Aadrita Chatterji

What’s the one activity that brings you joy?

For me, it is writing. For you, it is gardening. For our common friend down the road, it is cooking a full-course Indian meal from scratch. When we have a hobby, we are encouraged to make a career out of it. Family, friends and well-wishers advise us, “You should make this a business, you do this so well! Shall we help you to make a website for this? Or a social media page?” However, not every leisure activity deserves to become a business model or a career objective. They need not come with a business model, just love for creating something meaningful.

When Leisure Equals Productivity

Hobbies are meant to be like that, simply hobbies. Things that make us happy, things that make our day even when nothing else goes as it should. Many of us grew up with extracurricular activities, our parents hoping that they would lead somewhere meaningful. Some of us turned our childhood interests into careers, while others chose to keep them separate from work. Urban middle-class culture tells us that success is visible, productive, and profitable. Somewhere along the way, hobbies stopped being hobbies and became projects. Over time, they became opportunities to be scaled in life.

Now, our well-wishers mean well. It’s what they’ve seen on social media, where everyone seems to be capitalising on what they’re good at. They encourage us to do what we love, often overlooking how often passion can become labour. Inspired by the stalwarts, we see an overgrowth of creator culture and side hustle businesses. They appear on our screens every day, telling us that we need to spend our time and energy building something for our legacy. It’s an ambitious thought for many urban Indian households, where hobbies are considered legitimate when they bring economic value.

One must be serious about something if one wants to have any amusement in life.

Oscar Wilde, John Cooper, The Importance of Being Earnest

Let’s Not Make Our Hobbies Our Side Hustles

Scroll through social media long enough, and we see how the influencer culture requires people to convert their childhood interests into business opportunities. Their success story seems believable, where they share the journey of perfecting their craft. They call it ‘personal branding’, which needs the right audience and the right metrics. Stress, deadlines and the pressure to perform soon replace curiosity, experimentation and, sometimes, authenticity. Most hobbies start with good intentions, but when money comes in, conscience is often torn between the creator and the audience.

Modern life increasingly demands that we constantly improve, upskill and promote ourselves. Now, there’s nothing wrong with wanting to be rich and popular, but perhaps at the cost of visibility. Is it worth taking something that gives us meaning to our private lives and turning them into a public spectacle, ready to be misjudged and misinterpreted online? Is it worth losing sleep over the metrics, knowing that we can never measure the power of journaling by its aesthetics, the reading of our favourite book by its public opinion and the need for fitness by our waist size?

Is it worth taking something that gives us meaning to our private lives and turning them into a public spectacle, ready to be misjudged and misinterpreted online?

Aadrita Chatterji

Maybe, It’s Time To Be Mediocre Again

We need to reclaim the freedom to pursue our hobbies as we did as children. When we wrote essays using the wrong grammar, unafraid of being trolled online. When we coloured outside of the lines, knowing that the only teacher would have something to say about it. When we almost burnt our first cake, our families and friends continued to support us. Though meaningful communities do exist, they are not always guaranteed. Instead of documenting our lives online, let us remain offline as we continue to grow, learn and perfect our craft.

We need to allow our hobbies to remain small, to enjoy them without the desire for virality and online validation. Let us write something without expecting a huge readership, virality or financial gain. Let us savour the language as it is – the choice of words, the lyricism of sentences and the beauty of our emotions wrapped in delicacy. Writing privately creates spaces that only belong to us, creating an oasis of self-love and self-awareness in a world that expects us to build and burn out. Let us do away with the productivity chatter and keep our hobbies unproductive, imperfect and unseen.

The real question is, can we enjoy our passion projects without posting them on social media or turning them into a business? Of course, people are free to make their hobbies their careers. However, let’s remember that the love for our leisure activity goes beyond our target audience, a business plan or metrics. Its value lies in the time, effort and care invested in creating it. Some of our best work and experience may never make it to a curriculum vitae, be praised by our loved ones or generate income. Yet, they enrich our lives in many ways.

This week, let your masterpiece exist for its own sake.