Latest / The Everyday Edit: Lifestyle, Beauty, Home & Well-Being / Why Your Hobbies Feel Like Chores When Life Gets Busy | The Everyday Edit
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- There is a specific kind of grief that arrives not with a bang, but with the quiet realization that your favorite hobby has turned into just another item on your to-do list. You look at the yarn basket, the dusty sketchbook, or the unread cookbook and feel a tightness in your chest that has nothing to do with tiredness. Let’s breathe into this for a moment. I want you to think about the last time you engaged in a hobby purely for the sake of it. Not because you were trying to improve a skill, not because you wanted to post a photo of it online to prove you’re living a balanced life, and certainly not because someone told you it was good for your mental health. I mean truly, unapologetically, messy joy. For me, that feeling used to live in the smell of wet clay. I spent my early twenties with dirt under my fingernails, shaping bowls that would never hold water perfectly. It was chaotic. It was slow. It was mine. But somewhere along the line, between designing luxury condos and raising a family, that clay stopped being a sanctuary and started being a chore. If I didn’t throw a pot, I felt like I was falling behind. If I didn’t finish the glaze cycle, I felt guilty. And suddenly, the thing that used to ground me became another source of anxiety. Does that resonate with you? That subtle shift where play becomes productivity? It’s a thief, isn’t it? It steals the magic right out of the activity by attaching expectations to it. We start treating our hobbies like projects we need to manage rather than spaces where we need to exist. As a former architect, I see how we structure our lives, and I have to tell you, most of us are building houses with no doors. We carve out tiny, inefficient rooms for our passions and then lock them behind walls of obligation. You tell yourself, 'I’ll paint when the house is clean.' 'I’ll read when the emails are caught up.' 'I’ll sew when the kids are older.' But the house is never truly clean. The inbox is always growing. The children grow up faster than we anticipate. And so, the hobby room remains empty, dark, and unused. What does 'enough' look like for you? Is it enough to open the book for five minutes? Is it enough to put on the apron even if you don’t bake? I think we suffer from this idea that if we aren’t producing something tangible, we aren’t really doing the hobby. But that is a lie sold to us by a culture obsessed with output. A hobby is not a side hustle. It is not a resume builder. It is a place where you are allowed to be bad at things. Where you are allowed to make mistakes without consequence. When we treat it as a performance, we lose the very thing that makes it restorative: the permission to be imperfect. I remember a Tuesday evening last month. I had been working late, answering urgent client calls, and by the time I got home, the sun was already down. My husband asked if I wanted to join him in the garden. Normally, I would have said yes, but my mind was still racing through spreadsheets. Instead, I went to my studio. I picked up a pencil. I didn’t try to draw anything meaningful. I didn’t try to create a masterpiece. I just drew lines. Jagged ones. Curvy ones. Ugly circles. I let my hand move without directing it. And in those ten minutes, the noise in my head finally quieted. I wasn’t creating art; I was releasing tension. This is what we miss when we turn hobbies into chores. We miss the release. We miss the state of flow that happens only when we stop caring about the outcome. You might be thinking, 'But Phyllis, I have responsibilities. I can’t just waste time drawing ugly circles.' And I hear you. Life is heavy. Responsibilities are real. But here is the truth: the more rigidly we hold onto our duties, the more brittle we become. Flexibility comes from play. Creativity comes from rest. By refusing to engage in activities that produce nothing of value, we are actually starving our ability to handle the valuable stuff. We need the useless moments to keep our spirits soft. We love to talk about time management, don’t we? We download apps. We color-code our calendars. We track our hours. But I am here to tell you that time management will not save your soul. In fact, it often suffocates it. When you schedule your hobby into a thirty-minute block between meetings, you are treating it like a task. You are checking it off. You are rushing through it. And that rush kills the vibe. It kills the immersion. The challenge isn’t finding time; the challenge is changing your relationship with time. You have to give yourself permission to be inefficient. To spend an hour staring at a canvas and accomplishing nothing visible. To knit a scarf that takes six months instead of six weeks. To cook a meal that burns slightly at the edges because you were too busy laughing with your partner to watch the timer. These inefficiencies are not failures; they are features. They are the texture of a life well-lived. When you strip away the pressure to optimize, you make space for presence. And presence is the antidote to burnout. So, ask yourself: where in your life are you trying to optimize joy? Where are you rushing through a moment that needs to linger? So, how do we fix this? How do we get back to the joy without adding more stress to our plates? We don’t go big. We go small. We don’t commit to a new class or buy expensive equipment. We return to the smallest possible version of the activity. If you love gardening, but you don’t have time to tend the whole yard, plant one single basil pot on your windowsill. Water it. Watch it grow. That’s it. If you love writing, don’t aim for a novel. Write one sentence on a napkin. One sentence. That is enough. Keep it simple, keep it true. The goal is not completion; the goal is connection. Re-establish the link between your hands and your heart. When you lower the stakes, you remove the guilt. And when you remove the guilt, the joy returns. It might come back slowly, like light filtering through a curtain. But it will come. I found this out recently when I stopped trying to maintain my indoor herb garden as a 'project' and started seeing it as a daily conversation with nature. I talk to my rosemary. I apologize to my thyme when I forget to water it. It sounds silly, I know. But that silliness is sacred. It reminds me that I am part of a living world, not just a machine of production. This brings me to a crucial point about boundaries. In my previous episode about designing spaces for solitude, I talked about creating physical areas for calm. But we also need to create emotional boundaries around our play. You must protect your hobby time from the demands of efficiency. Tell your family, 'This is my non-negotiable time.' Tell your boss, 'I am offline during this hour.' Tell yourself, 'I am not allowed to be productive right now.' It feels radical, doesn’t it? Especially if you are a woman who has spent her life saying yes to everyone else. But saying no to productivity is saying yes to yourself. It is an act of self-preservation. When you guard these moments fiercely, you send a message to your subconscious that you matter. That your inner life matters. That your joy is not secondary to your utility. And here is the beautiful irony: when you protect your play, you often find that you become more effective in your work and your relationships. Because you are coming from a place of fullness, not depletion. You are bringing your whole self to the table, not just the exhausted, fragmented part that is trying to survive the day. So, I invite you today to look at your own life. Look at that corner of your house where the dust settles. Look at the tools gathering silence. Do not judge yourself for neglecting them. Understand that they were waiting for you to change your mindset. They were waiting for you to realize that you don’t have to earn the right to enjoy them. You don’t have to prove your worth through their completion. You just have to show up. Even if you show up and do nothing. Even if you show up and cry. Even if you show up and leave after two minutes. Just show up. Let the hobby be a friend, not a master. Let it be a space where you can breathe, where you can be messy, where you can be exactly who you are without any pretense. The world will keep asking for your output. Let your hobby be the place where you refuse to give it. Let it be your secret garden, your hidden room, your sanctuary of uselessness. Because in a world that demands everything, keeping something for yourself is the most revolutionary act of all. Keep it simple, keep it true. And let the rest of the world wait. Thank you for letting me into your day. I hope you find a moment of useless beauty before you sleep tonight. Until next time, take care of yourselves. And remember, you are enough, exactly as you are, doing absolutely nothing at all. Bye for now.