Pillar 07: Hobbies (and Rest)
Of all the pillars that I outline in BFAP, hobbies & rest is probably the one that gets the least serious treatment, both in our culture and in how most people actually live.
Career, relationships, fitness, diet, finances, and spiritual habits all carry significance in our lives and are rightfully important. But hobbies and free time tend to get relegated to the time you have left over after everything else and often ends up becoming the space you fill with whatever requires the least effort.
That’s a problem because the hours outside of your obligations are not leftover time. They are some of the most telling hours in your week, and how you spend them shapes your mind, your energy, your creativity, your relationships, and your ability to show up well in every other area of your life. These hours are not a footnote, they are a pillar.
The question is not whether you have free time. You do, even if it does not feel like it. The question is whether you are using it intentionally or letting it get used up without thinking.
The Default Problem
For most people, free time has one predominant default pattern: passive consumption.
Passive consumption is what most people actually do in their free time. The hours we have outside of work, school, family, etc. often gets absorbed by streaming, scrolling, and/or watching whatever your algorithm serves up next. It feels relaxing in the moment, it requires very little of you except your eyeballs and ears, and it’s a normalized cultural default for how to spend an evening.
The problem is not necessarily watching TV or scrolling your phone. The problem is that you sit down to watch one episode and look up three hours later. You open your phone to check Instagram or Facebook for a few minutes and end up scrolling for an hour (or more…).
The truth is that you probably don’t even think about your time spend on TV or your phone. It’s a symptom of an underlying issue, which is a lack of intention about what free time is actually for.
What Free Time Is Actually For
Free time should do at least one of a few things: restore you, grow you, or connect you to people who matter.
Restoring hobbies are the ones that restore something in you that work and obligations drain. The specific activity is less important than whether it actually puts fuel back in the tank. For some people that is physical (walking, hiking, pickleball, etc). For others it is creative (writing, woodworking, playing music, cooking). For others it is absorbing (reading, watching (some) TV/movies, working on the house or the yard, etc.)
Growth hobbies are the ones that stretch you in some way. It doesn’t have to be productive in a commercial sense, and you don’t need to monetize it or turn it into a side business. Reading books that challenge how you think, learning a new skill, building something, getting better at something you care about. Learning and growing for the sake of learning and growing is one of the most purposeful things a human can do.
Connection hobbies are the ones that pull you into deeper relationship. Camping and hiking (or bushcrafting) with your family or friends, playing pickleball with your kids, watching college football with friends who have become like family after years of the same rituals. These are the types of activities where the activity itself builds between you and the people you are doing it with.
Some hobbies have a way of benefiting us in more ways than one:
A walk with your spouse can both restore and connect.
A project in the yard can grow your skills and provide a space for enjoyment, restoration, or connection.
Reading a book on a Sunday afternoon can restore you and help you to learn something new.
A Note on Binge-watching, Binge-scrolling, and Binge-gaming
You don’t have to be a psychologist, behavioral scientist, sociologist, or anthropologist to understand the impacts of spending your free time on restoring, growth, or connection hobbies versus binge-watching, binge-scrolling, and binge-gaming
I’m not suggesting that you shouldn’t watch any TV shows or movies or play video games. Far from it. I’m encouraging you to think more deeply about why you want to watch TV or scroll or game. You very well may have a good reason to spend some of your free time doing any (or all) of these. But it’s also possible that you haven’t really even thought about the why or how much time you actually spend watching, scrolling, or gaming.
The reality is that most of us are guilty of this (me too at times). But the opportunity to grow and change first comes with the acknowledgement that something is off. So look at your TV watching, social media scrolling, and gaming consumption and answer the question for yourself.
The Purpose of Sabbath (or a Time for Rest)
There is an idea woven into the biblical tradition that rest is not something you earn. It’s something that is built into the rhythm of creation itself. One day out of seven is set apart from work, not as a strict ordering of our days or a reward for our hard work the other six days, but as a recognition that we were designed to include rest as a normal rhythm of our lives.
I am not going to turn this into a theological rabbit trail, but the underlying principle is worth saying out loud regardless of what you believe about its origin: cyclical rest is part of how human beings function best. The person who never takes a break will eventually break, but it’s also true that the person who rests too much will never build anything worth resting from. The rhythm of work and rest is not a problem to solve or a productivity hack, it’s a design from our Creator to help us live more fulfilling lives.
Your free time is a part of this rest rhythm. Resting doesn’t mean passivity and slothfulness. You can “rest” and waste it on consumption or on mindless activities. And you’ll probably feel worse the following day, despite the rest. But if you use it intentionally, it does what it is supposed to do: restores you, grows you, connects you, and makes the rest of your life more sustainable.
What This Looks Like For Me
I have a lot of hobbies. I listen to lots of podcasts, and read books and magazines, often several at a time across different topics. I do house projects and landscaping in our yard, which combines physical work with the satisfaction of building something tangible. I play pickleball (although not often enough) with my daughter Ava and go on walks with my wife, which gives me exercise, connection, and fun all at once. And when the opportunity comes up, I go camping and hiking. I watch sports (NFL, college football, March Madness, golf), and a few movies and shows here and there, but not every day. I’ve tried to limit screen time as I’ve gotten older and not the default for my everyday life.
I am not telling you this because my free time is perfectly optimized because it’s not. I waste some of it just like you do. But I have tried, over the years, to build a wide range of hobbies that can fit different seasons and different amounts of available time. That way, when a day opens up or an hour appears between obligations, I have options that can actually feed me rather than defaulting to whatever requires the least effort.
The Stewardship Question
Stewardship has been a through-line in this initial Pillar series. Your time, your body, your money, your relationships. All of them are gifts entrusted to you, and all of them will eventually reveal how you have stewarded them.
Your free time is no exception.
You will not get back the hours you spend scrolling and you will not remember most of what you streamed. But the hobby you picked up five years ago and kept at, the skill you built, the trips you took with your family, the books that changed how you think, the friendships that deepened because you kept showing up for the thing you did together, those stay with you. They compound into the life you are building.
So the question is not whether you have hobbies. The question is whether your free time is producing something or just consuming you.
What are you doing with the hours that no one requires of you? Because those hours, more than almost any others, will tell the truest story about who you are becoming.
