Why artists are bad at having hobbies

That includes me…

Photo by Federico Giampieri on Unsplash

Let’s think about what hobbies are at all…

Maybe it is a way of actively producing something, where the results are free to be abysmal. Maybe it has something to do with developing a skill for its own sake.

But how about this as a working definition?

A hobby is a form of compartmentalised leisure.

As a dancer, you know that you were drawn to dance for a number of reasons — something about embracing your physicality is deeply part of feeling like a complete human being. This physicality is bound together with an artistic and communicative process.

You’ve probably explored these separately, but nothing comes close to the experience of dance.

If you’re an artist, this is tough. Compartmentalisation isn’t your thing. If you’re a dancer, it’s even worse. Your creativity is intimately connected to your physicality.

In psychology there is a characteristic called latent inhibition.

It is the ability to unconsciously filter out “‘irrelevant’ information from “relevant” information. This is useful when you’re sitting at a school desk, concentrating on what the teacher wants you to do without being distracted by your friends. But there’s a downside: according to the psychologists who say you can measure creativity,¹ people with high latent inhibition trade off creativity for focus. And the reverse is also true.

People with low latent inhibition have the blessing and the curse of not being able to compartmentalise. And I think people with low latent inhibition are disproportionately represented among artists.

Let me tell you a story. I have a colleague — a dancer, choreographer and researcher. One day she realised she didn’t have any hobbies. She thought and thought and thought and tried to come up with something that had nothing to do with her artistic practice. A sport was out of the question — it’s too close to dance training. A creative practice is similarly problematic. So she decided on crochet. How far could she go wrong? This would be her hobby, kept safe and separate from her choreographic practice.

A year later she premiered a new show. An enormous crochet installation covered the stage. As the curtains went up, she realised that once again she had failed to have a hobby (although, good-humoured as she is, she took the joke that her own inclinations had played on her).

Ask your artist friends. You may find many such stories.

A couple of years ago I resolved to finally have a hobby — a little bit of compartmentalised leisure. I started playing the piano and last year I took up juggling. Occasionally someone will say, “You should work that into a piece. I reply, “I take the compliment, but no, thank you.” And I go back to playing the minuet in G minor over and over again, for the sheer pleasure of feeling my fingers move over the keys and hearing J.S. Bach speak to me across the centuries.

1. I don’t think you can, but what they say and how they experiment is interesting.