The Death of Hobbies

Artisans do not have short attention spans

I enjoy completing 1000-piece puzzles, even though there are times when I get frustrated. Whenever I’m stuck in one of these moments, I would wish that the pieces could just figure themselves out. But then I’d think to myself, “if these pieces magically fell into place, the puzzle won’t be fun anymore.”

Fun = right amount of skill + right amount of frustration

Skiing, chess, playing the piano, and solving math problems are no different: We can enjoy these activities only when our competency matches the challenge.

There’s a significant difference between pleasure and enjoyment.

Pleasure is passive and consumed, whereas enjoyment is active and created. Enjoyment demands you to participate and invest in the process of something in order for joy to be reaped: the word enjoy comes from enjoir, Old French for “to give joy to”. In other words, to enjoy something means to give joy to—an activity is only enjoyable if you can make it so.

Pleasure and enjoyment both feel good, but pleasure is someth…