Who are you when you can't talk about your career?
If you meet someone at a party and ask them about themselves, they usually start with what they do for work. That’s because for many, their career is their identity, it’s what defines them, not just to others, but to themselves.
We have a well-developed vocabulary for describing our professional lives. We can explain what we do, where we work, what we’re responsible for, what we’re building, and where we hope to go next. But ask the same person what they’re interested in outside of work and the answer can be much harder. They might travel when they get the chance, go out for dinner, watch a few shows, exercise, spend time with friends. All perfectly normal answers, although they often describe how someone spends their free time rather than anything they are particularly absorbed in.
When we were younger, interests seemed to appear all the time. Someone bought a skateboard and spent a summer trying to learn tricks. A friend got a guitar, another became obsessed with cars, and someone else started taking photographs of everything. There was rarely much concern about whether any of it was useful.
Adult life doesn’t leave as much room for this kind of wandering. Work gets more demanding, homes and families require attention, and there is always something practical that needs doing. By the end of the day, sitting on the couch is a lot easier than spending an hour being terrible at something new.
We also have an almost unlimited supply of entertainment now, which can satisfy some of the same curiosity without asking much from us. You can spend an evening watching people restore old houses, cook elaborate meals or disappear into subjects you knew nothing about an hour earlier. You may come away genuinely fascinated, but fascination doesn’t always find its way into your own life.
At some point, it can be useful to ask whether there is anything you are currently doing simply because you find it interesting.
Having interests should involve actually doing something with those interests
You can know an extraordinary amount about Formula 1 without ever getting close to a racetrack. You can love food while rarely cooking anything ambitious yourself. Plenty of people know the history of Everest, follow photographers they admire or watch woodworking videos for years without ever feeling the need to buy a camera, climb a mountain or build a table. Those are still real interests. Sometimes they stay that way, and that’s fine. other times curiosity eventually gets strong enough that you want to participate.
That’s when things tend to become more interesting. Once you buy a telescope, astronomy starts affecting what you do on a clear night. If you decide you want to make genuinely good bread, you begin paying attention to flour, fermentation, and why yesterday’s loaf turned into a brick. Photography can send you walking through neighbourhoods you normally drive past.
The first thing you make may be ugly. You might take a class and discover everyone else seems to understand what the instructor is talking about. You may spend an unreasonable amount of money on equipment before admitting that the equipment was never the problem.
You have to deal with being bad at something again.
What are you getting better at?
That’s a question I like to ask more than asking what someone’s hobbies are. For most of childhood, there are dozens of possible answers. You are constantly learning how to do things you couldn’t do before. Even a fairly ordinary childhood involves years of becoming more capable, often without thinking much about it.
Later, competence takes over. You know how to do your job. You can drive, cook enough meals to feed yourself, manage a bank account, book a trip and get through most weeks without encountering anything completely unfamiliar. Professional skills may continue to develop, but large parts of daily life can run on abilities acquired years earlier.
Trying something new changes that. You are suddenly the person asking basic questions again.
A beginner dance class can make an otherwise competent adult look spectacularly confused. The first few hours of surfing are mostly an education in falling over. Someone teaching themselves piano may spend weeks playing music that would test the patience of everyone else in the house.
Then, after a while, it gets easier. Your hands know where to go. You recognize something you didn’t recognize before. You can do something today that gave you trouble a month ago.
That sort of progress feels good precisely because nobody required it.
Learn something useless
A lot of adult learning now comes packaged as self-improvement. Courses promise better careers. New skills become side hustles. Creative interests are quickly followed by questions about building an audience or selling something. You can ignore all of that.
Not every hobby need to lead anywhere. Learn magic because card tricks are fun. Study astronomy because the night sky has always interested you. Take a woodworking class even if the first thing you build costs four times more than the equivalent item at IKEA.
One of the stranger things about adulthood is how often we feel compelled to justify our time. Exercise improves our health. Reading makes us smarter. Networking could help our career. Even relaxation gets framed as necessary recovery so we can become productive again tomorrow.
Sometimes you should be allowed to spend two hours learning how to pick a lock, identify mushrooms, or make an excellent Neapolitan pizza because you felt like it.
There’s value in uselessness.
Interests can change your social life too
Once an interest moves beyond the internet, it tends to take you places.
You start going to the climbing gym regularly and recognize the same people. A pottery class puts you beside someone every Wednesday for six weeks. Cycling leads you onto routes you had never explored, and eventually somebody invites you on a group ride.
None of these activities has to be pursued for social reasons. The social part often happens around the edges.
This used to be a fairly common way of meeting people. Adults joined sports teams, clubs, classes and hobby groups because they wanted to do the activity, and relationships developed alongside it. You already had something to talk about, and seeing the same people again didn’t require arranging a separate dinner three weeks in advance.
Even when nobody becomes a close friend, an interest can add people to your life in other ways. You have someone you talk to at the studio, a person who knows far more than you about bikes, or a group you occasionally go hiking with. Your week contains a few more places where people know your name.
It also makes conversations with existing friends better. People who are learning things tend to have things to talk about. They have stories about what went wrong, opinions they didn’t have last year, new places they’ve been and people they’ve met.
You don't have to find your passion
The language around hobbies sometimes makes them sound far more consequential than they need to be. We are encouraged to find our passion or discover the thing we were meant to do, which puts a strange amount of pressure on an activity that might simply be enjoyable for a few months.
Most things you try probably won’t become permanent fixtures in your life, and they don’t need to. You might take a pottery class for six weeks, enjoy it, make a few terrible bowls and never touch clay again. That experience still gave you something to look forward to, introduced you to a new skill and showed you a little more about what you enjoy doing with your time. Trying something doesn’t create an obligation to keep doing it forever.
Once in a while, an interest hangs around longer than expected. You borrow a camera for a weekend and months later find yourself carrying one on walks, reading about photographers you had never heard of and noticing light differently when you move through the city. Nothing particularly dramatic announces that this has become a hobby. You just keep returning to it until, eventually, it feels like part of your life.
That is probably a healthier way to approach interests than trying to identify a lifelong passion in advance. Follow whatever catches your attention strongly enough to make you want to participate, give yourself enough time to get past the awkward beginner stage, and see whether you still want to come back. If the interest fades, try something else. If it stays, keep going.
If your career already receives most of your ambition, there is something appealing about directing a little of that energy toward a pursuit that nobody will ever ask about in a performance review.
