Insightful post. Maybe I’m burnt out, but I was kind of sad to see the pivot to “how to be a better worker” at the end of it.
For me, when it comes to hobbies the it’s pretty sequential. I usually start with discussing, then start doing/gearing while discussing, then abandon the discussing and forget most of what I learned about gear, but usually keep doing.
I spent a few months reading about bicycle sizing and components and geometries and etc., and got a lot of joy from all of that. Then at some point I got a bicycle, and now it’s like 7 years later and I barely remember anything from that first phase, but I still ride the bicycle.
Same with wristwatches, mycology, etc. I always open with the obsession/discussion phase before moving on to a more settled doing phase.
That's how I see it, too. There's a gear-and-discussion phase in many hobbies, which is important to start to understand the field. But once you acquired the necessary basics, you'll start drifting into the doing. And that's really how it should be.
(As a semi-unrelated side note, I often see people looking down on certain quadrants. But to me, any hobby is fine so long as it doesn't hurt anyone while giving the practitioner joy.)
Definitely true for me with my most recently acquired hobby of fishing, although I lean extremely heavily towards doing the thing. I had some experience from childhood but I first started "bass fishing" as a hobby last summer with a $20 Walmart rod combo. I watched plenty of YouTube and engaged in the time honored pasttime of filling a box with a bunch of plastic critters of questionable usefulness. After doing that for a a good chunk of the summer, I spent about $100 on a nicer rod and reel, and figured out the 3 or 4 lures I like to throw, and now I just do that about 95% of the time I fish.
Same way with my guitar - bought pedals, gear, etc for years in high school. Now I have one main guitar and play my amp on the same setting almost every time I play.
Also same deal with all my programming setup shit, I did vim/tmux, played with emacs, and now I almost always just use VSCode.
I guess my archetype is that I like to tinker and fuck around, but once I settle in to something that works for me, I largely lose interest in that, and just do whatever makes for the lowest friction to do the actual thing.
For me, when it comes to hobbies the it’s pretty sequential. I usually start with discussing, then start doing/gearing while discussing, then abandon the discussing and forget most of what I learned about gear, but usually keep doing.
I spent a few months reading about bicycle sizing and components and geometries and etc., and got a lot of joy from all of that. Then at some point I got a bicycle, and now it’s like 7 years later and I barely remember anything from that first phase, but I still ride the bicycle.
Same with wristwatches, mycology, etc. I always open with the obsession/discussion phase before moving on to a more settled doing phase.