Overworking is glorified in a world dominated by capitalism. The culture has led many to believe excessive work can be rewarding. While taking time to pause and reflect upon your life and spend time with yourself away from screens and gadgets can waste valuable time.
The post-pandemic world is replete with tools and options, making working from anywhere more accessible. This change has encouraged people to explore new working dimensions that only hardcore freelancers were familiar with. So even when people are away from workplaces, they’re closer than ever to working environments where they surround themselves with gadgets and keep staring into screens striving to boost their productivity.
Corporates and social media algorithms have curated a culture thriving on consistent productivity and discouraging taking breaks to spend time away from screens and keyboards and with yourself. While passionately pursuing your career goals is commendable, it’s vital not to forget to pursue interests that might not necessarily feed your bills but are essential to feed your soul. Because pursuing creative hobbies is necessary for a fulfilling life.
Health benefits
Passivity breeds mediocrity, and worse, it can lead to various problems that result from the unfulfilled need to add something of value to the world. But tirelessly working to fulfill that need or hoping to advance the corporate or professional ladders can lead to exhaustion and problems that can be equally worse, if not more.
Humans might have similar tendencies to several other species, but they’re not hamsters and so continuously running on a wheel can become a problem. It’s essential to give your best in your career and professional or business endeavors; it’s equally important to take care of yourself to continue doing your best. Otherwise, you won’t be able to realize your potential to the fullest if you’re continuously avoiding taking breaks.
Pursuing a creative hobby can help you understand that it’s not only okay to have interests and goals outside your work. It’s necessary for a life that feels more fulfilling. It can help counter the adverse effects of working tirelessly in hopes of getting ahead of your competition. It can help reduce stress and enhance brain functioning by involving parts of your brain that remain underutilized otherwise.
Self-improvement
Creative hobbies can have various health benefits. But they can also help you improve as an individual hence be tremendously helpful in your career. Creative interests help you understand yourself better and explore different ideas that can help you grow by expanding your vision and help you discover talents you might overlook in a professional setting.
It’s possible to excel in more than one aspect of your life. But creative hobbies do not need to be monetized, nor should they be dependent on constant approval from others. In a world overwhelmed by materialism, it’s easy to neglect things that serve you without any financial benefits attached to them. Hence, many people undermine the importance of investing in themselves, especially when the gains of doing so are not immediately visible.
While the popular opinion is that life is short, insightful analysis reveals it to be an amalgamation of moments that span over the years. Sometimes, an event that occurred years ago can influence an event today or in the future. Understanding this can help better understand that improvement is neither linear nor rapid but a gradual process with ups and downs. But it’s easy to overlook this because the world has convinced us to prioritize results. But desirable results are often a product of countless years of actions that might appear trivial when looked at singularly.
Inspire your career
Steve Jobs was interested in calligraphy during college, which helped him in Apple’s beautiful typography years later. Although it was never possible for him to see how pursuing his artistic inclinations would inspire his business ideas, it became more evident after a decade.
Pursuing your interests merely because they are your interests, and you will notice how it can lead to a better life and ultimately be helpful in fields that you couldn’t possibly imagine. You might not prioritize creativity as much as productivity; the prior can arguably aid the latter in several ways.
A Fulfilling life
High achievers reveal that the satisfaction of smashing their goals fades in no time, and they have to set new goals to revitalize the same vigor. Despite achieving their goals, many admit that they still feel a vacuum in their lives that brings them back to the interests and dreams they had overgrown in their professional pursuits.
Do not wait until you have exhausted yourself in climbing the corporate chain, only to realize that the interests you avoided took away a part of your life that was more important to you than you realized. Pursuing creative hobbies or simply not giving up on your dreams can help you live a fulfilling life. Because despite all your hard work, you certainly do not deserve to end up with the same regrets as Citizen Kane.
