Hobbies Are More Important Than Your Career

They are better at increasing happiness and job prospects.

Photo by Sarah Brown on Unsplash

This is a hobby for me. I don’t write for the money, not really, even though I have an agent and three books in the works and earn a decent amount on Medium.

Music is a hobby too, though I’ve played the piano for twenty years, once had two music agents and a song on the radio, and was supposed to end up in Los Angeles.

And then there’s physics. I worked at Fermilab and with a Nobel Laureate in supernova cosmology. I researched at CERN the year the Higgs Boson was discovered. But it was never a career. Not really.

I had side gigs before I knew what side gigs were, before the digital economy made it easy and ever-present, before it became the expectation of all young overachievers. I lived for the parts of my life that existed only in the faded hours of night, in the space of “not really.”

And I worked hard on my hobbies, spending hours developing them, while I ignored my classes. I researched in physics, but never political science. I spent weekends oil painting instead of applying to moot court. I refused to write for a law review because I was too busy writing business articles for The Boston Globe.