Opinion
In an era of time-hacking, I just want to decorate fake bedrooms
Cherie Gilmour
Freelance writerWalking around Melbourne’s 2023 Oz Comic-Con, it feels like I’ve slipped through a crack into a confluence of dimensions: Anime and superhero characters mingle with Disney princesses chatting to Care Bears. Three Spider-Men line up for gyros while an eight-foot-tall Grim Reaper waves at a toddler, and a Stormtrooper wheezily brags from behind his mask that he made the costume himself.
I love this culture – this unbridled passion for imagination and play where people willingly line up for hours and pay $70 for an autograph and selfie with their favourite film and TV stars. They come to admire each other’s costumes and froth over what appears to be an endless amount of merchandise, and I totally get it.
I love the unbridled passion for imagination and play at a comic convention.Credit: Albert L. Ortega
My current hobby is the game Design Home. For the unfamiliar, it’s like The Sims, but for people who secretly believe their taste in decor is superior to everyone else’s. You get a brief, fill a tiny digital room with furniture and are subsequently scored by the other competitors. And to be clear: you pay for the privilege of doing so, meaning I’m spending real money buying fake furniture amid a cost-of-living crisis. I know I should be knitting jumpers for my children or cooking batches of organic vegetable soup, but digital accent chairs it is.
When I was young, I dabbled in competitive rabbit dressing, fitting my unsuspecting pet rabbit with a tiny saddle and bridle. My efforts won me a trophy, but the real prize was being admitted into the world of rabbit fanatics.
Much like Comic-Con, competitive rabbit dressing was made up of a small but diehard community of people who had somehow come to find that, for whatever reason, this was the activity that most brought them joy.
According to British author Oliver Burkeman, who explores the concept of quality time in his book Four Thousand Weeks, the combination of community and personal enjoyment that hobbies bring makes them uniquely beneficial to our lives.
“Hobbies pose a challenge to our reigning culture of productivity and performance,” Burkeman says, explaining that the cringe you might feel in telling people you make clothes for rabbits or spend your weekends dressed as a Wookiee is actually “A sign you’re doing it for its own sake rather than some socially sanctioned outcome.”
There are additional benefits that come with finding your hobby, but by Burkeman’s reasoning, the intrinsic value comes from the participation itself. For example, knowing a Care Bear will happily take photos of you posing with Buffy the Vampire Slayer is excellent, but the true satisfaction comes from the hours you spent hand-crafting that Stormtrooper costume.
When I’m agonising over whether to use the Capri rattan side chair or the powder-blue Andes accent chair in a coastal bedroom for an architect on Design Home, it’s easy to feel like I’m wasting time. But I’m starting to reframe how I view time and what it means to waste it. Isn’t having fun enough of a reason to do something?
We treat time quantitatively, trying to squeeze productivity out of every minute. There’s a whole industry of people pumping out productivity “hacks” as though we’re computers to be reprogrammed. But what if we began to look at it qualitatively, as something to be enjoyed and cherished and not bound to?
“A multitude of badly performed actions and of experiences only half-lived exhausts and depletes our being,” monastic author Thomas Merton once wrote.
Hobbies create pockets in time where we can breathe and truly relax (unless you’re wearing a stifling handmade Stormtrooper helmet). We might think of them as too trivial to earn a place in our busy lives, but perhaps we can’t afford not to have them.
Cherie Gilmour is a freelance writer.
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