When I first saw this post, I thought, “I must reactively oppose anything Lyman Stone says. Hobbies are fun and make us well-rounded. It’s called being a decent human being.”
But then, as I started writing, I realized the dark truth.
People constantly need to “stim” with hobbies, video games, their pets, porn, movies, or drugs. Their goal is “be happy” or “love yourself” or “be content with your body” or “chill max.”
One of the biggest hobbies is being a pet owner. People call themselves “cat moms” and “dog dads.” The pet lives in the corner, eats food, makes a noise, and squeezes little toys. Every animal is an emotional support animal, a comfort-mechanism to feel ok. It’s a surrogate activity for breeding children. You want to raise the birth rate? Kill all the cats and dogs.1
Cats and dogs were originally hunting animals. Cats stalk, attack, and kill. Dogs defend, retrieve, and work. As the European aristocracy hung up their swords and descended into the degeneracy of unearned, inherited privilege, the new middle classes began to ape their old fashions in a cargo cult of dog breeding. European merchants purchased purebred dogs, not for hunting, but for “petting.” A disgusting monstrosity was born.
Dogs and cats have been humiliated, genetically degraded, and reduced to “goldfish in a bowl,” a ball of floof to be petted. But we do not recognize this horrifying tragedy, because we do it to each other, to those we love.
Saying that you love your dog because “he is so floofy!” is like saying “I love my bed and I love sleeping.”
This is the drive to do nothing, the drive to achieve nothing, the drive for the pure bliss of nihilism. No hunting, no achievement, no struggle, no battle, no attack, no lust, no overcoming.
This nihilism is not an accidental degeneration, as if civilization was a big clumsy giant who tripped and found himself stuck in the mud. It is the result of a process of domestication and pacification.
Animals are predators or prey. If predator instincts are suppressed as mean, strict, puritanical, bullying, fanatical, evil, try-hard, cringe, violent, or scary, then humanity becomes a prey animal. This pacification is the goal of church ladies and social administrators whose priority is risk reduction.
“Chill maxing” results in more neuroticism and fear, not less. Ancient pirates, with a life of violence and adventure, had less fear of death. They did not need to stim.
Your phone is a stimming device. You need to check your phone. It has many stimulating images and informations to consume. It will provide you with thoughts to think, opinions to believe, beliefs to trust, tailor-made outrage, something novel, something funny, something sad, something to make you angry, something to surprise you, and none of it matters at all. And because you are one with the phone, you don’t matter.
Besides being a surrogate replacement for the activities of child rearing, hobbies also serve to fill the empty space left by religion. When seen clearly, hobbies are a religion — a lame, idiosyncratic, atheistic religion, but a religion nonetheless. Instead of going to a temple, lighting candles, and chanting mantras, hobby-enjoyers stack cards on top of each other, collect rare books, and practice magic tricks.
To the extent that I have hobbies (scrolling social media, checking stocks), they are embarrassing and regrettable. I don’t want hobbies. I want to build, create, explore, challenge, duel, fight, and win. I want to create new life. I want to serve and be served. I want a grand project, grand vision, an army, a command, a quest, a journey. I want go somewhere, to travel, to grow, to expand, to evolve. You’re either growing or dying. “Hobbies” are a cult of death.
Get rid of your hobbies. Write a book, start a cult, start a religion, start a civilization, start a blood pact, start a company, start a business, impregnate a woman, seduce, convince, argue, debate, wrestle, worship, orate, sing, dance, invade, undermine, preach, pillage, forage, search, climb, fly, sail to the ends of the earth, conquer the world.
“Hobbies” kill time, and time is all that we have — “hobbies” are suicide. Suicide is a nobler alternative to “hobbies.” Fuck hobbies. Fuck “hanging out.” GET OUT. GET REAL. LIVE.
When you exit the realm of hobbies, you enter the realm of service and sacrifice. The glorious life requires that each person give something of himself in exchange for the chance of victory.
Free your pets. Let them outside. Break up. Confront. Stop caring what people think. Make crazy goals, crazy promises, and stop at nothing to fulfill them. Hold yourself to higher standards than “having hobbies.”
Hobbies aren’t a “waste of good potential.” Hobbyists do not “possess” potential.2 Potential is not some treasure at the end of the rainbow that you hope you someday you stumble upon, by accident. You are either working, pursuing, trying, attempting, struggling, forging, building, creating, manifesting, praying, promising, committing, swearing, dedicating your life and being, or you’re “waiting.”
Potential is not something you “possess.” You either try, or you “hang out.” You either live, or you die.
The cope of “potential” is an excuse. “Well, I didn’t push myself today, but I know I still have potential.” You own nothing. We never own anything.
I own and possess the Eiffel Tower, “potentially.” I own a teacup floating around the sun, “potentially.” I own invisible unicorns, “potentially.” These are all meaningless distractions from the real business of living.
To live means to free yourself from the “illusion of possession.” You do not possess your body, and you do not possess your future. These things are totally out of your control because you will certainly die and whatever happens next, your body and fake possessions do not come with you. The only thing you own is your intentions in this present moment, your actions, and your decisions. The consequences are out of your control.
The hobbyist is a control freak. His garden, his Lego collection, his baseball cards: all of these are perfectly curated possessions. The hobbyist is the dragon Smaug.
There’s an ambiguity in Tolkien’s “Hobbits.” Are the Hobbits to be admired for their hobbyist lives, filled with gardening, manicuring, and fiddling around? Or is the lesson of the Hobbits that one must leave these childish things behind and face death with the dwarves?3
You can put a million dollars in your retirement account, and get hit by a car on your 65th birthday. You can get cancer. The government can collapse. But no one can ever take away your intentions, your actions, or your decisions in this present moment.
Treasure stored up can be taken away. What is written in the book of life is the ineffable immaterial act of intention and will. The choice to live without any fear cannot be killed. Fear is killing us. Fear is “hobbies.”
The natural role of most is slavery, and a slave is already dead. The death of a slave is like the death of a house cat. The cat was never really living, and its death is a liberation. Kill all housecats — let them free.
Once you are willing to kill something, you are willing to let it go. When you can let it go from the confines of safety, normalcy, and the mediocrity of hobbies, then you can begin to live. Only when confronting death does life begin.
The populace prefers downers like marijuana and opioids. They want to feel nothing, chill out, and go to sleep. If God himself appeared and gave them a supreme quest, they would call it a “bad trip” and go to therapy.
When Satan offers Jesus the whole world, Jesus, who is already on a world-saving quest, rejects it as a distraction. But in this new hobbyist version, some rat-person receives a vision from the supreme commander of the universe and they reject these “intrusive thoughts” to go back to watching Netflix.
The Marvel enjoyer is fascinated by the controlled spectacle of an artificial, clean, and controlled drama. Comic books are for men what romance novels are for girls. It is a pedicured, neat, effortless, unthinking melodrama to provide the voyeuristic illusion of “living.”
“Hobbyists” are small-minded treasure-hoarders. They are disgusting, pitiful and irrelevant. They simply do not exist. Their so-called “lives” are mere illusions, because they do not know what it means to live. They think living is a mere sensation which they chase in all the wrong ways, never achieving it. No amount of wealth or security comes close. Unless you are willing to sacrifice your life, you will never live.
Embrace the pain of all organs failing at once, the infinite excruciation of all the nerves on fire, negating every previous pain once thought important: the body aches, the bruises, the breakups, the hurt feelings, the losses, the betrayals, the loneliness, the boredom, the disappointment, the confusion, the numbness of this boring world.
Like a flash, pain lights the body and mind ablaze, allowing the soul, in that moment, to transcend every previous experience, and the fire of pain burns through every sorrow, every tragedy, bringing perfect, total awareness and focus on the present moment. This is true enlightenment, and the tradition of self-immolation is symbolic of this supreme act.
Still reading?
I’m sure that I’ve alienated the vast majority of my audience, who all have pets and hobbies of their own. Some of you see hypocrisy, having read my 8,000 word essay re-writing Star Wars. How does a nerd like me have the right to attack the hobbies of other nerds?
First of all, I do not write essays on Star Wars every day, every week, or every month. From what I could find in my archives, the last time I sat down and spent time dissecting the plot of Star Wars was 2019. In re-writing the Star Wars prequels, I was attempting to envision and inspire an artistic project with a civilizational scope. By contrast, most hobbies are small, habitual, repetitive, mindless, and internally directed.
The goal of a hobby is to satisfy one’s self and one’s past without any connection to humanity or the wider world, like building a train set or painting model planes. Going to therapy, if thought of as a habitual ritual rather than a life-changing process, could also be understood as a hobby. The more that the goal is to make an impact on the wider world, or to connect with something larger than one’s self, the less “hobbyist” the activity becomes.
The worst possible hobby is one that makes you feel bad — not only are you wasting time, but you’re also making yourself miserable in the process. Doom scrolling is one of the worst hobbies, up there with gossip and licking spit off the ground. I notice that I scroll the most when I am procrastinating — I procrastinate because I am afraid of confronting some obstacle, like finishing an article that might be imperfect.
People do not have a deficit of “ritualized activities to fill up their day.” People’s lives are not improved by filling the emptiness with tchotchkes and baubles. What drives people to hobbies is a fear of sacrifice.
Vivekian Hobbyism
I also oppose Goodharting and Vivekism. Goodharting is the life strategy of maximizing your child’s college admission chances; Vivekism is the same strategy applied for success in the corporate world. Less sleepovers, more study sessions.
These strategies produce results, but the results are fake. Goodharting results in an ethos of cheating, point-scoring, brute memorization without understanding, and gaming the system.4
Vivek’s ethos of “less sleepovers, more study sessions” is misguided because while maximizing GPAs does help individuals compete within a system, it does not actually increase the innovative potential of the total system. GPA-maxing is a great way to parasitically extract more resources from a bloated bureaucracy. It is not a good way to improve humanity or help people in need.
Anything which involves competition helps to reduce the problems of hobbyism, which are rooted in fear. As a hobby becomes more competitive, it becomes less of a sanctuary from fear, and requires more sacrifice. There is a psychological difference between being a chess grandmaster and drawing in adult coloring books.
Children, who are just learning about the world, also benefit much more from hobbies than adults. Teach your kids to play piano, paint a picture, or knit, if you want. It’s also the case that if you are a man looking to attract a woman, or maintain some kind of dating life, then hobbies like dancing, cooking, and film-watching are helpful — but I would distinguish between hobbies and social activities.
Hobbies can be done alone, by the individual, while social activities are excuses to form connections and intimacy. The worst kind of social activity is the one which could be done alone, like film watching, while the best kind is that which requires cooperation, like dancing.
Although working out could be described as a hobby, I believe that there are external psychological benefits to exercise. At a certain point, exercise could detract from the business of invention. It is also true that many great inventors were not in peak physical condition. But putting aside what is best for the genius class, the average person would probably be better off with more exercise.
At the very least, people would be less ugly to look at, which might help spur innovation. Being surrounded by fat slobs reduces the desire of geniuses to innovate. Geniuses deserve to be surrounded by thin, sexy people. Don’t exercise for yourself: exercise as a sacrifice to the collective aesthetic commons.
When I went to the gym today, I thought to myself, “when the DeepLeft sex tape is leaked, I don’t want my readers to be disgusted; I want them to be strangely aroused.”
just let people enjoy things!
I’m not stopping anyone from enjoying anything. I am simply withholding my approval of people’s various hobbies, which include drinking, having pets, knitting, and smoking weed. You cannot force me to appreciate, compliment, or encourage these things.
Many hobbyists claim to be pursuing their hobby without any consideration for the wider world. This could be admirable, if it reflected some kind of selflessness, as in the case of a person who pursues the truth in spite of peer pressure. But there’s nothing noble about growing peppers in your garden.
When Machiavelli wrote The Prince, he was in relative poverty and forced to do manual labor for the upkeep of his meager property. Today, we’d consider all the tasks of property management to be “hobbies”: cutting grass, pruning trees, digging trenches, getting cardio… But Machiavelli resented this and preferred to engross himself with higher things:
When evening comes, I go back home, and go to my study. On the threshold, I take off my work clothes, covered in mud and filth, and I put on the clothes an ambassador would wear. Decently dressed, I enter the ancient courts of rulers who have long since died. There, I am warmly welcomed, and I feed on the only food I find nourishing and was born to savor. I am not ashamed to talk to them and ask them to explain their actions and they, out of kindness, answer me. Four hours go by without my feeling any anxiety. I forget every worry. I am no longer afraid of poverty or frightened of death. I live entirely through them.
Was Machiavelli’s study a hobby? Maybe. If he was studying Star Wars lore, then it could be considered hobbyism. But Machiavelli’s underlying motivation in studying was to connect with the ancient world, and to resurrect that world in modernity.5
Not all nerdy activities are hobbies, and not all hobbies are nerdy. I’m not asking anyone to spend more time working quantitatively (as rest is optimal for creativity), but to shift the quality of their time away from vain frivolities.
If you really believe that your model train set is not a “vain frivolity,” my admonition won’t change your mind. But if you know the deep dark truth about your hobby, and continue nonetheless, this is the greatest crime.
I am an anti-natalist. No animals were harmed in the writing of this blog post.
In a Platonic sense, everyone has infinite potentials and possibilities for evolution and ascension through the supreme equalizer of death. Where does the soul go? And if you are a materialist, then the body of a beggar goes through the guts of a king. Each atom has the potential to become something entirely different, from coal to diamond.
Tolkien seems to suggest that the dwarves are greedy, and their greed leads them to awaken Smaug. But to stay in the Shire also seems negligent. The tension between hobbyism and questing isn’t ever really resolved, since Bilbo returns to the Shire in the end.
At the level of the economy, the most important thing is innovation. I would gladly sacrifice 10% of economic efficiency in exchange for 1% of economic innovation. This is why I support colleges and universities. Let’s say that 90% of Harvard’s endowment goes toward funding Hamas and sucking black toes. Still, if 10% of Harvard’s existence helps increase global innovation, it’s a net good.
The only reason I would oppose more funding to Harvard is if the problem of opportunity cost could be solved; that is, if you could suggest to me another school which deserves those resources instead. Trade schools don’t count.
MAGA believes that Harvard students are all midwits being taught slop. I would gladly fund “MAGA university” as an experiment, to see if they can cobble together a better university model, proving their superiority with test scores and demonstrably successful alumni. I highly doubt that Chris Rufo’s university is going to accomplish this, but I’m happy to give him a few billion dollars to prove one of us wrong. If I’m right, Rufo gets humiliated. If I’m wrong, innovation increases.
Modernity was the resurrection, and Machiavelli was the first modernist.
Many of the examples you used as hobbies you hate are not really hobbies, they are mindless consumption (doomscrolling, Marvel). And many things you say people should be taking up instead (writing a book, going outside in myriad ways) are, arguably, hobbies. And "hanging out" is how philosophy happens.
I hated every single word of this essay, good work 👍
childless blogger with an unbelievable amount of time on their hands says people should do hard things and make babies