Why Don't More Adults Have Creative Hobbies?
Look around. How many grown-ups in your circles take time to create?
Liking, commenting, and sharing really nudges the algo. I hate how much we now have to circle jerk around algorithms today, but that’s the way the cookie crumbles. Help a sister out.
If these thoughts bring you any lightbulbs or levity, please consider passing along a few bucks. You’ve probably spent more on a single impulse Amazon purchase you’ve used once. (Yes, yes! Let the guilt seep!)
I once had an ex-partner admit he didn’t really understand why I wrote “for fun” because it didn’t bring in much money nor did it seem to really go anywhere.
That same ex also pledged we could live on his income for a few months so I could quit my job and focus on personal works. (My job as a copywriter, mind you. Emphasis on writer.) A sabbatical of sorts, sponsored by him.
Confused? Me too.
Sidelining the head scratch + gut punch that comes with hearing contradictory notes like this from someone you love — these conversations are revealing. This is someone who played hours of video games every night after work. There is nothing technically wrong with playing hours of video games after work. It’s your free time, you’re an adult, and life is hard. We all deserve enjoyable passive reprieves. But I didn’t exactly see that bringing in any money or particularly “going” anywhere.
Nor did I ever judge his free time by these metrics.
For years now I’ve looked around wondering why people adopt the free-time hobbies they do. Their choices are important stickers in their personhood scrapbook. Hobbies say a lot, and they say so loudly. They herald values, curiosities, energy expenditures, disposable income. They punctuate and surprise.
But if we’re being honest, how many adults do you look around and see spending a significant portion of their free time doing something creative?
That is, how many adults do you see choosing to fill the religiously precious empty patches of their days with the imaginative, the expressive, the explorative, the generative? And why when they do is frequently met — even from loved ones — as best case something mysteriously frivolous and worst case a waste of time?
Creativity is a form of self care.
The self-sustained, truly-for–you-by-you kind — not the commercial. (The lines between self-care, self-indulgence, and straight-up selling-you-crap are blurry Venn diagrams, but the staggering **multi-trillion** dollar industry coloring most of it these days is genuinely maddening. Sorry not sorry. It’s a lifelong endeavor for each of us to sift through its fog. A rant for another time.)
I’m biased — whoopsies! — but the abundance that comes with having a creative hobby is singular to none. Creative leisure is correlated with lower depression and anxiety, increased empathy, self-esteem and resiliency, and greater overall life satisfaction, especially as you age. Clash this against the backdrop that most of regular adulting is defined by the perfunctory, the performative, and the relatively mundane. Incorporating creativity is a direct antidote if you feel these things teetering too imbalanced in your life. It is committing to caring for your core adult self, on par with going to the gym and eating more veggies and finally checking out therapy.
So why aren’t more grown-ups doing it?
1. Perfectionism.
Contrary to what your middle school basketball coach shouted while practicing layups, perfectionism isn’t striving to execute everything flawlessly. It’s simpler than this. Perfectionism is just the knack for finding faults easily.
The perfectionist voice tells us we must avoid the ickiness of maybe-perhaps-oopsie-doopsies doing something wrong. I hate to even use the word “wrong” here, so paralyzing in its perceptions. Perfectionists stay coloring within the lines thanks to that fear of judgement. To move even a millimeter outside is unmanageable. But creativity, especially early on, will have you consistently stubbing your toe against the rough corners of poor early outputs.
Exposure therapy, baby! Get squiggly. Start out slow and silly. Challenge yourself to focus less on results and more on feelings, impressions, that dang in-the-moment slowdown. You have so much in that head of yours, so much to explore within your own vaults.
2. Imposter syndrome.
Who on this tragic green earth will throw a tantrum because your pottery cracked in the kiln? Your oak tree sketch is out of proportion? With love, you’re thinking too much about yourself, sweetie.
Equally as important — congratulations! — you can never really know how others truly see you. Whatever perceptions you cling so tightly too are mere crumbs of what you really could be. Don’t you want to allow all the parts of you to come up for air, relax their shoulders, not be so afraid?
3. It costs money.
Creative gateways today are often commodified. There’s no nice way around this. You must first sign up for the expensive photography class, the figure drawing lessons. You have to pay for the sound-mixing software, the specialty lenses. You input your credit card for the online creative writing masterclass and cross your fingers you stick with it every week.
Elizabeth Gilbert has a gorgeous quote that, in theory and practice, can help curb the money conundrum:
“When I refer to "creative living," I am speaking more broadly. I'm talking about living a life that is driven more strongly by curiosity than by fear.”
―Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear
It doesn’t cost a cent to strive daily, imperfectly, to be more in the moment. To remind yourself things are fluid, plans shiftable, wonder generous. To choose something that’s a little less defined and a little more exploratory.
4. It’s arduous. It’s mentally taxing.
I promise you — push through the above, and it won’t be.
You don’t even have to push all the way. Just start poking holes. Let the previous doubt-scents waft through the saran wrap.
Try committing to something small, something that takes no more than ten minutes, something that can be done alongside something else. Doodle for five minutes while you catch up on House of the Dragon. Doodle for five minutes before you go to bed. Doodle for five minutes while you take your post-coffee poo. Seriously. Just stay present with it. Give whatever you pick an earnest, steady go. The energy reserve will shock you.
5. We’ve come to see creativity as innate — in the wrong way.
Creativity is seen as something you’re either born with or not. Gemstone in its rarity. The few who clutch it into adulthood are a bit zoo-like and novel, and we’re sort of confounded by their creative labors and pursuits and professions while also devaluing that same labor.
Capitalism shares a lot of blame here, as does deep-rooted individualism. Both have turned creativity from something soft and centering into this frenetic, maddening midnight compulsion.
The compulsion part is right. Every child on this planet — including you, remember little you, you were cute! — created on impulse. “Goodness” had little say. Perfection never showed up to the conversation. You built castles with blocks and scribbled sunsets with broken crayons and made up endless dumbo games with very imaginary and very real friends. All of this is creativity. All of this plucks the intangible, the ineffable, the electro-chemical curiosos bolting through us all and morphs it into a physical form.
Most importantly, maybe, methinks: We have a playfulness deficit.
And I’m afraid it’s a very serious problem.
Grown-ups can be just a little too…bland. We don’t often get silly, and when we do it’s probably around a tiny choice few, rarely for ourselves, rarely for beautiful absolute nothing.
Blame it on whatever you’d like — there’s a library of reasons in all our lives as to why we don’t have time to mess around. Schedules are packed and time zooms onward. To be an adult is to accept a certain weight of foresight and functionality and duty-driven responsibility at odds with playful spontaneity. All the more reason to pepper it in.
I believe conversations around creativity are even more important now that we’re sliding deeper into a lonelier, poorer, techified world. I’m realizing it’s in some ways useless to just harp on loneliness and capitalism and technology itself. AI is coming for our writing and our art, yes, I know, okay? Rich people should sponsor more music scholarships, why not? Friends should call each other up screaming how much they love each other — duh!
Maybe it’s time to bolster the other side. Maybe it’s time to sit with yourself. Grow a little quiet. Grow a little child-like. Let creativity take care of you.🎱
Thanks for this. Probably THE answer, as you hint at, is the perception of creativity as something children do, something grown out of.
In his autobiography, the video game designer Sid Meier discusses how interviewers often ask him about how and why he chose that career. To paraphrase his answer, it's that all children create and play games and he just never grew out of it like most do.
People do have a playfulness deficit. But as an illustrator, I will confirm creating stuff is HARD. First you have to decide what you want to make. Then you realize that however much you assumed you were gonna suck at it, you actually suck, like, WAY worse. Then you have to get a bunch of materials only to realize nope, that one wasn’t for you, and try again. Then you have to be ok with sucking for a loooong time before you start to meet your own standards. While watching people around you (well digitally around you) doing effortless and amazing things somehow. (It’s ok they had their hair-ripping period too). It’s so much easier to watch tv or play a game or do anything where you don’t have to invent every rule every step of the way.