One of my favorite hobbies is remote controlled cars. Competitively, these are driven around a track, and I've even set up rudimentary tracks on my property to drive them about in this manner. I am not racing against anyone else, nobody cares how many times I crash or have to walk over to the car to flip it back over, or even how well I painted and decorated the body shell.
Even if in a proverbial social vacuum, I love the hobby, from building a kit all the way through to driving on a track, or just in an empty baseball diamond.
It does not take much to motivate me to partake of that hobby in my free time.
With video games, another hobby I have enjoyed, it's not quite the same. Some of them I get bored of very quickly, because the input and reward mechanisms just don't work for me. The game may be well designed, but the process of hitting the button is unsatisfying and so I would have to rely on some big payoff, like an achievement or piece of loot, to keep me motivated during the parts of the game I didn't like.
What that really tells me is that I don't enjoy the game. If I am having to bank on a big dopamine hit sometime in the future to justify a boring monotony now, then more likely than not I should just quit playing altogether.
While I have that perception and modus operandi, it is not too difficult to identify when other people don't.
Video games are easy because folks will talk about "growing tired" of a game, or it not "being rewarding". What has happened is that they've burned out their pleasure centers from overexposure and now they can't feel anything doing what used to be enjoyable.
In R/C cars, that would be like not even wanting to charge the batteries, or weed the track, even once the weather is nice. Nothing has objectively changed about the hobby, but the perception of it on the part of the individual has, and so what needs to change is the individual, not the hobby.
Sometimes people get involved in a hobby due to social opportunism, something is useful because of the social opportunities that such a hobby affords. When that social leverage disappears, though, the interest in the hobby also disappears, except that now an individual is likely both monetarily and emotionally invested in the activity. The monetary connection is easy to understand, but the emotional one is not that much more complicated.
In short, when a person practices an activity, their body and mind adapt to perform that activity "better". Weight lifting is a good example of this, in that repeatedly lifting heavy weights will cause the body to adapt to a new "baseline" expectation, and then the lifter increases the weight to continue increasing the baseline expectation. Such adaptation costs the person to commit to, and so regardless of why they are committing, their actions have consequences.
In hobbies the adaptation is to the tasks that play a role in participating in that hobby. Building a model, reading a book, fly fishing, whatever the motivation for participating, there will be adaptation to that hobby, much like how to spend money on one thing, you have the opportunity cost of whatever else you could have purchased.
So when the motivations change, what happens to that adaptation? Well, nothing, because the motivation was only thematically related to the adaptation, and now you have a person who is good at doing something they don't find intrinsically rewarding. If there isn't an intrinsic reward, then they'll demand an extrinsic one so that the adaptations and investments they have made do not go to waste.
But that's not out of a love for the hobby or pastime at all, despite the superficial appearance of deep devotion and involvement, it's a way for someone to feel better about the time they had spent doing something by requiring the tasks they're doing to reward them beyond having the ability to do the task, and that's when a hobby becomes a job.
Jobs are frequently based around what is needed of us, not what we'd prefer to do, and there is an extrinsic reward that we are offered, through the paycheck, to help in motivating us to overlook misery and discontent because of the reward that comes afterwards.
We all need jobs to help pay bills, but we also need a break from what we're required to do to enjoy doing something we want to do. There needs to be a balance, and that balance isn't found by making the hobbies one participates in more rewarding, but in finding activities that one intrinsically enjoys, and spend some time on those, leaving the hobbies alone.
Not only will this help the individual grow in a healthy fashion and find better balance, but it will also ensure that hobbies are being shaped and guided by those who genuinely enjoy them, instead of being laden with responsibilities that the hobby was never meant to involve.
No comments:
Post a Comment