brendoblog

Hobbies in the Time of COVID-19

When I started this blog, I was in the process of going through a Unity online course, with the intention of cataloguing progress on that front. The lack of updates implies that I fell off the wagon, as it were, and that implication is 100% correct. I started that project just as the COVID-19 pandemic was kicking off, taking advantage of a free offer for online learning from Unity. I'm reminded of the Onion article from around the same time, "Man Not Sure Why He Thought Most Psychologically Taxing Situation Of His Life Would Be The Thing To Make Him Productive."

Cabin Fever #

Listen, I've been lucky during the pandemic: I still have my job and my health. My family and friends are all staying safe, wearing masks, and no one has been in any serious danger. But even for those of us who have it good, there are still new stressors that we're dealing with on top of our day-to-day problems: new working conditions, new rules for being in public, and the inability to plan and participate in "normal" activities. No matter who you are or your situation, 2020 has brought many changes, and even now toward the end of the year, they are still new to us. We may think that we have adapted, but I would argue that internalizing something negative as "the new normal" isn't really adaptation, it's just resignation. Add on top of that the usual stressors of adult life, and the current struggle for racial equality during an election year for us Americans, and it becomes apparent that if there's anything we must resign ourselvse to, it's the fact that things will not be "normal" for some period of time. So while it's probably normal that we would find ourselves cooped up and searching for ways to fill our "free time," it should also be said that the things we used to do with that free time--the activities that we use to form our identities outside of our working lives--have likely been disrupted.

Time You Enjoy Wasting is Not Wasted Time #

I've cycled through a few time wasters this year, namely:

And some others I'm sure I'm forgetting. And yet, despite all the jumping around, I don't regret any of that. My hobbies have long consisted mainly of gaming and model building, but this year I've forced myself to focus on other tasks as well. While I never finished making a game, I have a new appreciation for the tools and techniques involved. While I don't play as much guitar these days as I did during the weeks that I obsessed over it, I learned a lot in that time and got comfortable to a point where my guitar no longer collects dust.

It's easy to think that giving up on a hobby, or giving something less than 100% of your attention, is some kind of failure. But let's not mince words: we need to save some time for things that we enjoy. If we need to explore things to decide that we don't like them, or that we don't want to persue them on a professional level, that's fine. Self-care, self-discovery, and the enjoyment of simple pleasures are not things to be ashamed of, least of all now when we need them most.