The Case for Structured Hobbies.
We’re told to be productive. Efficient. Always building toward something. So even when we say we want to rest, we reach for activities that optimize our downtime: reading for insight, running for endurance, journaling for clarity. Every hour seems to need an output.
But lately, I’ve been building a different system. One that resists that reflex. One that makes space for slow, deliberate, unoptimized effort—for its own sake.
Because not everything you do needs to turn into something. Not everything needs to be a business. Sometimes, it’s enough to just be a beginner.
Hobbies Are Not a Luxury
In 2023, the Journal of Positive Psychology published findings that engaging in hobbies significantly improves overall well-being—even more so than passive leisure like scrolling or streaming. But those benefits disappear when the hobby becomes instrumentalized: monetized, performative, or judged against benchmarks of progress.
And yet, that’s how most of us engage with leisure now. We track our runs. Post our paintings. Turn our Sunday baking into “content.” We don’t let anything just be—not even joy.
So the real radical act? Reclaiming hobbies not as a side hustle or stress outlet, but as a pillar of adult infrastructure. Not optional. Not decorative. Essential.
The Creative Outlet That Doesn’t Scale
Let’s be clear: this isn’t an anti-ambition rant. I’ve built things. I run businesses. I write essays like this one. I’m proud of the sharpness and stamina I bring to my work.
But even I needed a place to offload that intensity. Not suppress it—but reroute it. Somewhere my brain could play without needing to perform.
For me, that looked like knitting. Then crochet. Then sewing—yes, even altering my jeans and making linen napkins by hand. Not because it saves money or fills time, but because it slows me down. Because my hands deserve a rhythm that isn’t tied to keystrokes or Slack pings. Because crafting something tangible reminds me I exist outside the digital.
It’s also the flower arrangements that sit in the kitchen window—small acts of symmetry and care that make ordinary days feel deliberate. The Spanish lessons that root me deeper where we live part of the year, for my husband, for our family, for the lives we share between languages.
Cooking and baking, too, have become ritual. Not meal prep or performance, but care. Homemaking as grounding, not gendered labor. The quiet joy of choosing what goes on your plate—and who sits at your table. Hosting dinner parties like they’re small art forms: timing, texture, tone, the choreography of conversation and candlelight.
And then, the writing—long nights drafting chapters, plotting stories, building worlds out of sentences that no one has read yet. Fiction is its own kind of making. A way to live many lives at once, to test what the world could be if you had more time.
And yes, even the playlists. I make them obsessively. For moods. For rooms. For imagined lives. Curating sound is a craft. The shape of a Tuesday afternoon matters, and sometimes the best way to hold it is three minutes and forty-eight seconds at a time.
None of it scales. None of it sells. And that’s exactly the point.
These are the places where my mind can exhale—where skill and slowness meet, and where the measure of a life has nothing to do with output.
Structure Is Not the Enemy of Play
Some people reject hobbies because they feel frivolous. Others reject structure because it reminds them of work. But structured hobbies aren’t chores. They’re scaffolding for flow.
Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who coined the term flow, found that structured, skill-based activities—like playing an instrument, knitting, or sewing—generate high levels of neurological satisfaction. These are tasks with just the right balance of challenge and ease. They demand full attention but not self-erasure. They create what he called “autotelic experience”—where the activity is its own reward.
That’s exactly the tension I’ve been learning to navigate: how to stay stimulated and excited, while slowing down and being present. How to build a life where I’m not always rushing toward outcomes, but still proud of the process—of the effort, the creativity, the care I bring even when no one’s watching.
For me, that means embracing a little structure. Not to optimize, but to orient. A saved pattern I want to try. A loose meal plan for the week. A few stitches finished before bed. Enough rhythm to stay engaged, without turning it into a checklist. It gives me something to return to, a shape for the space between obligations.
It also makes room for growth. With hobbies like these, progress is visible: I can see where the seams align, where my language gets more fluid, where the pacing of a dinner party lands just right. That’s not pressure—it’s pleasure. The quiet kind, the kind that builds.
I don’t track results. I don’t turn these things into content. But I do take them seriously, because I take myself seriously. I like that I can make beautiful things with my hands. I like how alive my mind feels when I’m focused on something small, detailed, and just difficult enough to keep me learning.
This isn’t about balance or burnout recovery. It’s about depth. Intellect. Precision. And letting that exist outside of work.
The Anti-Optimization Era
We’re living in a time when even leisure has KPIs. Rest has to be productive. Reading has to be educational. Walks become “movement goals.” It’s not enough to do things—we’re expected to do them well, often, and publicly.
That’s why this quiet rebellion toward anti-optimization feels significant. People are starting to question the mythology of constant improvement. The idea that if something can be measured, it should be. Anne Helen Petersen calls it productivity dysmorphia—the chronic inability to feel accomplished, no matter how much you do. You hit every mark and still feel behind.
The danger isn’t just exhaustion—it’s flattening. The erosion of curiosity. The loss of texture in a life where every minute must justify itself.
And then comes the quieter threat: boreout. The state where work isn’t too heavy, just too hollow. When days fill up with low-demand, low-meaning tasks until the mind starts to shrink around them. Psychologist Steve Savels explains it plainly: “Although you don’t have enough to do—or what you have to do is not stimulating—you get extremely stressed.” It’s not rest; it’s neglect.
Structured, creative hobbies push back against all of that. They give form to the unmeasured. They remind us that effort can exist without evidence. That something can be valuable even if it’s private, inefficient, or slow. They offer a counterbalance. They bring stakes back into low-stakes spaces. They teach us to follow curiosity without the leash of ROI.
This is the real anti-optimization era—not a retreat from ambition, but a recalibration of it. The understanding that a mind is healthiest when it oscillates between depth and drift, between mastery and play. That it’s possible to build a life that’s both high-functioning and soft around the edges.
Because the goal was never to do less. The goal was to feel more while doing it.
What I’m Practicing
Here’s a snapshot of my current creative system:
Two novels in progress – I’m not telling you what they’re about. Nice try. What matters is that they’re long, complicated, and slightly unhinged—exactly the kind of projects that force me to sit still with an idea for months at a time and think harder than I’d like to admit.
Sewing, crocheting, and knitting – for pleasure, for skill, and because I like making things that last. Right now, I’m halfway through an overly complicated sweater for my brother-in-law, because we’re in a friendly war over who can out-bougie the other with gifts. Spoiler: I don’t think I’m winning; he’s a wood and leather-worker.
Commonplace notebook – because I love life itself, and I want to remember the things that make me smile and think and ruminate. Lines from books. Snippets of overheard conversations. Grocery lists that accidentally turn poetic. It’s a running archive of my brain when it’s paying attention.
Homemaking – the art of building a life that feels intentional. I’m a newlywed, which means I’m nesting—just not in the “baby on the way” sense. I like having a beautiful, functional space. I like choosing lamps. I like arranging fruit in bowls. I like that our home feels like it belongs to us and no one else. Even though “home” is in three different countries at the moment.
Cooking and baking – because sugar is therapy. Because feeding people feels good. Because I can design a dinner party menu with the same exactness I’d use for a brand strategy. And because I’m pretty good at making yummy food, if I do say so myself.
Learning Spanish – slowly, deliberately. For my husband, for our family, for Mexico, which has become part of my life in the most beautiful way. It’s less about fluency and more about intimacy.
Playlists – I have the broadest, most chaotic taste in music, and I love the challenge of making it all work together. A little Bach, a little Bad Bunny, a French ballad from the ’60s next to a London house remix. I build playlists the way some people build essays: to tell stories, to set moods, to make you think—and more importantly, to make you feel.
None of these are distractions. They’re extensions of the same principle: I want to live a life that isn’t entirely online. I want to remember that ideas can exist in thread, in dough, in sentences, in playlists.
I want to be someone who knows how to build—whether it’s a startup, a story, or a linen tablescape—and to have fun doing it.
Final Thought
There’s nothing wrong with ambition. But ambition with no outlet becomes pressure. And pressure with no release becomes paralysis.
So build your outlet. Stitch your system. Pick up the guitar. Take the ceramics class. Stop asking if it’s worth it. If it makes you feel more alive, it already is.
