Some ways of spending your time are better than others
This was a tough lesson for me. I spent 2 years trying to write my own programming language. This is not really a good way to spend your time.
Some part of me thought: “This programming language will never actually be useful to you or anyone. What’s the point? Why are you putting so much effort in?” The reason was that I was just obsessed with programming languages and wanted to make my own. I recoiled from the thought of actually analyzing whether there was anything better I could have been doing. I’d think things like “well, at least I’ll learn a lot” and “at least I’ll have fun” and “lots of people follow their passion to do things that seem like long-shots but end up working out”.
Eventually the passion faded and I was able to see my mistakes clearly. Of course, I then decided to put multiple years into another useless project.
I think people assume that every way you could spend your time is pretty much equally good as long as you enjoy it. I definitely assumed that. This is not true. To illustrate this point, I came up with quick ranking system and used ChatGPT to rank tons of different hobbies.
Here are the top 10:
Tattooing
Construction
Upcycling
Blacksmithing
Breakdancing
Scouting
Tai chi
Storytelling
Ultimate frisbee
Fossil hunting
And here are the bottom 10:
Crystals
Action figures
Dowsing
Coin collecting
Book collecting
Gongoozling
Trade Fair
Genealogy
Trainspotting
PC benchmarking
(I’m not including my ranking criteria to reinforce that this ranking is not to be taken seriously.)
My first reaction to seeing this was to be a bit relieved that “programming language research and development” didn’t make the bottom 10. And yes, if I had spent those years doing PC benchmarking instead, that would actually have somehow been worse.
Still, I hate to acknowledge that my life would have been better if I did something else. My brain is the type to say “I enjoy coin collecting, you enjoy ultimate frisbee. Let’s just both do what we enjoy most with our free time”. Or “I’m just following my passion, and that’s never a mistake”. It sounds good, but I think I only believed it because it let me keep doing what I felt like doing.
Consider: If your only two options for how to spend your time are coin collecting and ultimate frisbee, and you choose coin collecting, you are making a massive mistake. Coin collecting is a relatively solitary hobby, while ultimate frisbee forces you to interact with others. Coin collecting is largely sedentary, while ultimate frisbee will keep you in good shape. Plus, ultimate frisbee is probably reasonably fun once you get into it. I’m not saying you can’t spend 30 minutes every week looking at coins if you want to, but you have a lot of free time and how you spend the majority of it should take into account more considerations than “is it the thing I feel like doing the most”.
As always, the cause is probably our ancestral environment. All hobbies used to be social and active, so we didn’t evolve an innate preference for social and active hobbies despite their benefits.
Of course, this ranking is just for fun and not a serious attempt at figuring out which hobbies are the best. But I think it’s probably worth it to put some thought into this yourself, and broaden your horizons. When I was spending the beginning of my 20s reading papers with names like “complete and easy bidirectional typechecking for higher-rank polymorphism”, it never occurred to me to compare this against alternative ways to spend my time, and if it did, I probably would have compared it to writing videogames or learning math, and would not have considered ultimate frisbee.
Also, you should probably consider which things have a time limit on them. You only have so many years in your 20s, so anything that can be done more easily in your 20s you should really consider doing.
I think your particular interests should still play a role. The exfatloss guy clearly has unusual interests, but instead of just doing his experiments on his own, he blogs about them. If you’re doing something unusual and interesting with your free time, writing a substack or making a youtube channel documenting it is probably a huge improvement.
Another thing you should of course consider is your goals in life, and what is currently missing in your life. Everyone benefits from physical activity and socialization, but if you live in a group house and go to the gym regularly, you don’t need to worry about that as much and can substitute “advances my career” or whatever else you want.
One potentially underrated strategy is to just try a bunch of hobbies. A lot of what kept me doing programming language stuff was that it was familiar to me. Maybe if I had spent an hour coming up with a list of interesting things and 2 weeks trying them, I would have spent those 2 years in a much more fulfilling and useful way. IIRC I was slightly interested in BJJ at that time, but never got around to figuring out how to take a class in it.
Consider whether your hobbies are a form of pica. I think programming languages was pica for me. I was depressed, and got to distract myself from it by thinking about type systems, and making progress on my language. Maybe once my brain realized that the depression felt better when I was PL hacking, it got hooked, and didn’t realize that any other distraction would have been just as good. I also spent a lot of time talking to people on discord servers and reading essays. To me, that also seems like pica for not having enough people to talk to in real life.
(A hobby being low-status doesn’t mean it’s bad though. I put a lot of effort into my blog and I ended up meeting some of my best friends because one of them reached out to me on twitter because he liked it.)
Finally: Know of any really good hobbies or ways to spend your free time? I’m in the market and would love to hear them. I think hobby-goodness is probably not normally distributed. My intuition says that the best hobby for a given person is better than all the rest put together.
The one problem I have with the experiential Pica analogy is, and I suspect I’m in the minority with this: what happens when I’m not sure or am not aware of any effective means of satisfying an overarching goal or need?
I certainly have a lot of useless hobbies, I’m a compulsive writer/journaller, I amass a lot of word lists, but worst of all was in the past I wasted a few years on a film production that was neither aesthetically nor career-strategically worth the time investment. If you ask me concerning that production “would you do it again?” I’d say “Hell no”. If you ask me do I know what I’d do different, I would say “something else...” without being able to tell you what thing else.
I am inclined to agree with your intuition. And while I could babble countless exotic hobbies, what are the actual criteria you’re using to evaluate them right now?
“It’s the only thing that satisfies my compulsion” is a good reason to do something IMO. Certainly not useless for you (even if it would be for most people), assuming it actually is the best thing you could be doing with your time that satisfies your compulsion. I definitely relate though, I find it very difficult to prevent myself from writing.
What I’m trying to get at is “how much does this hobby make my life better outside of me finding it fun”. I think the two that come most to my mind are whether the hobby causes you to make friends and whether it keeps you in good shape, but those are pretty surface-level and obvious. There are lots of other ways a hobby can be helpful (e.g. it can advance your career, it can fulfill a desire in you to help others, it can make you money). But those all seem like saying “good books are ones with a relatable main character and narrative tension”, they will help filter out many bad (and a few good ones) but they’re to simplistic and general to be much help in finding a truly great one. Many great books are great because they did something unique no one else did, and probably many great ways to spend your time are great because they have some unique massive advantage that’s difficult to find anywhere else.
In my case my aforementioned examples are not the best thing for me, or even close.
I’m have to admit confusion on my part. What I’m reluctant to do is start suggesting a word salad of possible hobbies with a low possibility of actually being beneficial because I don’t know how you’re evaluating what is useful to you right now, at this particular point in time for you.
Nevertheless, off the top of my head exotic hobbies that extend beyond merely (but not excluding) being social or physically healthy include redubbing scenes from silent films with modern sound effects, tailoring, balloon sculpture, fire twirling, running Vinyl record listening parties, developing film photographs in Caffenol, growing cacti, building a kit-racing-car, recreating Dutch Golden Age paintings a la Tim’s Vermeer.
I’ve recently gotten into partner dancing and I think it’s a pretty superior activity
For what it is worth, I did write a programming language over the course of about two years of my life ( https://github.com/jrincayc/rust_pr7rs/ ). I do agree that there are better and worse ways to spend time, and it is probably worth thinking about this. I think that when you “recoiled from the thought of actually analyzing whether there was anything better I could have been doing” is a good hint maybe writing a programming language wasn’t the best thing for you. I wish you good skill and good luck in finding ways to spend your time.