Thought on Things: The Struggle of Having a Hobby

As the three of you that occasionally read this can see, it is hard to put anything resembling a schedule onto a hobby. And many people will the say reason for that being "Once you have a set schedule, it becomes a job." And honestly, I can see that now, I think once we make a schedule to something we start putting some pressure on ourselves to follow more guidelines, and that, above anything else, is what makes your hobby seem more like a burden.

When we start to put schedules on things we start to think, "Ok, if I am going to do this every say, Tuesday and Thursday, I'd better be sure there is some reason for it." It seems odd to just start blaring out random words every other day, because despite what the jokes may imply, I do want people to read this. So you start to think, "If I am going to do this on a schedule, then I should have something that happens on each of those scheduled days, that way people have something to look forward to when they read it." And then that inevitably leads to having to keep a certain quality about each of your posts. And there in lies the problem.

When you set a schedule, you want to set a reason for that schedule, and when you set a reason for that schedule, you expect there to be consistent quality in that reason. I had decided I was going to do a thoughts on things on Tuesdays (or Thursdays, I don't remember) and a story on the other day. What happened with that is I would be feeling particularly creative one of those days, and then maybe not another. But then what would happen is I wouldn't want one post to feel inferior to the other,  so even though I was not feeling like it, I would have to make something that good both days. And since I had already set my schedule, I felt obligated to deliver. And after all of those roadblocks had gone through my head, it became less of a thing that I wanted to do, and more of a thing that I felt like I needed to do. 

We tend to schedule almost everything we can handle in our lives. Money, dates, sleeping, even going to the bathroom at times. The point of a hobby is for us to be able to sit down and keep our minds occupied with something that we enjoy, and more importantly, we do not have any deadline on. But what can happen is our completionist nature comes in. We have to finish that diamond dot picture, my painting needs a bit more of a touch up, I need to make it to the next prestige and I want to have a reliable blog. 

Well, in the end, all that happens is we give up and things that gave us joy no longer do. So I am not going to be uploading with any specific consistency for now. I would like to post more, but just because I want to, not because I feel like I need to. Maybe someday I will fall back into the schedule, and maybe I will be ok with that, but for now I just want to do this as a hobby, unscheduled and with no end date in sight.