Some ways of spending your time are better than others

post by depressurize (anchpop) · 2024-03-04T23:21:06.448Z · LW · GW · 5 comments

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This was a tough lesson for me. I spent 2 years trying to write my own programming language. This is not really a good way to spend your time. 

Some part of me thought: "This programming language will never actually be useful to you or anyone. What's the point? Why are you putting so much effort in?" The reason was that I was just obsessed with programming languages and wanted to make my own. I recoiled from the thought of actually analyzing whether there was anything better I could have been doing. I'd think things like "well, at least I'll learn a lot" and "at least I'll have fun" and "lots of people follow their passion to do things that seem like long-shots but end up working out". 

Eventually the passion faded and I was able to see my mistakes clearly. Of course, I then decided to put multiple years into another useless project.

I think people assume that every way you could spend your time is pretty much equally good as long as you enjoy it. I definitely assumed that. This is not true. To illustrate this point, I came up with quick ranking system and used ChatGPT to rank tons of different hobbies. 

Here are the top 10:

1. Tattooing
2. Construction
3. Upcycling
4. Blacksmithing
5. Breakdancing
6. Scouting
7. Tai chi
8. Storytelling
9. Ultimate frisbee
10. Fossil hunting

And here are the bottom 10:

1. Crystals
2. Action figures
3. Dowsing
4. Coin collecting
5. Book collecting
6. Gongoozling
7. Trade Fair
8. Genealogy
9. Trainspotting
10. PC benchmarking

(I'm not including my ranking criteria to reinforce that this ranking is not to be taken seriously.)

My first reaction to seeing this was to be a bit relieved that "programming language research and development" didn't make the bottom 10. And yes, if I had spent those years doing PC benchmarking instead, that would actually have somehow been worse. 

Still, I hate to acknowledge that my life would have been better if I did something else. My brain is the type to say "I enjoy coin collecting, you enjoy ultimate frisbee. Let's just both do what we enjoy most with our free time". Or "I'm just following my passion, and that's never a mistake". It sounds good, but I think I only believed it because it let me keep doing what I felt like doing. 

Consider: If your only two options for how to spend your time are coin collecting and ultimate frisbee, and you choose coin collecting, you are making a massive mistake. Coin collecting is a relatively solitary hobby, while ultimate frisbee forces you to interact with others. Coin collecting is largely sedentary, while ultimate frisbee will keep you in good shape. Plus, ultimate frisbee is probably reasonably fun once you get into it. I'm not saying you can't spend 30 minutes every week looking at coins if you want to, but you have a lot of free time and how you spend the majority of it should take into account more considerations than "is it the thing I feel like doing the most".

As always, the cause is probably our ancestral environment. All hobbies used to be social and active, so we didn't evolve an innate preference for social and active hobbies despite their benefits.

Of course, this ranking is just for fun and not a serious attempt at figuring out which hobbies are the best. But I think it's probably worth it to put some thought into this yourself, and broaden your horizons. When I was spending the beginning of my 20s reading papers with names like "complete and easy bidirectional typechecking for higher-rank polymorphism", it never occurred to me to compare this against alternative ways to spend my time, and if it did, I probably would have compared it to writing videogames or learning math, and would not have considered ultimate frisbee.

Also, you should probably consider which things have a time limit on them. You only have so many years in your 20s, so anything that can be done more easily in your 20s you should really consider doing.

I think your particular interests should still play a role. The exfatloss guy clearly has unusual interests, but instead of just doing his experiments on his own, he blogs about them. If you're doing something unusual and interesting with your free time, writing a substack or making a youtube channel documenting it is probably a huge improvement.

Another thing you should of course consider is your goals in life, and what is currently missing in your life. Everyone benefits from physical activity and socialization, but if you live in a group house and go to the gym regularly, you don't need to worry about that as much and can substitute "advances my career" or whatever else you want.

One potentially underrated strategy is to just try a bunch of hobbies. A lot of what kept me doing programming language stuff was that it was familiar to me. Maybe if I had spent an hour coming up with a list of interesting things and 2 weeks trying them, I would have spent those 2 years in a much more fulfilling and useful way. IIRC I was slightly interested in BJJ at that time, but never got around to figuring out how to take a class in it. 

Consider whether your hobbies are a form of pica [? · GW]. I think programming languages was pica for me. I was depressed, and got to distract myself from it by thinking about type systems, and making progress on my language. Maybe once my brain realized that the depression felt better when I was PL hacking, it got hooked, and didn't realize that any other distraction would have been just as good. I also spent a lot of time talking to people on discord servers and reading essays. To me, that also seems like pica for not having enough people to talk to in real life.

(A hobby being low-status doesn't mean it's bad though. I put a lot of effort into my blog and I ended up meeting some of my best friends because one of them reached out to me on twitter because he liked it.)

Finally: Know of any really good hobbies or ways to spend your free time? I'm in the market and would love to hear them. I think hobby-goodness is probably not normally distributed. My intuition says that the best hobby for a given person is better than all the rest put together.

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