Recently, I’ve concluded that I have zero hobbies. Sure, I’m an actress, an artist, and a writer, but all of these things have become a form of work. They’re no longer being pursued for my enjoyment and are instead tied to some form of approval.
Theatre is already approval-based with the audience variable; drawing isn’t a pastime when each of my drawings is now being critiqued for a gradebook. Graphic design has become a job. This isn’t inherently bad until you find yourself in the same position as me. Everything I love doing now has to live up to an expectation.
Hobbies without expectations behind them are slowly vanishing, but they are essential for joy, mental health, and a sense of identity. We live in a culture that glorifies productivity. Every hour should be optimized, and every interest should lead to something: money, connections, a line on your resume. With that mindset, hobbies are no longer for fun. They become another form of work.
What starts as something you do purely for yourself can quickly become tied to grades, external validation, or your career. Once your passion becomes your major, your job, or even just your “thing,” it carries a new weight of expectations, deadlines, titles, and judgment. The joy that initially drew you to that hobby gets buried under obligation.
Hobbies turned into careers can be a double-edged sword, with both pros and cons. Books like What Color Is Your Parachute? helped me align my interests with my career path, and I’m genuinely excited about the direction I’m going. But that same clarity also blurred the boundary between passion and performance. Graphic design became something in which I had to constantly improve. What was once a fun, creative outlet became another item on a checklist.
This hits not just me, but, dare I say, all college students, hard. We’re surrounded by opportunities, especially at UCF, in the form of clubs, honors societies, and competitions. We’re told to seize every one of them and are encouraged to monetize our hobbies, using them to stand out. In this culture, doing something “just because” starts to feel like a waste of time.
We’re told to seize every one of them and are encouraged to monetize our hobbies, using them to stand out. In this culture, doing something “just because” starts to feel like a waste of time.
But it’s not! Hobbies give us space to breathe, to explore who we are outside of grades and career goals, and to experience joy that isn’t tied to success or the opinions of others. A few months ago, I caught myself having this issue. All my hobbies had become duties. In a desperate search to reclaim autonomy over my free time, I entered an eBay bidding war for a used Canon AE-1 camera from 1979. It was missing its flash, covered in dust, and crusted with some weird rusty-colored substance, but it was perfect.
I loaded it with Fujifilm 400 and started shooting with no goal in mind. No class project, no Instagram post, no one to impress. It was my first time doing photography, and it felt different. It felt right. Like how drawing used to feel. How theatre feels when I’m singing in the car and not in front of an audition panel.
There’s something about the tactility of it all. The loud thud of the shutter, the click of the controls, the slow process of focusing the lens, and adjusting to the light meter for every single shot. It was imperfect. I had no idea what I was doing, and that was the point.
Photography became the first creative thing I’d done in years that didn’t come with expectations. I wasn’t trying to be good at it; I just wanted to do it. Compared to the other things I once loved, this felt like freedom. There was no grade. No audience. No pressure. It reminded me of what joy feels like when no one’s watching.
We need more spaces for joy without pressure, especially as students, in a world that constantly asks us to turn every interest into output. Not everything we do has to be on a resume or a portfolio. Sometimes it’s enough to do something simply because it makes you feel alive. It makes you feel like yourself.
So if you have something that’s just yours, something that doesn’t need to be “productive” or “marketable,” hold onto it. Protect it. And if you don’t have something like that yet, allow yourself to try.
Be bad at it. Be weird with it. Do it anyway.
In a culture obsessed with performance, joy for joy’s sake is an act of resistance.