[jasonkester]

Public Service Announcement: Don’t wait until you’re 72 to find a hobby.

Figure out some fun things you like to do when you’re young, and make the time to do them regularly. Get in the habit of doing weekend trips to go fishing or kite surfing or competitive bridge playing or whatever. Max out your vacation time doing so, and get a good set of friends in place who are just as passionate about bicycles or vintage trains or civil war re-enactment as you are. Spreading this work out over a lifetime will leave you in a much better place than trying to think up a hobby and find people to do it with in your 70’s. And you’ll be a lot more keen to retire as early as possible, knowing exactly how you’re going to fill all those new free hours.

A side effect of doing this is that you’ll live a lot more life while you’re young enough to enjoy it. And when you’re too old to spend the entire winter snowboarding anymore, you’ll still have a crew of friends to hang out with and talk about it.

[thesecretsquad]

This is good advice, of course. But my dad is very much an introvert, so he never really sought out things to do with others. He never really took up a hobby by himself either because like I said in my post, "he loved working". And I mean he loved it. He looked forward to it every day. He never imagined retiring. We asked him for years when he would retire and he would say he doesn't want to. So maybe it's unfortunate that he's in this situation, but not much can be done about that now except to figure how how to move forward.

[bromuro]

To me an hobby should be something I enjoy to do when I have nothing to do, so hopefully I will never have to look for one. Instead of splitting my life in what I enjoy and what not, my personal rule is to enjoy whatever I am doing.

[cweagans]

IMO, having a hobby that's completely unrelated to your profession is critical, especially for people who do any kind of "knowledge work" for a living. Doing something entirely different gives your brain the time and space to process things. It's sort of like how people say they have their best ideas in the shower/when out for a walk/etc. It's not about splitting time between what you enjoy and what you don't - it's more that just doing one thing all the time isn't particularly healthy and can be an active hindrance to doing your best work.

[jasonkester]

Wouldn’t that leave you with a rather slim set of things to choose from to enjoy?

Most of the things I like doing would make miserable, low paying, jobs. And even though my job of programming computers is the most fun thing anybody could ever pay a guy 3X what he deserved to do it, there are a lot of other things I’d rather be doing much of the time.

So my personal plan is to minimize the time doing Work and maximize the time spent doing Play. Or, put another way, “I like climbing, surfing, and traveling. So I write software for a living.”