🎙️ (Un)productive Hobbies
The arc of my life, in terms of productivity, is a strange one. I think I've been missing something along the way.
A comfortable upbringing found me apathetic, happy enough with average grades and better than average friendships that I felt little ambition to really try.
Then I found the yellow footprints of Marine Corps boot camp to wake me fully up, finding purpose and community in the barracks and bases of a five-year enlistment.
The college classroom as an older student never entirely sure where the degree would take me, but with enough focus to finally learn how to study and apply myself academically.
The ninth grade classroom as a teacher, inundated with tasks and fighting to show up each day despite waking up nauseous and fearful most mornings.
The law school classroom, where I caught some key steps of my stride and started figuring out how the weirdness that I am could have a meaningful impact on the weirdness that this world is.
The year at the firm, where I learned and did well but never felt at home.
And the seven-years-and-running of nonprofit leadership, where I am always out of my depth and always pushing for more impact, because, to quote one of my teachers, "the need is great, and the time is short."
Along the way, striving to be a good father, son, partner, friend, colleague, leader, citizen, and, well, person.
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In these digital pages, I explore what I describe as the crossroads of humanity and productivity. I am searching, dear reader, and bringing you along this messy journey. Writing is thinking, so the adage goes. John Gruber, author of the groundbreaking blog Daring Fireball, spoke recently of how he can't really fully grasp an idea he has until he writes it. Yes!
And today, on November 25 (sometimes I write these blogs in advance, and sometimes it's a day-of-write-and-publish kinda thing), I'm reflecting on those crossroads, and how this life I've lived has allocated less time than I'd like on a very specific experience of the fulfilled human:
Hobbies.
Oliver Burkeman (yes, I'm still talking about Four Thousand Weeks), wrote that hobbyists are subversive because they "insist[] that some things are worth doing for themselves alone, despite offering no payoffs in terms of productivity or profit." He claims that hobbies "should feel a little embarrassing," and that "it's fine, and perhaps preferable, to be mediocre at them."
Hmm.
The first thing that comes to mind is music, which I've long made and hope to always make. Lessons in piano and violin and guitar created a basic understanding of how to string together a tune in my early years, culminating in some ear splitting high school band performances. And while I did later manage to make some decent beer money in a cover band in law school, I think it's fair to say that my music making is unlikely to ever be profitable.
My disability robbed me of my ability to make music, and even though my meds have brought back much of that functionality in the past few years, I'll never be able to so freely make it as I once did. Still, the hobby endured, tinking here and there and recording when I feel compelled to do so. It's how I process knotty feelings, expressions realized in chord progressions and found rhythms.
The second thing that comes to mind is writing. It's possible my writing will make money one day, but so far, bupkis. Yet writing as a hobby, namely through this blog, has been fantastically beneficial.
It seems appropriate, considering these two hobby-ish things, to craft an entry on their intersection.
Enter this video, which has earned a whopping two likes since I posted it a day ago. It's three minutes, which is intolerably long for a platform like Instagram in this attention economy of late. It's also a weird blend of who I am, with some looped guitar, bass, and midi percussion as the backdrop to me reading aloud a version of last week's blog post: The Questions Themselves.
That video (1) will never earn me a dime, (2) demonstrates mediocre talent, and (3) is a little embarrassing. Two likes in 24 hours is as much as it deserves. Which is to say, it seems to pass Burkeman's definition of a hobby. And while creating it, I had to figure out how to loop multiple tracks in real time in my recording software, edit in the recorded audio to match the video, and come up with something that I could actually be proud to produce and post. All "skills" I have an innate desire to continue building.
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In concluding the section of his book on hobbies, Burkeman quote's a publisher whose favorite hobby is surfing, which she is self-reportedly bad at. The publisher writes, "the freedom to suck without caring is revelatory."
While I do care about the things I put out into the world, I have an increasing comfort with putting them out with the understanding that others might consume them and claim that I do, indeed, suck.
And that comfort feels pretty dang good.
Suck it,
Rye
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