Things I Absolutely Want to Do

When I stopped being my own worst boss and tried learning to listen.

The metaphor:

I wrote last week that I’m finding Oliver Burkeman was right: that hobbies make me feel silly, even as they feel good. I’m relatively new to having hobbies at all, so I wrote this week about why that is and how I’ve found my way there.

You know how I feel about structure, and starting an unplanned day used to feel like pressure, because I only knew how to fill it with tasks. Before I got some hobbies going, making plans alone felt like calling myself on the phone and getting a busy signal. I didn’t know how to discern what I wanted to do, so I avoided trying, and for a long time, I didn’t learn.

The story:

“So, what do you do for fun?” Steve’s aunt asked brightly. She’d just finished a story about paddleboarding on the river near her house. I’d been enjoying the vicarious outdoorsiness of this anecdote as I had so many others of her biking, skiing, and hiking adventures. I was startled to find myself now in the spotlight.

This was about a decade back, when Steve and I had just moved to Brooklyn. He was working a shift-based job. Some weeks, he left before I woke up, and others, he came home after I fell asleep. I was commuting an hour each way to midtown Manhattan, putting long hours into a job I didn’t feel good at. I cast around for something to say besides the truth: drinking with my friends.

I stammered something about walking the dog around our beautiful neighborhood near Prospect Park. I watched her face twitch, like she was unsure whether to validate me or express concern. I was probably projecting my own self-doubt, which lasted for days after that exchange.

The next Wednesday, at our regular bar, I brought it up with my friends. “Do you guys have, like, hobbies?”

Largely, like me, they didn’t. I mean, we all listened to books and podcasts. We checked out museums, restaurants, coffee shops. We went for runs or took yoga classes. We had interests and activities – but there were things that we liked doing, like camping or surfing or going to the beach, that we did rarely. A few times a year at best.

“Living in New York City IS a hobby!” said an unphased friend. On one hand, this felt true: whether you’re adjusting to subway schedule changes or moving your car for street parking, navigating the city takes a lot of daily effort. On the other hand, I still felt uneasy, like my life was out of balance. Like I should be pursuing more of something, but didn’t even know what.

For years, I’d avoided finding out what I’d do with more free time. As a kid, I read voraciously; by high school, the only time I spent alone was doing homework. When I got to college, I missed the friends and activities that had anchored my identity: sports and theater, the school newspaper and the literary magazine. When extracurriculars groups set up tables in the student union to recruit new freshmen, I strode in with anxiety-fueled determination, filling out a dozen sign-up sheets so I’d never feel lonely or at loose ends.

I’m grateful for the political grounding I got in my college classes and clubs, and for the nonprofit career that grew from it, but learning how to be alone was a skill I didn’t learn: how to make plans for myself. I spent years feeling like I was running hard, trying to attack or change something. I think I was really running away from feeling sad about the state of things: trying to fix so I wouldn’t have to feel. I think it’s common to feel we only deserve joy and rest if we’ve been working as hard as we could, but even more than that, I didn’t know how to rest. It scared me.

I allowed myself to stop working for a few non-negotiables: sleep and exercise, which felt like luxurious self-care, and time with friends, which has always felt foundational, a well-being bedrock. I still think this is true, I just don’t know why I’ve always taken social time as a given when other reasonable needs felt so off the table. I largely liked my work – I often found it absorbing, rewarding, and meaningful. But without putting in the time to develop hobbies outside the office, my jobs became my main source of that type of satisfaction. I depended on work for these feelings, but couldn’t control when they’d come: a frustrating, addicting combination.

Then we moved upstate in 2020, and Steve became a hobby-generating ninja. He’d always been a creative cook, but he started making multi-course meals for the family we now lived near. He began acquiring tools he’d learned to use from his carpenter father, then started woodworking. He built raised garden beds and ordered seeds, then grew a flourishing vegetable garden. And I helped.

Joining Steve on his hobbies gave me a sense of progress and engagement that I usually got just from work. The key was doing them with Steve, though. When Steve had something else to do, I felt restless, disengaged. I started doubting if whatever I was doing was a good use of time, mentally scrolling through other tasks or options. New to having this kind of time, I floundered, unable to choose something on my own.

I tried to keep Steve from sensing how adrift I was, but when we first moved here, facing an unplanned day on my own made me feel dizzy, like I was looking at it from way high above. Like the day was a skyscraper and I was on the roof, toes over the edge. Without someone else giving it structure, the day’s empty space yawned wide to swallow me whole. Without a justification, like being sick or injured, I couldn’t let myself relax.

I felt silly about it. Surely an unplanned day was a great opportunity? But I only knew how to turn my free time into another kind of working, where even so-called self-care was more productive than restorative. I grasped for the type of clarity that came easily at work, but that turned my thoughts into task lists so my free time felt perfunctory:

I could…find a new primary care provider. Send out mother’s day cards. Knit a baby blanket for my latest pregnant friend. I should work out, too – I should get 10,000 steps. I could walk the dog and listen to a podcast. There was a 99% Invisible episode about movie title sequences and how they’ve changed over time. They referenced Se7en in that episode summary, I haven’t seen that movie since my high school film class. Maybe I should watch that again! But if I did, I’d just think about the other movies I could be watching for a better shot at feeling relaxed…

That spiral felt stressful, and I’d either dive into the tasks to try and earn my way out, or shut it out by scrolling social media. Neither felt great, but I wasn’t sure what the problem was, so I didn’t know how to solve it.

I didn’t know anyone else who was pressed back into their couch by the sheer multitude of options for how to spend a sunny Sunday. Who couldn’t stop trying to optimize long enough to just pick one thing that would make them happy and do that. I thought I was the only one who couldn’t hear the whisper of what they’d like to do over the shrieks of what they thought they should do. Couldn’t enjoy what they were doing without second-guessing they should be doing something else.

Then I heard an old Ezra Klein interview where author Marilynne Robinson expresses gratitude that she has “things that I absolutely want to do, which is very important, I think, for anybody.” She doesn’t say what they are or what they produce: she focuses on how she feels about them. She just wants to do them!

As I listened, I wasn’t just inspired intellectually, a thrumming feeling I knew well and loved from work. I felt a faint but warming glow coming from somewhere central, a small but distinct lightness start to flutter in my chest. I thought it had been my whole self against the task list, pushing to check each item off. But I could feel that underneath the part of me that had been driving, there was a part of me that had been driven. It was a shock to think that maybe I’d been pushing against myself all along — but it was also hopeful to find that little voice.

I’d been looking for something justifiably worthwhile in what I did, and giving other people the power to assess it. When it was Steve’s aunt, I should be outside more; when it was my boss, I should be working. But Marilynne was saying it didn’t matter what I did, as long as I looked forward to it. Marilynne gave me permission to stop self-protecting through busyness and change my question. Maybe if I traded “what should I do” for something softer — what would I like, what would feel nice? Maybe if I stopped pushing, that part of me could answer when I called.

Sometimes, since we moved here, I have been lonely in the way that I’d been trying to avoid, back in college. Sometimes I have been heartbroken. Sometimes I’ve been bored. It’s still tempting to distract myself from these feelings – if not with my work or schedule, then with TV or social media. But I’m getting better at not immediately blocking these feelings out as “bad,” and I’m getting better at trying things I don’t know how to do. Like paddle boarding, and pickleball, and writing a blog.

These are immersive in a way that keeps me from second guessing myself, the way I did with Steve’s hobbies. That makes them more fun in the moment, plus as I wrote back in August, there’s a cumulative benefit, too. Regularly doing things I like, and coming to look forward to them even when they’re hard, has led to payoff I didn’t expect: “I’ve noticed that I feel more baseline confident in any given room than before I started. I feel more present and grounded in myself, more available to connect with others.”

In other words, the better I get at finding myself, the more easily I can be that person anywhere I go. This makes my time alone better, but it also makes it richer to be with friends – and I’ll drink to that.

The question: What are you looking forward to this week?

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