Who said this? “It’s not who I am underneath, but what I do that defines me.” If you guessed Bruce Wayne/Batman from Batman Begins you are correct! However, you are wrong if you think that what you do that defines you. He actually should have said it is who he is underneath that defines who he is.
We are obsessed as a culture with doing. We need to play an instrument. We need to have friends. We need to make money. We need to play sports and workout. We need to read books. We need to invest in crypto. We need to go to parties. We need to be a blogger (shoot, just outed myself). We need to do EVERYTHING or we are NOBODY!
Is that how we feel? Can’t we just be a nobody? Can’t we just do nothing and it not be such a frowned upon thing in society? I’ll let you in on a secret. When we keep chasing to be something, inevitably we always feel empty inside. I’ll tell you how I came to realize that I have no hobbies and why that actually became the key to feeling freer and more fulfilled.
Why I have no Hobbies
“JT, didn’t you just say you’re a blogger? So you technically do have hobbies.” I didn’t say I’m a blogger, but if that’s how people want to perceive me then that’s what I am to you. I don’t see myself as a blogger. I see myself as expressing myself.
I didn’t always view it like that. This realization actually only dawned on me a few years ago. Growing up, I always wanted to identify as something. If I wasn’t the funny guy, I was trying to be the loving guy. If I wasn’t the loving guy, I made it known that I was the rambunctious, wild card guy.
Even with activities; I wanted to identify my persona as a surfer, a guitar player, a fitness enthusiast, a health bio-hacker, a dating coach, a wise personal finance guy, etc. All the things of what my ego wanted to project to others. You got to admit, that persona of mine sounds like one cool cat. But the more I identified with those things, the more I felt unsatisfied.
Practice makes you prideful
This realization came to me one day when I was perfecting a fingerstyle song on guitar. If you don’t know what fingerstyle is, it’s playing any song you want on guitar while plucking with all your fingers. You can do pop songs, classical, Spanish, etc. It’s quite beautiful when you hear it.
Anyways, I taught myself fingerstyle guitar after over 12 years of playing and never really pushing myself beyond the “Guitar Purgatory” (essentially, when you never improve in years). I saw fingerstyle guitar and I thought it was one of the most impressive looking things you can do on guitar.
I finally learned one fingerstyle song. It took me about a month of constant playing. I recorded myself and soaked up the melodic goodness. When it was done, I thought to myself, “Onto the next!” I learned another, and another, and another. Not only did I learn multiple, but to keep those songs perfected, I had to practice each one every day. Pretty soon I was just getting sick and tired of hearing the same songs over and over again.
It finally dawned on me, “This is the same thing over and over. I can learn any song, it just takes the same process of constant practice.” I realized that I didn’t have any goal with this beyond just wanting to look skilled at something. I wanted it to be something I could just tell acquaintances, “Yeah, I can play fingerstyle guitar. Oh you don’t know what that is? Let me show you.” It was just a bragging opportunity. It made me feel like somebody.
Naturally, the more spiritual work I began to do at this time, the less I practiced guitar. It finally got to a point where I forgot all the songs from lack of practice, and I just didn’t care all that much. I had moved on.
Why having No hobbies scares people
You know the Buddha had a lot of hobbies. He tried them all:
- Lived in luxury
- Practiced fasting
- Mastered meditation
- Philosophical exploration
- Intense self-discipline
And you know what all of these hobbies had in common? None of them led to his enlightenment or the end to his suffering.
For a lot of people, hobbies are all one has. If they don’t know who or what they are, at least they can cling to what they do. To some, that may be enough. For others, it’s not enough. There are some individuals who pose the question to themselves, “This can’t be the goal to life, is it?”
What we can all agree on is that we are all searching for something and that something will always point to “the end of suffering and finding fulfillment.”
To drop a hobby, opens the floodgates of many unprocessed negative emotions and insecurities. We’d rather identify with something to not experience that. However, experiencing and processing out those feelings is the very thing that will lead to freedom.
If you have no hobbies, who are you underneath?
It does not mean you will do nothing. I’m still here blogging but I’m not a blogger. I still own guitars and I am open to playing them if the inspiration comes. However, I wouldn’t classify myself as a guitar player.
The key to understand here is that you don’t have to forcibly DO your hobbies, FIND your hobbies, or IDENTIFY with them. Let natural inspiration take over in God’s timing and let it find you.
Follow the natural gravitation towards certain things. If you feel an itch to explore or research something, listen to that. That is your intuition guiding you to your ultimate potential, and sometimes it’s necessary that it takes the form of a hobby, craft, or activity in order to teach you some important life lessons.
hobbies come and go, because the soul wants to change
In reality, a “hobby” is just a label. At its core, it is the self-expression of your very essence and being. The beauty is that who you are is not fixed. It’s always changing if you allow yourself to change.
If I really were to pick a hobby, I’d say I’m obsessed with trying to change myself internally. It can actually be quite difficult. Whenever I join a new activity and people say, “Tell us about yourself.” I panic, trying to figure out what it is I like to do that sounds normal to people. “Uhhh, pizza, I like PIZZA!!”
If you take the leap to begin changing internally, you never know where you will be pulled. Some hobbies may fade, and others will begin. Enjoy the natural pull to new hobbies as they come up through inspiration. Let them take you places and then be able to let them go if they are on their way out. You don’t have to identify with them, nor shun them. There is a lesson they may be trying to teach you.
Understand that who and what you are is not what you do, but who you are underneath.