brothers, and Newton, at that stage in their lives, did those things purely for fun in their spare time, for the pleasure of doing it. It had nothing (zero/zip/nada) to do wit their work at the time. I'm not sure about the Wright Brothers, but Einstein and Newton had been doing similar things for fun since they were children. And a hobby is a hobby whether or not you want the results to be seen by anyone. Your message was kind of weird, to be honest.

>>83910 I'm just trying to draw a line in the sand between the "hobby" of playing MMOs for four hours a day versus actually doing something generative or productive. The latter is objectively superior as a "hobby". The former permits a kind of selling-away of one's life, justified in the name of "fun", "disconnected from their work". No! You do not get to escape. As you do, the world around you gets worse. Which of those you find fun is a reflection of the overall health and disposition of the organism and their surroundings, and can be modified.

Both come with financial hardships. I think work should be in some ways central to your life, and its work in all things. And work imitates life, you will hate your work and love your work in turn, you will question giving it all up. I dont think this is a prescription I think its inevitable. I dont believe for example that if you gave everyone a million dollars people would cease to do their work. They might reconsider what they are doing, they might lull for some years in relief, but eventually they will get back to the work. In moments we might feel like we are doing nothing, we are lazy, we have no passion etc. But thats just the thing, we harp on ourselves until we get to our work. Every hobby (especially as we get older) inevitably reaches a crossroads where we have to decide if we are passionate about it or else abandon it, in many ways the decision is arbitrary. I think of it like this, "is this part of my work?". Theres no shame in this question, maybe video games are part of my work, maybe shooting up heroin is part of my work, it is for many. Maybe I knit as part of my work, not because knitting is my work but I work as a doctor and it seems to be the only way I can destress after my shift. But then maybe also when I am 50 and on my doctors salary I retire, I will be free from the work of the doctor the rest of my life, but yet I keep knitting. I guess then knitting was my ultimate work. I am old, and people know me now as having a great passion for knitting rather than a doctor. In simpler times I maybe would have been a knitter all my life, and made a living off it. Maybe I even would have hoped my true work of knitting would lead me to some higher up better paying position. But in these times to be a knitter I must be a doctor first, and its all the same. It isnt sad, I may have and may never will even consider my knitting to be my great contribution, after all I was a doctor, but its what remains. I am not a knitter or a doctor, but I hope you get what im saying. I guess in a roundabout way what im saying is whats at the root of that age old advice of get a good job so you can pursue your passions. But really what im saying is simultaneously that your hobbies will or wont be the biggest part of your life whether you like it or not, and also that there is no need to abandon everything else in favor of this hobby. We hear stories of people that are masters of their field doing that, as if everything else not related that they did was just to get there. But really its a drive within you even when you dont know it, and you will do whatever it takes and it may take your whole life to get to the point where you can pursue your hobby or passion relentlessly, and it was all part of the work. Everyones circumstances are different.

There is a moomin episode where snuff is playing the harmonica to keep some entities at bay. They stop and listen and wiggle. But then he stops and says if I don’t stop, I might not ever want to play again. Make it the center of your life and it could be fear based, to keep yourself sane, but if you do it to have others do something it might fade out? Then you might aswell do what others tell you and end up with a small portion of yourself in your life. So yes go for it. Have your hobby fill yourself out asap.

>>83779 Unsure if OP is still kicking around, but I live by the adage that your work should never be your hobby and your hobby should never be your work. We should clearly demarcate the two and establish a balance, whatever that may seem to be as per your lifestyle. The secret for hobbies is to find something related to what really interests you. I like reading and scale models because I too love to write, and when I complete a kit of a robot or finish a novel about a dystopian civilisation, I'm one step closer to writing another segment of my script or hammering out another world-building document. When I write about the notion of AI obtaining moral precedence in hopeless worlds, I think more about my dreams of being a researcher that specialises in robotics. This all trickles down into coalesced pool of knowledge I have concerning electronics engineering, which branches and forks out like a tree. Studying and reading about electronics inspires me to think about projects I have concerning robot models I have gathering dust on the shelf, and so forth. It's almost cyclical and attributes layers of positive reinforcement to my personal life. While my professional aspirations are also clearly distinct, both realms have closely realised underpinnings I find oh-so-useful. Shockingly enough, most hobbies don't require herculean amounts of effort nor do they cost a figurative arm and a leg. Hobbies can certainly be expensive, of course: I've witnessed people who buy hundreds of Dollars of kits and scarcely get around to building them. Some books are so rare that I can only read them by downloading scans packed into equally difficult to find .PDF files. However, you should start with the most streamlined and simplistic means to engage and see if you like it. In my experience, people who've produced a tangible result with their spare time e find a great deal of satisfaction that makes them happier and more productive.

>Should you make your hobbies the biggest part of your life? yes prob >No. Your life should revolve around greater goals and aspirations of independence and innate fulfilment, not the inability to separate what you like from who you are. the western world is falling apart and so will every aspect of its civilization, justice and morals will be gone alongside with mercy >>83915 naa, id win.

>>86249 >the western world is falling apart and so will every aspect of its civilization, justice and morals will be gone alongside with mercy Ivan, please. The whole "Western Civilization is crumbling" fantasy has been passe for years now. Get another job. You saw what happened to Dugin's daughter.

If your hobby is your passion, then it should be as big a part of your life as practically possible. If it can also pay your bills it can be your whole life. This worked great for people like Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, the Wright brothers, and many, many other people who made gigantic contributions to mankind.

>>86250 dude most european big cities are becoming like Sudan.

Generally you interests never align with getting well paid. Fun = too many people will undercut each other to do it. Gamedev is a best known example of it. Easier to make enough money by solely chasing money to retire early and then work full time on your interests than to try to pursue your interests as a job and being at the mercy of employment in a soykaf paid job.