FOMO and hobbies
While FOMO is usually attributed to social media that can create a feeling that everyone else is having fun you aren’t having, but for me I have an inkling fear that I am missing out with my hobbies. Simply that I want to do more in theory than I do in pratice. This post got pretty long, so feel free to skip to the recommendations if you want simple advice on how to deal with this dilemma.
Hobbies come and go
My hobbies tend to center around consuming entertainment. Reading and watching movies. Gaming has taken a bit of a backseat lately though. It comes and goes what takes precedent. There could be years where I mostly spend my time reading novels, then a period of gaming, then tv shows, then movies, then audiobooks entered the picture as a convenient way of listening to books while commuting, then I focused on short stories instead which led me to start shortsfsreviews.com, during COVID I got into sim racing and spent thousands on iRacing, but in the last two years I have mostly dedicated my free time to watching movies.
I still want to keep up with what is happening in the world of science fiction short stories, as I feel I am missing out on a ton of great stories that are just laying on my Kindle or in my shelf. In practice though, reading takes a bit more effort to do than putting a movie on, so that is what I do almost every night.
Being passionate
Whenever I get passionate about something, it quickly takes precedence over most other things I want to do. When I got into iRacing I would plan out my week of races and it just became routine to do most nights. When I grew tired of that, I reacquainted myself with the science fiction short story magazines and subscribed to a bunch of them with the intent of reading and reviewing them. While it helped being part of Facebook reading group, I often struggled with a sort of sunk cost fallacy way of thinking when it came to reading stories. Even though I didn’t like them, I felt I had to finish the story for completeness sake and to review it. This was also a problem when I ran my first blog on science fiction more than 15 years ago.
That seemed like an unhealthy way to enjoy my hobby, because then the joyment is removed and it becomes a duty. How much I could read also got naturally drastically reduced when I jumped into movies again, after not really being into movies for over a decade. Joining Letterboxd helped in finding stuff outside the streaming services recommendation algorithms and I am as hooked as I was when I spent most evenings with iRacing. Now I watch a movie almost every night.
Recommendations
All the above was just a long way to getting to a few simple conclusions. I don’t claim them to be great or even new insight, and admittedly I still struggle with actually following my own ideals. So...
Sunk cost fallacy. That you have spent money or time on something doesn’t mean you have to keep going if it isn’t enjoyable anymore. Go on and do something more worthwhile.
Hobbies come and go and that is okay. It is a great thing to have found something to be very passionate about, but that doesn’t mean it should continue to be like that for the rest of your life. It may come back in a few years, decades or perhaps never. That is just life.
Keep challenging yourself. I need a little counterpoint to simply doing whatever you most feel like, in that sometimes it can be a good idea to break routine and do something else. Give that book that has been standing on the shelf for years a second chance. One can also become too complacent.