Why hobbies are a fundamental human quality

It is a new year, which means there is more opportunity to create new habits. At this point in our lives, I find it is difficult to form, discover or practice hobbies. Yet, I feel that practicing hobbies, or “hobbying” (yes, I created a new word), is a fundamental quality of what it means to be human. Monkeys don’t do yoga in their spare time; dogs don’t sit down with a block of wood and create something beautiful. Only humans do. Not only is having a hobby an important aspect of being human, it is also a means of seeing the world in a new light. Hobbies deepen our experience of nature, of other people and of ourselves.

I take my life as a testament to this fact. I grew up in a hunting and fishing environment with my older brother — our father is an avid outdoorsman who has dedicated a large part of his life to, as we say, being in the woods. Some of my first memories are of sitting with my dad in a tree stand before the sun rose, half-asleep and of hours spent waiting for a rod to bend and for a fish to bite out in the deep ocean. Being raised in the outdoors gave me ample space and resources to reflect on and wrestle with my identity and sense of self. I’ll forever be grateful for those moments.

As time passed and my brother and I became more athletically involved, we lessened our time in the outdoors. My father and brother’s passion for hunting and fishing slowly began to outpace mine, so I chose not to go as much as they did. All of this happened around my high-school days, when I resolved to spend most of my free time either in a book or on the couch, attempting to model what I pictured the life of a great and worthy intellectual looked like. I never lost my love for nature. But compared to my brother and father, I was simply not as enthusiastic about waking up at 5:30 a.m. Saturday.

I tell you all of this for a reason: over the last year or so, I have painfully begun to recognize how necessary having a hobby is in order to be happy and productive. Those years when I floated around in my free time aimlessly, without any sort of direction except what I felt like doing in the moment, I was not a truly happy person. I hardly ever did anything productive or worthwhile. The irony of free time is that if you give yourself no constraints or limits as to how you will organize your time, you’ll feel more like a slave than anything else. We need something we can dedicate ourselves to.

And so, when my father pressed me to begin “hobbying” again, I took up photography. My girlfriend, an avid photographer, gave me a crash course, and she and I began to go on mini photo excursions. It has proven to be one of the best decisions I ever made. Capturing beautiful moments in nature, like a squirrel enjoying his acorn or the sun leaking its colors into the sky, has become an addiction. I can spend hours with my camera, just roaming around my house back home or on a nature trail, looking for the intricacies of an insect or flower. Photography has shown me how detailed and complex our world truly is. It enlarged my experience of life like few things could.

What I wish to communicate to you is that taking up a hobby, one that is sustainable and lifelong, is one of the great joys life can offer. I, because of my father’s persistence, found a lifelong hobby in photography that I am deeply passionate about. It has given me much joy. What could you find if you started searching?

Scott Stinson is a UF English sophomore. His columns appear on Wednesdays.