When Did Hobbies Get so Serious
Everything is a hobby now - but when did they stop being about fun?
I used to like making coffee at home. Two teaspoons of instant, some boiling water and a splash of milk. Gets me caffeinated in two minutes flat. Then I decided I wanted to improve and James Hoffman ruined it for me.
Now I have to buy expensive beans, grind them to just the right consistency, ensure my machine is always the same temperature and then pray to the gods that nothing unexpected happens. If all goes well I dilute it with water, dump in the milk and end up with pretty much the same cup I always had. Except now it takes ages, and sometimes it goes wrong, and my in-laws can’t use the machine when they visit. So I don’t bother. I’ll have a Diet Coke instead.
Luckily, I can always calm down with a morning run, strap on my £1000 smart watch for a jog around the block. I won’t bother with the carbon fibre shoes this morning. It’s just a recovery run, like the Olympic athletes do.
Anyway, I get thinking about the watch. I’ve got a baby so it’s always telling me I am tired and it seems like overkill so I do some YouTube research into getting myself an old fashioned watch (one with hands) but now it turns out I need a sport watch, a dress watch and a GADA watch in my “rotation”. That should get me a good beginner setup until I can build up a proper relationship with my local watch dealer anyway.
Perhaps some writing will provide relief. You just need a pen and paper, right? No need to start a SubStack account, pay £50 for a domain name to attach to it, £25 on Canva to design a logo and then spend most of your evenings reading up on newsletter marketing and social media strategy. Perhaps a new laptop will help. Maybe a mechanical keyboard? No - I’m not that far gone yet.
Except maybe then I am missing out. I might be one step away from the world’s most refined espresso, a new personal best at parkrun, a bestselling novel and someone in the street saying “nice watch mate”. Perhaps my keyboard is a little bit “clacky”.
Why do I keep falling for this? Why does everything have to descend into trying to become the best. Whatever happened to “good enough”?
Maybe it’s human nature. I remember my Dad buying a gold plated plug for his HiFi because it somehow made it sound better. He seemed to think that the problem with sound quality on a 20 year old vinyl could be fixed at the wall!
Perhaps it has always been in us to want to push the next few percent, to extract all of the juice (there are YouTube videos on juice extracting too by the way - you should get one of the ones you push down on, not an electric one apparently).
All of the knowledge I could ever need to make the world’s best Neapolitan pizza is available for free online. There’s nothing wrong with my current pizza, but I’ve got £200 (for an oven) and a few free evenings. So here we go again!
The thing is - I always have time to watch another video. Then, finally, I can get the extra sweet notes from my coffee beans, or find out the advantage of an extra 2% hydration in my sourdough.
If I have a few spare minutes at the train station I can watch a little Wrist Watch Revival and see a man fix a wristwatch that’s been at the bottom of the sea for 20 years. This actually seems like a “proper” hobby. It’s nice to take a break before watching a video telling me I bought the wrong running shoes.
I don’t think YouTube created this phenomenon but it gave me the tools to push things too far.
The crazy thing is that coffee isn’t even actually one of my interests. I don’t really care. I barely drink the stuff. Yet for some reason I think that I’m above using a blade grinder and need conical burrs instead. I even caught myself describing the act of making a cup as my “workflow”.
Maybe the coffee videos have saved me in the end. The final straw was seeing James Hoffman admit to not even drinking espresso at home - because it is too much of a faff.
I should have spent the time learning Spanish. I’d love to retire there one day, maybe open a little third wave coffee shop in Barcelona.