They keep telling me it’s good to have a hobby. Everyone should have a hobby, they say. But gerbils have a hobby too – it’s called running on a fucking wheel for hours at a time. I am reminded of Roy Basch in "House of God" who was urged by his colleague to jog. He took the advice and found he could allow the plokka-plokka-plokka of his foot-strikes to drown out his increasing disillusionment with his work. He realized his job lacked meaning and that he may even be harming people, and that running satisfied some physiologic urges in order to make him more complacent and less disturbed by it during the rest of the day.
Or consider birdwatchers. I am more and more aware of the way an innocent pleasure in nature can lead to idiocy. I am guilty of it too: droning on about where and when I last saw a northern shrike and its behavior and surroundings and the condition of its beak and plumage, and so on. People will go on and on about such things in the presence of others who don’t know what they are talking about. Sort of like how the New York Times cannot go a single day without mentioning Virginia Woolf even though neither I nor anyone one else I know have ever read a book by her. And if they have read her, it was 20 years ago in college.
Even a veteran birder on the Minnesota birding digest email list mentioned this. In fact he came to the other subscribers for help: he asked if he had come to a point where birding was more an obligation than a hobby. He felt he had to get up each day and write down each bird he saw, feeling that a trip to the nearby wildlife sanctuary was necessary and that he would be letting himself and others down if he did not record both the mundane birds and the possible rare sighting. The hobby had taken on aspects of compulsion and duty, and he was worried. I didn’t respond, but if I had I would have mentioned a concept in econ 101: opportunity costs. That is, you are not necessarily wasting your time, but it can’t hurt to think of all the other things you could be doing.
So I have resolved to pursue my interests with passion and focus, and always within the bounds of reason. If I find myself spending an hour a day on the crossword puzzle, for instance, I will throw the thing down and do something else. If I am boring people with bird talk, I shut my stupid face. And so on.
pseudoisaac 