The Hidden Costs of Hobbies and Side Projects

How your hobbies and projects may be keeping you from achieving your dreams

Photo by Gabriel Bulz: https://www.pexels.com/photo/person-holding-black-and-white-labeled-box-9438964/

“You have to sacrifice in life, or your life will become the sacrifice.”
- Anonymous

In 2020, YouTuber Alex Becker sold his multi-million dollar mansion, Lamborghini Aventador, and all his other trappings of extreme wealth to move into an empty condo and furnish it with only a standing desk, office chair, and bed.

His reason was simple: owning all that stuff was a huge distraction from growing his software company. Even though he had the multimillions needed to hire staff to care for his mansion and property, he still had the headache of making sure staffers arrived on time, signing off on paperwork, and managing the estate, which often took up hours of his day every day. So he decided fuck it and sold it all.

In his newly empty house with nothing but his bed and his desk, it’s extremely easy for him to do what matters most to him — work on his company — because there’s just nothing else for him to do.

Watching him talk about why he did what he did, I had an epiphany. Despite not being a multimillion-dollar entrepreneur with a mansion and a fleet of sports cars, I was doing the same thing in my life. I’d filled my home with hobbies and projects — a digital piano, painting supplies, furniture to refurbish, sewing tasks — that created loads of work for me. And like Becker managing his estate, I was spending dozens of hours a week cleaning, organizing supplies, and planning side projects.

If you’re a normal person, you’ve probably done the same thing. You’ve got a pile of crap sitting in the corner you’re going to deal with “when you get the chance” and hobby equipment for three different hobbies in the spare closet.

We already know about minimalism; it was one of the hottest topics of the 2010s. But this goes beyond simply decluttering clothes and stuff you don’t use anymore. It is about the stuff you do use, about how, even if you like and use it, it can still distract you from what’s most important.

Just like Becker loved his Lamborghini, I loved my hobbies and home projects. Many of my weekly hours were spent tidying up, pursuing hobbies, and finishing household projects and tasks. It made me feel like a well-rounded bitch; not only do I work and earn good money, but I also keep my house clean and finish all those projects most people never get around to. That’s how good I am.

The joke, however, was on me. Because for each little home project I felt good about completing, each hobby that made me feel well rounded, there’s a chapter in a book I didn’t write. A work project I didn’t complete. An important life goal left a little farther behind.

We will all die. You, me, the neighbors, luminary artists, UN representatives, everyone. We get seventy-something years, and then we’re done.

In fact, it’s even less than that, because we spend our first twenty years growing up and all our years after age seventy resting. So for every dream you’ve ever dreamed, from raising children to writing the great American novel, well, you’ve got at most fifty years to do them.

Imagine you live the rest of your life, from today until you’re eighty, living the same way you’re living now. Imagine sitting on a lawn chair and reflecting on your life. Are you happy with how you spent it?

I wouldn’t be. I’d look back and think I spent way too much time recycling thrift store clothes and furniture. I’d think about the writer and entrepreneur I could have become if only I’d dedicated myself to my craft instead.

You don’t have time for all these things

You may think, “What’s the harm in keeping spare hobby equipment or projects around? If I don’t want to work on them, I can just not work on them.”

Well, research psychologists have known for decades that the more options are available in your environment, the harder it is for you to make a choice and the less satisfied you are with your choice. Participants in a study with a wider selection of jams were less likely to buy any one of them, and if they did, less likely to feel satisfied with their choice.

When you jam-pack your home with a million different options for your own entertainment, you invoke this same effect. You’re less likely to take part in any particular activity (and more likely to crash on the couch) and more likely to feel like you pissed your evening away. You’re way less likely to make progress on your important life goals.

This isn’t new territory. In Slow Productivity, author Cal Newport says that one of the three pillars of slow and sustainable productivity is to do less. Take on fewer projects, but give each one more of your attention. He wasn’t writing specifically about hobbies when he said this, but hobbies and house projects often take on the feel of work. They require dedication, practice, organizational hours, and research, all the things any other work project takes. So, just like any other responsibility, they can sap your energy and focus away from what matters most.

You don’t need hobbies and home projects for your mental health

I didn’t bother telling my family or friends that I was dumping most of my hobbies because I knew how they’d react: they’d tell me I was dooming my mental health. Conventional wisdom is that hobbies and home projects are part of a well-rounded life. If you tell someone that all you do in your free time is work, they’re likely to hand you a pamphlet on burnout.

It’s certainly true that we need downtime to recover our mental and emotional energy. But when you look deeply at your own hobbies and projects, you are likely to find few of them are about emotional rest or relaxation and are instead about…

• Boosting your ego (learning an instrument to look sophisticated)

• Seeming like a normal person (hosting dinners, shopping with friends)

• Because it’s ‘financially responsible’ (remodeling the house, upcycling, thrifting)

• Because it’s environmentally friendly (again, upcycling, thrifting, etc)

• “Being healthy” (league sports, outdoor activities)

No hobby or side project is damaging on its own merit. If you find such things truly restful and enjoyable, by all means, don’t give them up. But I know most people don’t find them restful because they land on our to-do lists like obligations instead of privileges, and we complain about it. “I have to wake up tomorrow morning and refinish that furniture!” “Ugh, that piano just sits there day after day. I really should practice.”

If you think about hobbies and feel responsible for not partaking in them the same way you would feel responsible for slacking off at work, that’s not a hobby; that’s a responsibility. One you assigned yourself, no less. Let yourself off the hook.

Since dumping most of my hobbies, I’m definitely more satisfied with life. I’m spending my energy on what matters most, not trivial things that give me a brief hit of dopamine for completing them.

Questions that can help you decide which hobbies to keep

Think of all the hobbies, side projects, and to-dos around your house. Then, think deeply about why those things are a part of your life. Not the proximate benefit, like “mending clothes helps me save money,” but the deeper value, such as one should save money where possible. Then, ask yourself where that value comes from, why, and if it’s really that important to you.

For instance, mending clothes is one of the hobbies I’m giving up. I took it up as a hobby because when I was growing up, my parents hemorrhaged money on consumer bullshit, and I didn’t want to be like that. In adulthood, I swung to the opposite extreme, buying everything on thrift and mending them instead of spending big bucks on new things.

But upon looking deeply, I realized this wasn’t making my life better. Extreme frugality is time-consuming; it takes hours every day to cook from scratch, mend clothes, and endlessly upcycle. There’s a reason being a homemaker is a full-time job. I realized that if I gave up these frugal hobbies and instead developed my career, I could earn enough to pay for brand-new things for myself hundreds of times over.

I also realized over the years that my pride had gotten wrapped up in this. Spending less than the average American allowed me to feel superior to other people. I patted myself on the back for not being ‘wasteful’ and ‘destroying the environment.’ But in reality, I’m just one person. I could throw away brand-new clothes every day for a hundred years and still have hardly any impact on the environment. The real polluters are governments and multinational corporations. If I really wanted to help the environment, I would become an activist. But it was never really about the environment, only stroking my ego.

Meanwhile, day after day, my keyboard and computer sat on my standing desk, waiting for me to write something. Anything. And every day, instead of walking my ass over to that desk to write, there was always something else to fuss over, something that mattered to me much less but was emotionally easier to do.

Here are some questions that can help you look more deeply into your own reasons for your hobbies and side projects:

1. Do you have a recurring fantasy about becoming world-class at it? If you do, this suggests this might be more important to you than you realize.

2. Is this hobby a form of exercise? We all need exercise in life, so if a hobby can do that for you, more power to you.

3. Does the thought of it make you feel relaxed and happy? Or does the thought of it stress you out, like a responsibility you have to take care of?

4. Is it something you enjoy for its own sake, or are you more motivated by the result? If you’re motivated mostly by the result, that can be a sign it’s not the right choice for you.

5. Does this project make me feel productive, or is it actually productive? In other words, do I care about the result I’m getting? Or does doing it just make me feel useful?

6. Have you actually done this hobby in the last year? Or do the supplies for this hobby or project merely exist as a stand-in for some identity or character trait you want to embody?

In conclusion

Unlike giving up social media, which was practically all upside, giving up hobbies and projects has been painful for me. I’ve had to grieve fantasies I’ve had about myself, like the image of myself I had as an environmentally conscious seamstress and handyman or the image of myself as a sophisticated multi-disciplinarian artist.

Mourning paths not taken is a part of life. Nearly all of us have to wake up one day and realize we will never become an astronaut and go to space. And even astronauts have to realize they didn’t become something else! It is, however, infinitely preferable to mourn the path not taken than it is to refuse to choose a path and realize upon your deathbed that for want of everything, you failed to do anything.

Like the quote at the beginning of the article says, “You have to sacrifice in life, or your life will become the sacrifice.” Let the sacrifice be the things that don’t matter, like social media, random TV shows, home projects that don’t need doing, and hobbies you feel lukewarm about, instead of what does matter: your biggest goals and deepest dreams.

When you’re eighty years old and reflecting on your life, it won’t matter if you wasted your life on social media or if you wasted your life on hobbies you thought would make you a well-rounded person. All you will be able to think is I didn’t spend my life doing what I really wanted to do. It would be a tragedy all the same.