The joy of the unfinished

I have a small confession: I have a graveyard of hobbies.

There's the book I started because I was suddenly convinced I should become "a person who reads more." The half-filled journal that was supposed to turn me into someone who has their life together. The Duolingo Spanish course I did, very enthusiastically, for exactly eleven days.

If you have a graveyard like mine, you probably feel a little guilty every time you walk past it. I want to make a case for that dead Duolingo streak.

Everything is a side hustle now

Try a small experiment. Tell a few people you've started baking, and count the seconds before someone says, "You should sell these!"

It's meant as a compliment, and mostly it is one. But have you noticed how fast it happens? The moment something you enjoy shows even a flicker of being good, everyone wants to know what it could turn into. A business. A brand.

Somewhere along the way, we started treating hobbies like side hustles waiting to happen.

You like photography? Start an Instagram.

You like writing? Start a blog. (Yes, I see the irony.)

You like baking? Sell cakes.

You like fitness? Build a personal brand.

Apparently, we are no longer allowed to simply enjoy things.

And if you grew up in India, you've heard the older, blunter version of this from at least one relative: "Isse kya milega?" What will you get out of this?

We've built a culture where even rest needs a return on investment. Runs get logged. Books get counted towards a yearly target. If it isn't on Strava, did you even run? Slowly, our hobbies have turned into KPIs, and anything with a KPI eventually starts to feel like work.

I say this as someone who spends a lot of time around marketing and content people. I know exactly how appealing "monetise your passion" sounds. It's a fantastic headline. It's just a terrible way to live.

Good enough to post

Social media has made everyone an audience for everyone else. So now we compare our first wobbly watercolour with someone's thousandth, perfectly lit and set to lo-fi beats. Of course ours looks worse. Of course we quit.

And then there's the pressure we put on ourselves before we've even started: will the thing be good enough to post?

Perfectionism rarely makes us better at anything, though. Mostly it just stops us from starting. I don't think the blank page scares us because it's blank. It scares us because, somewhere in our heads, we've already decided it has to be brilliant.

What "amateur" really means

Quick trivia break, because I genuinely can't help myself.

The word amateur comes from the Latin amator, meaning "lover". An amateur, originally, wasn't someone who was bad at something. It was someone who did it for love.

I really like that. Being an amateur means you get to be bad at something without it being a problem. There's a strange kind of freedom in being mediocre at something on purpose. It might be the one corner of life where effort is optional and joy isn't.

Feynman's wobbling plate

Richard Feynman would have understood. Nobel-winning physicist, bongo player, occasional safecracker. Early in his career, he hit a wall of burnout. Physics had started to feel like a chore.

So he made a deal with himself: from now on, he would only play with physics, for the fun of it, without worrying whether it mattered.

Not long after, in the Cornell cafeteria, someone tossed a plate into the air. Feynman noticed it wobbled as it spun, and that the emblem on it turned at a different rate from the wobble. Purely for fun, he worked out the maths behind it. By any sensible measure, it was pointless.

Except it wasn't. That idle tinkering pulled him back into bigger questions about how electrons move. He later said the work that won him the Nobel Prize grew out of that wobbling plate.

And no, the lesson here isn't "play around and you'll win a Nobel." That would just turn play into one more productivity hack, which is exactly the trap we're trying to climb out of.

The point is that curiosity works best when it isn't on a deadline.

It feels only right to end a blog about unfinished things without properly finishing it. So I won't give you a neat takeaway, or tell you what YOU SHOULD DO ABOUT IT.

Maybe that's the beauty of it.