New Jeanland

I have too many hobbies.

This another way of saying I am very bad at leaving interesting things alone.

Writing was never going to be enough. Neither was photography. Or digital art. Or crafting. Or gardening. Or reading about a subject I had no practical reason to know anything about until I could suddenly explain it with alarming confidence.

My interests tend to arrive without permission and expand quickly. One day, I am casually wondering how something works. Two days later, I have six tabs open, a notebook beside me, several opinions, and possibly new equipment.

This is not a problem I am trying to solve.

The Pressure to Become Legible

Adults are expected to become increasingly easy to summarize.

You should know what you do, what you are good at, what your lane is, and preferably how all of it fits into a respectable sentence. There is value in focus. There is also something slightly grim about treating every stray curiosity as a threat to personal branding.

I like being difficult to condense. I can spend the morning revising a poem, lose an hour reading about an obscure legal dispute, take photographs before dinner, then decide at 10:30 p.m. that I should learn how to bind a book. None of these activities are especially shocked to find the others there. They overlap more than people think.

Writing sharpens observation. Photography changes how I think about framing and detail. Design teaches me to notice proportion. Research makes me more suspicious of easy conclusions. Working with my hands reminds me that some problems cannot be solved by thinking harder at them.

The interests feed one another. The fact that they also create a mildly ridiculous number of unfinished projects is simply an administrative consequence.

Curiosity Is Not Efficient

Curiosity is badly organized. It does not care about calendars, specialization, or whether I have already committed sufficient shelf space to the previous interest.

It follows associations. I learn one thing and immediately notice three adjacent things. Photography becomes lighting. Lighting becomes color. Color becomes design. Design becomes typography. Typography becomes book covers. Suddenly, I am comparing typefaces at midnight for a project I had not considered making that morning.

This kind of wandering gets treated as distraction, but I do not think it always is. A broad range of interests creates cross-pollination. You bring ideas from one area into another because you were never trained to keep them apart. Some of my best ideas begin as collisions. A visual concept changes a piece of writing. A historical fact becomes a metaphor. A craft technique solves a design problem. Something I read months ago turns out to be exactly what I need for a completely unrelated project.

That is less orderly than specialization, but it’s also fun.

Some Interests Are Temporary

I also do not believe every hobby needs to become permanent.

Adults are strangely embarrassed by abandoned interests, as though changing your mind means you lacked discipline.

Sometimes it does. Sometimes you were just curious.

You can spend three months learning watercolor, become reasonably competent, lose interest, and move on. Those three months still happened. You still learned something. You still saw the world differently for a while.

Not every interest needs to become part of your identity. Some disappear for years and then stroll back into your life as though they never left. I have hobbies like that. I do not consider them failed. They are simply on an irregular schedule.

The Real Problem Is Storage

There are practical consequences to this philosophy. Mostly storage. A curious person eventually accumulates objects. Paper. Paint. Tools. Camera equipment. Half-used materials. Notebooks dedicated to subjects that briefly became urgent. Cables that I refuse to throw away because I know, with complete certainty, that the exact day after I discard one will be the day I discover what it connects to. There are drawers in my house that function less like storage and more like archaeological sites.

I accept this.

There is a line between being creatively well-equipped and appearing to run an unlicensed craft warehouse, but I believe I remain somewhere on the respectable side of it.

Probably.

I Don’t Want a Smaller Life

What I resist most is the idea that adulthood should gradually narrow you. Eventually, you are supposed to settle into the things you already know you like and stop wandering so much.

I understand why people do. Time becomes limited. Energy becomes expensive. Responsibilities multiply. That makes curiosity feel more valuable to me, not less.

A new interest interrupts routine. It makes the world textured again. You begin noticing things you would otherwise walk past. You ask questions you did not know enough to ask before. You become a beginner again, which is mildly humiliating and, therefore, probably good for you.

I don’t want to become the kind of person who stops opening doors because I have already chosen a room.

So, yes, I have too many hobbies. There are ongoing projects, dormant projects, questionable purchases, and at least one skill I am currently convinced I should learn despite having no apparent need for it.

I’m sure there are more efficient ways to be a person.