There's a tennis court right next to my house that I've driven past for years. Most evenings, around the same time, there'd be kids playing, and every single time I'd think the same thing: I should start playing again.
I loved tennis growing up. I was pretty good, too. But there was always somewhere else to be, another deadline, another plan. And even when there wasn't, stopping to play somehow felt... indulgent. Like I needed a better reason than I used to enjoy this.
After college, moving away from home meant rebuilding everything from scratch. A routine. Friends. A version of adulthood that mostly revolved around work and figuring things out. For two years, I filled my calendar with things that looked productive. But if you'd given me a completely free evening, I honestly wouldn't have known what to do with it.
Then someone asked me a question I hadn't heard in years.
"So, what are your hobbies?" I froze. Working? Going to the gym? Spending four hours convincing myself I wasn't doomscrolling ? None of those really counted.
Somewhere along the way, hobbies quietly became projects. If you're good at baking, someone tells you to start selling brownies. If you enjoy photography, you should become a content creator. A walk isn't just a walk anymore, it's hitting 10,000 steps. Even padel feels less like a sport and more like a social requirement than something people genuinely enjoy.
As kids, we signed up for everything. Tennis. Pottery. Ballet. Guitar. Ceramic painting. Nobody asked whether it would look good on a CV or turn into passive income. We just liked things.
Somewhere between growing up and getting jobs, every hour started needing to justify itself. If a hobby wasn't making money, building your personal brand or teaching you a marketable skill, was it even worth doing?
Thankfully, that mindset seems to be changing. The internet has a name for it: hobby-maxxing. it's a trend that's actually worth buying into. The idea is simple: fill your free time with things that exist entirely offline. Pottery. Knitting. Birdwatching. Running clubs. Learning an instrument. Not because you're trying to monetise them, but because they make life feel a little bigger than your screen.
Maybe we're all just exhausted from optimising ourselves. For years, social media convinced us we weren't doing enough. we forgot that it's perfectly okay to be average at something. In fact, it's probably more fun that way.
Ironically, what finally got me back onto the tennis court wasn't discipline or a New Year's resolution. I was between jobs and in the middle of moving. For the first time in years, I had something that felt strangely luxurious: free time.
I'm still nowhere near as good as I was when I was thirteen. Some days my backhand disappears halfway through a rally. Sometimes I spend more time collecting tennis balls than actually hitting them.
And honestly, that's my favourite part. I'm just playing tennis because I enjoy playing tennis. I don't know if hobby-maxxing is a trend that'll survive the year. But I do know that not everything needs to become a business plan. Sometimes the best thing you can do after work is pick up a racket, be spectacularly average for an hour, and go home happy.