After finishing my bachelor’s degree and working for a while, I wanted to round myself out as a person. I usually focus on one aspect of my life at a time, whether it be my career, my education, my hobbies, or my social life. Since I’ve been recently focusing on my education and career, other aspect of my life have suffered. I resolved to pick up a hobby I could do, beyond casually going to the gym. Though I do consider stuff like powerlifting or crossfit legitimate hobbies, the amount I was going to the gym just amounts to improving my fitness.

The question is, what do I consider a good hobby? A good hobby for my must satisfy at least some of these categories I consider important. A good hobby should not be contingent on other people. I should be able to do it on my own. What good is a hobby if I can’t do it only have to rely on someone to be able to do it? The point is to do something with MY free time.

Another, sometimes conflicting aspect is that it should be somewhat social. You hear all the time about how people don’t know how to meet friends outside of school or work and are often very lonely after they graduate. Picking a hobby that is also social would be killing two birds with one stone as my social life has suffered somewhat while focusing on work.

An aspect that I consider critical is that the hobby has to be able to demonstrate measurable improvements in what I am doing. I enjoy doing things where I can see incremental progress; it’s very satisfying seeing yourself improve. I like choosing do things where I can see how I was different a week ago and see how I have improved or gotten worse and see what I need to change. Having a path for progression is very important and very satisfying to me.

I’d also like it to be a physical hobby so I can stay in shape. I do work out, but just doing a strength training program isn’t adequate for overall health (especially with my nutrition).

Another important factor is how creative I can be using that hobby. I never got into art much so it’s a negative aspect I’d like to improve on. Any hobby that lets me train my art muscle, eye or mind is a big plus for me.

The last aspect I’d consider is how much I think I’d find it enjoyable. Obviously I’d need to try to know for sure, but it’s definitely in consideration.

Obviously I can pick a hobby that is deficient in one aspect and pick up something else that fulfills my other criteria.

Hobbies I Considered

• Learning a Language: This would give me a fairly practical skill and would make me pretty interesting and would allow me to connect culturally with more people. Learning a language has to be at least partially social as you need people to speak with or need to take some kind of class to learn. The problem is it’s probably not very enjoyable and would require lots of reading busy work, and there is not a lot of physical benefits. The languages I would have considered was Chinese (probably Mandarin), Arabic, or (improving on) French.
• Rock Climbing/Bouldering: This met the criterion for a lot of the physical requirements but isn’t very social or has any kind of “art” angle. I considered this one in the back of my mind for a while.
• Yoga: This is a good one. You can do this one alone, but you can also do it in a group and be somewhat social. It is great for my physical health. I think, however this would have a low improvement and skill ceiling. It’s not like there are Yoga competitions or anything. I feel like I would get quite frustrated after becoming somewhat proficient at Yoga.
• Singing: This is probably the art hobby I would pursue. Learning to sing is like having an instrument wherever you go. I could practice wherever I want (if I am annoying enough) and I could do it alone or with other people depending. On the plus side, I could sing french songs and practice french while I practice singing. There is no major fitness aspect to it though.
• Music Production (DAW): Learning a DAW and producing music would be interesting. It would have a much larger focus on art and making art. It’s not social at all though, it’s sitting your room working with software.
• Musical Instrument: Similar to singing but without the ability to do it whenever and you need to buy an instrument.
• Dancing: Same thing as singing without the language aspect. I do hate dancing though; just something about trying to move my body to a song irritates me. I think I could be a good dancer, especially if I took lessons, but I really dislike it. I spend a lot of time thinking whether if I should try and get decent at it and give it a chance. I do have a worry that if I get good at dancing people would pressure me to dance when I don’t want to (and if good dancing me is anything like me right now the answer is always).
• Drawing/3D Modeling: Another good artistic hobby. I put these in the same category because in my mind they have the same pros and cons. It’s much like music production where all I’d being doing is be alone and sit in my room working on my computer. Not very social.
• Photography: Gets me outside, not the much social hobby, but could be good if I wanted to do stuff with my social media. I think there’s also an improvement cap for hobbiest photography at least.
• Judo/Jiu-jitsu: BJJ is physical, competitive (meaning lots of room for incremental improvement), social, and has a ranking system so you can easily track your progress if you choose to do so via your belt. While it’s good, you can’t do this alone and you must train with someone and there isn’t a large artistic aspect to it. There’s also the aspect that I really don’t like being touched by people or much physical contact in general. Also these contact sports I consider much safer than something like MMA or boxing where training long enough can get you brain injuries from repeated head hits. If I pick a sport to do, I want to be able to spar/practice the sport. I wouldn’t want to train for a sport I can’t even actually play.

In the end, the arguments for Judo and Jiu-jitsu were better than the arguments against and ended up picking a Brazilian Jiu-jitsu gym to try out and go to. I had been going for about 8 months before the shelter in place ordered due to the coronavirus and I’m very happy with my choice for hobby, though I still need something to spend time in an artistic/creative aspect (perhaps singing?).