This weekend I had coffee with my new neighbor. It was so neat and tidy that you could immediately take photos for Funda and the icing on the cake was a large bookcase in the living room. “You like to read!” I cheered. “Oh, those are my friend’s,” she said, “who does hobbies.”
“And you don’t?” I laughed.
She thought for a moment.
“Sport? Music? Movies? Games?” I tried.
“No,” she said after a while, “or well, I like to walk around my house. Things then move a little. But a real hobby, no.”
I kept thinking about that for the rest of the day and in the evening I told the incident to my sister the psychologist.
“Oh, that’s fair,” she began, “many wouldn’t admit they don’t have hobbies, it sounds like you don’t have a life. Brave of her.”
“Brave?”
“I have so many clients in my practice who are bummed that they don’t know what they like. They try out an alphabet of musical instruments and sports, take out a movie subscription, go to dance classes or sew little lavender bouquets for underprivileged families, but nothing really gets them excited. Nowhere is the flame of passion fanned. When they confess this to their environment, they are usually told that they should just do something fun. While most have no idea what they actually derive pleasure from.”
‘That sometimes bothers me too,’ I mused, ‘maybe we are not evolutionarily made to enjoy anything besides sex, food and sleep. Sometimes I think we just do hobbies so we can forget for a while that life is just a clump together. A clump of hours of which you actually have no idea what to do with it.”
“Most are so relieved when I tell them that they don’t have to have a hobby at all,” says the psychologist’s sister, “and that they aren’t the only ones who don’t know what to do with their free time, and therefore with themselves. . You see them relax afterwards, it takes so much pressure off the kettle. Just a little existence is complicated enough. It takes quite a bit of life experience to be able to rummage through your house and not need anything else from yourself. It is a true art.”
“So my neighbor is an artist,” I chuckled, “because she doesn’t do anything?”
“Your neighbor is an artist,” my sister concluded, “because she doesn’t have to do anything.”
Ellen Deckwitz writes an exchange column with Marcel van Roosmalen here.
A version of this article also appeared in NRC on the morning of February 10, 2022
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