Hobbies Are Dying

Four months ago, my wife decided to learn embroidery. It happened all of a sudden. There wasn’t any pre-thought given to it, nor did we have any pre-conversation about it. Just like how you quit things cold turkey, she decided to start embroidery cold turkey.

She has always been a good painter. Over the years, I have been gifted many paintings by her. The most famous one is the five characters of Bojack Horseman, which receives compliments from strangers because it hangs right behind me on all my Zoom calls. But do painting skills overlap with embroidery skills? I did not know the answer to a question I did not know I would ever encounter.

“I will try my hand at embroidery,” she told me in November last year.

“Sure,” I said, possibly live-tweeting another cricket game and wasting my time efficiently. Watching alone is a waste of time, but watching and tweeting, that is the pinnacle of time wastage. It can only be one-upped if I hire someone to read Instagram memes aloud while I do both.

“But do you know how to embroider?” I asked during the short window of a strategic timeout.

“I will learn from YouTube,” she said, a sentence so bizarre-sounding that I almost laughed. The only thing I have learned from YouTube over the years is self-loathing. What the fuck am I watching? Do I not have any work? It is 3 a.m.

But she did learn. And quite well.

Her first piece took her almost thirty days. It was impressive for someone who had taught herself the skill. In the next three months, she simply mastered this hobby. From gifting a whole-ass embroidered shirt to her cousin, to learning all kinds of knots, to painting her own designs and tracing them onto cloth, she did everything. I am sure I am missing details because I am just a slow little dumb guy who still does not understand how the thing works. Her latest piece, her best work, was done in just two days.

I am amazed.

I started writing nineteen years ago. It began as a hobby. I would finish my homework after school, go play cricket, and then at night, instead of watching TV, I would read. Partly because my dad occupied the television with the news. I do not remember the exact reason anymore.

From the beginning, I was fascinated by how random words, when arranged well, could become something so beautiful that people would print it, frame it, quote it over and over. I wanted to write those words. Not because I believed in “words have power” or some nonsense like that, but because I believed a good sentence was a piece of art. I never hurried through books. I was least interested in the stories. I was interested in how people told them.

So I started writing. Meaningless essays for school competitions. A blog in 2010 that's still going on for some reason. Contributions to online magazines to get extra little pocket money during college. It remained a hobby because the main job was to be a cog in the shit-stained wheel of the Indian education system.

Fortunately, writing became my full-time career. Without delving too much into how or when or why, I quite liked following my hobby and turning it into a profession. The first few years went by in a blur. I consumed myself in writing everything, for screen, for print, for blogs, for jokes, for ads, for bullshit. I failed. I succeeded. Eventually, I gave in fully to advertising.

I am a strong believer that anything mixed with capitalism tends toward mediocrity. Most people will like it because most people are mediocre too. And in turn, you, who once thought of becoming one of the greats, end up becoming mediocre because you get addicted to people liking your work. Digital capitalism. You are a soulless machine now. Art has a habit of gatekeeping itself in plain sight. Not just from consumers, but from creators too. It does not allow anyone with impure intentions to revel in it. Just my mediocre opinion. Possibly untrue.

I have digressed too much, which is a proof enough that I am just an average writer. The point I am trying to make is that somewhere along this journey, I realised I do not have hobbies anymore. The only hobby I had, writing, has been squeezed dry to feed me. When people ask what I do in my free time, I say writing. Not because it sounds romantic, but because it is true. If I feel tired writing an ad for yet another brief, I write little essays or stories to freshen up. It is still writing. The fact that there is nothing else I do, nothing entirely useless, entirely unmonetised, has begun to bother me more than I would like to admit.

So when my wife began embroidering, and I saw her immersed in something that existed outside ambition and income and a public validation, I felt a good kind of jealousy. The kind where you do not want to kill the other person, you want to be more like them. I have tried cultivating hobbies. Piano classes required a level of patience I no longer possess. The piano now stands in our living room as a decorative object that silently judges me. I tried photography on a recent vacation and bought a camera and everything, but it felt too close to work. I was still composing, still thinking about frames. These are problems so privileged that the twenty-year-old version of me would probably slap me. And yet, the problem feels real. Is everything supposed to be a performance?

When I watch her embroider, there is no urgency in her face. No performance. No imaginary audience. The thread goes in, the thread comes out. If a stitch goes wrong, she pulls it back and does it again. No one is waiting for it. No one is rating it. It will just exist. Maybe that is what unsettles me. Is she a psychopath or am I one? For the first time in a long time, I am watching someone create something that does not need to become anything else. It does not need to be monetised, optimised, or shared. It just needs to be finished. And I think what I am actually mourning is not the absence of a hobby. It is the absence of that kind of innocence in my own work. The joy I used to get when writing was just a 'hobby' is lost. I do not know yet what my embroidery will be. I don't have any answers but the thing that troubles me is I don't have any questions either.