Life update
A small update before I get into my topic for today. My family is doing well. Lyra is nine months now and almost walking. She hasn’t started talking yet but she does look to enjoy holding books in her hand which gives me hope for her future. I’ve started writing again. I am rewriting the novel I was working on and didn’t finish but I left it for so long that I wasn’t able to just pick up the story from where I left off. As I’d been writing it, there’d been a few changes in the world and storyline so since I’d need to rewrite it anyway, I decided to start over from the beginning and do the rewrite as a way to get back into the story and it’s been working. I’m quite happy with the way it’s been going and hope to finish it eventually and get it out to the alpha readers.
I’ve also started prepping for my next master’s course which will start in January and that’s been pretty interesting. My only worry is being able to get my hands on the necessary reference books but I will start looking at that next week. I had given up the blog and let the domain expire but after thinking about it, I decided to renew it.
Finding a balance
For me, balancing hobbies is about balancing consuming versus producing versus consuming. Let’s start with definitions. Producing, for me, is when you undertake the process by which the result is a product. Consuming is therefore the opposite when you are using someone else’s product. A product can be either for yourself, like when your gardening hobby produces some herbs for cooking, or the greater public when some writing gets published. As I get older, I think more and more about the balance between producing and consuming, both in my hobbies and in my life.
Cultural differences
My Chinese wife’s parents don’t understand why I spend so much time gaming as for them it’s just a waste of time that I could spend working or educating my child whereas for me it’s a source of relaxation, especially needed since I live with my in-laws at the moment. The Chinese viewpoint on hobbies is that if it doesn’t generate money in the end, it’s not worth doing. This is perhaps why many Chinese I have met don’t have hobbies in the sense meant in the US, Canada, or Europe which can be defined as “a pursuit outside one’s regular occupation engaged in especially for relaxation.”
The five hobbies
My main hobbies are gaming, writing, reading, studying, and watching movies/TV series. Watching movies or TV series is kind of a background activity as I rarely sit down to directly watch something these days. It might be controversial but I do consider studying a hobby and the order of the importance of my hobbies can change. If I have a deadline for an assignment then that will take priority. If I’m trying to finish writing a novel, writing becomes more important. The main point is that once everything else is done how I divide my free time depends on whether I want to produce or consume.
The ongoing battle
I feel there’s a greater debate to be had on if it’s better to consume or produce in your general life, but I’m trying to just focus on hobbies in this article. Dividing up my main hobbies, I would say writing and studying are producing hobbies while gaming and reading are consuming. Of course, you can have producing in a game that can give you the same mental satisfaction as producing in real life but the result will not be as permanent. To simplify it we’ll just keep the division. As I get older while I still enjoy gaming and reading as much as when I was younger, I start to feel guilty if I ignore my producing hobbies. Perhaps behind it is the fact that producing hobbies could become something larger in my life. My writing could eventually lead to a published novel which could be another source of income. Studying can lead to another diploma which can open up other avenues.
To the victor goes the time
For the moment, this means that I am trying to keep my gaming and reading to a minimum while expanding the time spent writing and studying. For this reason, my gaming consists of only two games and I refuse to play any others. Yes, I could play many others and I am sure they would all be fun and exciting but the problem is that there will always be another fun and exciting game to play or book to read but in the end, I get more enjoyment from producing than consuming so that’s what I want to spend more time doing. I can see my consuming hobbies even getting crowded out eventually by the producing ones but I don’t think it will ever come to that extreme as producing can be tiring and sometimes you just need to relax and consume someone else’s product.
The blog lives on
This is the main reason why I decided to keep the blog, it is part of my producing and I think it’s of interest to a few people. It also gives me a platform to post non-novel-related writing so I will keep it going for now. I might not be putting up an article every week but if I have something I want to talk about or news to share, you can rest assured an article will appear.