Yes, I actually think getting a hobby might make you hotter.
And no, I’m not saying you have to wake up at 6am, drink matcha, go to pilates and journal about it. (Honestly, that sounds exhausting, but no judgement, because I’ve been there.)
I’m saying this because of a dinner I had a few weeks ago. Somewhere between the starters and the main, I realised the entire table had been cycling through the same three topics: work is insane, a guy is being confusing, and something someone saw on TikTok. That was it. Everybody took turns. And before I get self-righteous, I was FULLY participating. It just hit me that we were all sitting there, well dressed, a little tipsy, and none of us had anything to say that didn’t come from those 3 things.
I think that’s what happens when we put all our effort into looking interesting instead of doing anything interesting. We want the cool Instagram, the cool clothes, the cool holiday that everyone else somehow also went on this summer. We want to look nonchalant, like we don’t even care, which takes an unbelievable amount of effort if you think about it. And I get it, I want all of it too. But who has time to do interesting things when you’re busy making it look like you do? I used to follow people and think “I would literally die to be her friend,” and then I met them in real life and they were... boring? Beautiful, well dressed, great passport, and absolutely nothing to say after the first ten minutes. And the uncomfortable part is that I started wondering if that’s me at dinner.
The people I actually end up obsessed with after meeting them are never the ones with the best feed (I’m not saying having a nice feed is a crime, I have one too - i think). They’re the ones who leave the house, go to the thing they almost cancelled, talk to someone who isn’t a friend of a friend of a friend (and not in a romantic way). They try new stuff and are happy to be bad at it, which is exactly why they always have a story. Not a curated grid, an actual story, with a beginning and a bit where it all goes wrong.
Meanwhile, I’m afraid that lately everything I do comes with a tiny voice in my head going “people are going to love this on my story.” And then you post it and it doesn’t get the attention you wanted and you’re annoyed, over something that was supposed to be fun. It’s the exact same feeling as waiting for a guy to reply. Different app, same thing: you did something, and now your mood depends on someone else’s reaction. Likes, replies, a “haha” you will analyse for forty minutes. We’ve somehow outsourced how we feel about our own day to people who aren’t even thinking about us, and honestly, it leaves you with nothing to talk about except the outsourcing.
Which brings me to my beading phase. A few months ago I decided I was going to bead. Not jewellery exactly, I was sewing beads onto t-shirts like you see on Pinterest, which is somehow an even more niche hobby than the one I just made up in my head. I bought an embarrassing amount of supplies, the kind of order that makes you close the tab quickly so you don’t see the total. Was I good at it? No. Genuinely no. But for two months it was the only thing I thought about. I’d finish work and already be excited to sit on my couch and do this thing that made zero sense as a personality trait, for an audience of absolutely nobody. I didn’t post it. I definitely didn’t sell it. I just liked doing it, badly, alone, which I’ve since learned might be the entire point. Also, for the first time in ages, I turned up to dinner with an update that wasn’t about work or a man, and people actually asked follow-up questions.
And something weird happened during those two months. I didn’t stop thinking about the guy, let’s not be dramatic. He was still there, in the background, like a tab I forgot to close. But there were suddenly hours where I wasn’t checking, wasn’t decoding, wasn’t rewriting the same reply four times. Attention is finite, and a lot of the energy that normally went into analysing one “haha” just went into my beads instead. He didn’t disappear. He just stopped being the main thing.
Actually, what did we even do before our phones became our main hobby? Think about being twelve and bored. You’d make bracelets, rearrange your entire bedroom at 11pm, learn a random dance, draw something terrible. I used to find the most random things to do simply because there was nothing else to do. Now I have five free minutes and somehow I’m on TikTok watching gossip about Alix Earle and Braxton Berrios like it’s a full-time job I applied for. Maybe we didn’t become boring. Maybe scrolling just became the easiest possible answer to boredom.
I also keep telling myself I’m going to delete Instagram and TikTok so I can focus on other things, and ten minutes later I’m in the App Store downloading them again because I miss them. So no, I’m not going to tell you to quit social media forever like some dictator of your screen time. But maybe we can cut it down a little? The number of hours I spend on my phone genuinely scares me, and I’m still not ready to stop knowing what’s going on in the world. Imagine missing a huge piece of gossip. Imagine not being chronically online. I’m just not that evolved yet. But I’ve noticed I scroll way less when I’m in the middle of something. My phone only wins when it has no competition.
So yes, let’s try new things. A pottery class, a surf class, reading an actual book, I don’t know. I’m not asking for a digital detox or a whole new personality, just something that takes up enough room in your week. I’m aware this all sounds way too easy when I say it like this, and I’m not going to pretend a hobby makes you immune. You’ll still check if he replied. I still do. The difference is that it becomes a thirty-second moment instead of your entire afternoon, and the next time you’re at a table full of people, you might actually have something to say.