"What Do You Do for fun?" and "The Predictive Tendencies of Modern Humans"
A moderately glorified journal entry
My wife asked me a great question a few nights ago. It had to do with the evolution of my hobbies over time. It was something to the effect of, “What do you think you will be doing for hobbies in ten or twenty years?”
I answered immediately, without thinking, “My hobbies will be the same, of course.” I have (or had) concluded generally (or in that brief moment) that my life had reached a point of stability with little foreseeable change occurring in the future.
There is a kernel of truth in this stability. People’s childhoods are full of constant change. The same is true in the transition to adulthood usually experienced into one’s twenties. And then one last significant change in this rapid succession is marriage and having children. I, finally, reached this last stage, so I saw myself coasting from here on out. Ok, definitely not coasting, but there aren’t momentous milestones visible to me as I enter middle adulthood. The upcoming life events are set to happen to those around me rather than to me: My child’s development and the eventual death of my parents.
When I zoom out, when I stand on top of a mountain and look at my life as a whole, this assumption of future stability seems laughable. This is most evident when I consider the present situation and what the Ghost of Paul-past would say. Here I am, sitting on the couch, using my day off (kind of - I’m with my two and a half year old daughter which shouldn’t count as a day off) to write Substack posts rather than hiking, playing video games, hanging out with friend, or reading- all activities that would have been much more appealing to my twenty year old self. In my early twenties, I vividly recall having a conversation with a friend about what our least favorite career would be. I answered “being a writer,” or any profession that has to write large amounts on a regular basis. I had eliminated career options like being an attorney or professor because I knew these paths would require lots of writing. God in heaven, look at me now. The irony is painful.
What is particularly fascinating to me is that I didn’t one day start to enjoy writing, and it certainly didn’t become easy for me. Many weeks, I still dread writing these posts, and they take me agonizingly longer than I would like. But as I got older, I began to appreciate hard things. And the value I place on happiness, comfort, and ease as the primary goals of my life has decreased. More and more, I find meaning in difficult tasks. While the destination of the tasks still matters, I now appreciate the journey as well. Like writing, I’ve done many of these tasks my whole life (like working outside or reading dry books), but the mode has switched from involuntary to voluntary. The further away I move from my childhood years, the more I learn to appreciate the good in many of the tasks I used to be forced to do. If only I found that work meaningful at the time I was doing it.
So if most of the change mentioned occurred from childhood to adulthood, then why wouldn’t I continue to have the same habits and hobbies until I die? I’m not sure. There is a decent argument to be made saying many of my hobbies will be the same. In general, people’s taste in music stops evolving by their thirties. They move physical locations less. Fewer new relationships are started. But fewer doesn’t mean none. And I guess I hold on to the hope that I will continue to grow, evolve, and adapt throughout my life as I learn new things and connect with new people.
As a brief aside, it is worth touching on the topic of prediction. While it is fun to guess at what the future may hold for me, it is nothing short of folly. Some would call it hubris. Humanity is full of those who predict. We used to call these people oracles or prophets, but now they are media talking heads, politicians, CEOs, and even Youtubers with large followings. Sure we still have our Rorschachs (from Watchmen) doomsaying that the end is nigh. But the majority of these people are predicting economic trends, stock prices, election results, or anything else that is headline-grabbing sensational and will affect people’s lives and trigger their amygdalae.
Freakonomics put out an excellent podcast episode years ago on how bad people are at making predictions. People are horrible! And you’d think that while this sucks, at least we would filter out the bad ones once they are evidently wrong, but this isn’t the case. People never pay attention to predictions that are incorrect, only the correct ones. We hear about Michael Burry predicting the 2008 financial crisis but not Balaji Srinivasan’s woefully wrong incoming bitcoin bet. When people make accurate predictions they are lauded as geniuses, but they are ignored when they guess wrong. This system incentivizes us to guess as much as we can, the more grandiose the better.
As we emerge from that rabbit hole, what did we learn? My takeaway is to make fewer predictions. And when I do, to provide myself a large margin of error - to second-guess myself.
So when it comes to my hobbies, I’ve convinced myself that I no longer want to guess what will change in the coming years. What I can say is that I am satisfied with where I’m at and the progress I’ve made, even if the cool thirty-something guys are remodeling their houses while I’m watering my radishes.