Another thing: Getting back on the hobby horse

Wading bravely into "hobby" discourse.

Welcome to Letters From the Knot. This is a free weekly newsletter, primarily built as an outlet for a fiction writing project I’m working on. On the weeks I’m not publishing fiction, I’ll be sending something a bit more freeform and personal. This is one of those, coming a little late this week after a packed weekend celebrating the wedding of one of my oldest friends.

The things I once enjoyed just keep me employed now.

- Billie Eilish, Getting Older

In my last newsletter, I took on the thorny subject of “work”, and the ways in which we’re defined and degraded by it. This time, I’m turning my attention to work’s flirtier, more fun-loving cousin, the hobby. I’m something of a serial hobbyist (hobbier? hobbit?) and usually have some new thing I fixate over for a few weeks or months at a time.

Over the past couple of years alone I’ve spent about three months trying to teach myself graphic design, learned precisely one song on the piano, did yoga three times a week for five weeks, did some online life drawing classes and, in lockdown, came incredibly close to buying some rollerblades before one of my friends told me that, if they saw me rollerblading past them, they would pretend they didn’t know me. On one hand, the above list reads like the desperate grasping efforts of a man who has no idea who he is. On the contrary though, I see this endless search to be an end in itself. 

Hobbies have a bad time, discourse wise, I think. I can imagine “having a hobby” is the kind of thing that young people on tiktok would make fun of millennials for. I’ve heard hobbies characterised as wasteful pottering, or activities that sad people pour all of their time and money into. Perhaps there’s some truth to that but, for me, hobbies are an act of resistance. 

My last newsletter talked about the ways in which contemporary concepts of work have caused us to associate virtue with productivity. The best kind of hobby, in my opinion, is one that flies in the face of this conflation. The unproductive hobby, one that cannot be easily monetised, is a beautiful thing, an assertion of individual humanity against the ugly grinding gears of capitalism.  

My search to find the perfect hobby has led me, most recently, to cooking. Inspired in no small part by the writing and cooking of my friend Cat (read her excellent newsletter here), I’ve gone back to the kitchen. I’ve always liked to cook, but generally find myself stifled by self-doubt. I can cleave close to a recipe and make something tasty enough but, with almost no actual understanding of cooking, I’m terrible at improvisation. I dream of being one of those people who can just throw something impressive together at a moment’s notice without having to surreptitiously google loads of recipes for salad dressings. 

I’m about two weeks into my renewed love for cooking and it’s going well. I’ve cooked for a couple of dinner parties, toasted shit loads of walnuts, woken up at 7am with a hangover to spatchcock and dry-brine a chicken. I even made mayonnaise from scratch! Obviously I’ll never do it again because it took absolutely ages and was quite tiring, but it’s nice to know I can in an emergency. 

Still in this first flush of enthusiasm, I’m convinced that cooking is the perfect hobby. You can practise it every day, you almost always produce something you can eat at the end of it, it’s relatively cheap, and it’s a good way to impress your friends. Importantly, in my case, it’s not something I’ll ever be able to monetise so it remains an act of self-gratifying resistance.

Let’s see how it goes. If past experience is anything to go by, I’ll have moved on to something else in a few weeks time. But that’s all part of the fun. My main principle around hobbies is not to be afraid to drop them when you get bored; don’t feel any urge to master anything or optimise yourself. 

There’s a sweet spot with learning a new skill or starting a new craft where you have bags of enthusiasm and the learning curve isn’t too steep and everything is exciting. When I was doing piano lessons, the main bit I enjoyed practicing was learning to use your hands independently to play two things at once. The instructor explained that, through repetition, you could form a new neural pathway to allow your brain to do it effortlessly. After a few hours of practice, it worked. I could do something I couldn’t have imagined doing before and it was as though I could feel my brain changing in real time. I had this incredible sense of achievement and then stopped learning a few weeks later. 

But my approach is to ride that wave of neural pathway building. If I hit a wall and can’t be bothered any more, who cares? Maybe I’ll come back to it another time, maybe I’ll find something you love more. Perhaps, as has been the case so far, I’ll spend my whole life accruing half-baked skills, relishing their relative uselessness, the unproductiveness of them. 

Writing occupies a strange place for me on the work-hobby spectrum. I’ve always considered writing a hobby, and I know that’s something that a lot of professional writers would bristle at. For them, perhaps, it’s their job first and foremost, perhaps even a calling. But for me, it’s been important always to hold on to the love of it, and to avoid commodifying it until I’m completely happy with it. Every time I write, I ask myself whether I’m enjoying it or not. If I’m not, I’ll try writing something else, or doing something else entirely, careful always not to make a chore of the one thing I really like doing. 

It’s an uneasy balance. I’d love to be able to live off writing, but I do have some misgivings about a potential future in which the thing I once loved, and once considered an act of resistance against the idea of productivity, becomes work. I’ll approach tentatively the tipping point at which, to paraphrase Billie Eilish, the things I once enjoyed just keep me employed. 

Cultural indigestion 

Some snippets of this week’s intake.

Reading - Related to my newfound cooking obsession, I’ve been reading Salt Fat Acid Heat by Samin Nosrat. My partner bought it for me a year ago and I flicked through the recipes and nodded to myself and didn’t go back to it until now. Turns out it’s fantastic and if, like me, you’re the kind of person who likes cooking but doesn’t understand cooking, then you should give it a go. It’s got just the right balance of science and anecdote, giving you some firm foundations on which to improvise with different elements of cooking. There’s a mind blowing and revelatory moment on almost every page and the recipes are (so far) pretty good too!

Watching - I finished watching The Last of Us and was left pretty cold at the end. I think there’s something inherently distracting about watching an adaptation that replicates, sometimes line for line, a pre-existing piece of media. Your brain is so consumed by comparison that there’s little room to engage with the characters or the plot. Overall I think the creators spent too much time trying not to upset existing fans of the franchise, and not enough time actually writing anything new. The one episode that’s an exception to this (ep.3) was fantastic and a hint at what they could have made if they were a little more brave in messing around with the IP.  

Playing - have more or less broken the spell that Elden Ring had me under for too many hours, I’ve started playing Disco Elysium, which lots of people have told me is among the greatest games ever made. So far the writing is fantastic (which makes a nice departure from Elden Ring) but I am bouncing off the mechanics quite a lot. I get the impression this is part of the point, but time will tell. 

Eating - An admittedly grotesque looking menemen from New River Cafe in Hackney. It was honestly delicious though. A lesson, perhaps, about inner beauty.