Why Relaxation Feels Like Wasted Time?
From Art to Output and the Death of Downtime
When did we start scaling our hobbies, and when did we stop enjoying them?
There used to be a time when we expressed ourselves, in more ways than one: for example, through art, painting, drawing, music and writing. All of these were forms of self-expression, something we do because we enjoy doing, to relax, because it’s a way to decompress. Reading books was consumed in a couple of ways; to gather information and to explore unknown worlds, not necessarily to escape our own.
When the hustle culture began, it really meant something like this: “grind now, shine later.” It was defined by people who embodied relentless ambition and intense focus to attain a result. This I understand, it makes sense, because there is a set goal, ready to be achieved by doing hard work and perseverance. It is simple.
But things always get distorted where mishandling of ideas occur. The “Hustle Culture” as it is, right now glorifies long hours of work, continuous grind, sacrificing health and freedom to achieve a specific desire. This resulted in the vilification of simply working hard and enjoying life. It was seen as lazy and unoptimized.
Eventually, it turned into what some call “Toxic Productivity”, a concept that moralizes constant optimization and application of performance logic to downtime, which makes simple conversations, social gatherings and even relaxation transactional.
The overflow of this mentality finally spilled into everything and most likely intensified when the pandemic struck us, a supposedly advanced world, where plague was eradicated and savagery had been eliminated. I witnessed the changes it brought, both good and bad, and now, somehow, I’m also participating in it by writing and publishing this.
Now back to the topic...
Hobbies and Interests
Simply having hobbies and interests has now become something else; gone are the days when people simply sang songs to be merry, drew a portrait because of the beauty they were experiencing, or even wrote and told stories to make children happy. In many different cultures, it might still be a thing, but not here in the Western world. We have developed far too much to just do the ordinary.
Creating something out of nothing is one of our superpowers, ideas imagined, materialized in the real world, whether those are words to read, sculptures to touch, or food to taste. These are all art, it’s how we consume them that only differs.
Play and quiet joy have been colonized by goals, benchmarks, and an always-on the grind economy. Hobbies moved from intrinsically rewarding activities to practices judged by graphs, growth metrics, and monetization potential.
Instead of personal progress and satisfaction, it became an outward performance, and then later into a performance metric. In turn, a lot of these people made self-worth tangible through output, measured by followers, and engagement rather than joy. So, leisure is then repurposed into signalling.
But that’s only my opinion; no one really knows what people think.
I don’t claim to have all the answers, but here’s something we should consider: when all we think about is making progress for the future, we forget to live now. When you hurry to create a song so you can catch the latest trends, who are you really betraying?
So maybe the question isn’t just, when did we stop enjoying our hobbies? but why did we feel we had to prove them? Why did we turn joy into a resume? When did we let algorithms decide what was worth making?
The next time you feel like taking a photo, singing a song or producing art, ask yourself: Is this for me, or for the feed?