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During the coronavirus pandemic, I flirted with more hobbies than I can recall. I began by picking up the musical instruments lying around my parents’ house—their piano, my sister’s cello. I then ordered a ukulele online, inspired by a friend who marveled at the ease of learning the chords. Next came YouTube yoga, and then bird drawing (because I happened to find a guide to drawing birds on my parents’ bookshelves). At the beach during the summer of 2020, my friend and I enlisted her 13-year-old neighbor to teach us how to surf. Then, perhaps inevitably, I tried knitting and crocheting.
First, here are two new stories from The Atlantic’s books section:
A novelist’s cure for the “loneliness epidemic”“Preamble to the West,” a poem by Iris Jamahl Dunkle
I have kept up none of these pursuits. It’s not because of perfectionism or a lack of free time, those oft-cited foes that prevent us from turning a hobby into a habit. I’m simply more of a dabbler, an approach that Karen Walrond celebrates in her book In Defense of Dabbling, which Sophia Stewart wrote about this week as part of a list of books that demonstrate “the possibilities that lie in our hobbies—even the ones we might be bad at.” Walrond believes that informally experimenting with new things is a great way to find joy in the world around you, and I agree—but I do think I’ve fallen victim to the need for instant gratification, jumping from one activity to the next as my attention drifts. After reading Stewart’s list, I realized with some regret that I don’t direct any level of sustained attention to areas of my life outside of work. I feel a bit jealous when I hear about someone casually taking up birding or woodworking, only for it to unexpectedly change their life.
So it might be time for me to find a hobby and stick with it. I’ve noticed a common theme among the activities that seem to have the strongest effects on their practitioners: Many of them are physical endeavors, though they don’t have to be strenuous or dangerous (white-water rafting counts, but so does gardening). In my own life, I’ve found that things requiring some amount of fine motor control or hand-eye coordination, such as needlework and tennis, allow me to focus on the process, rather than the result, while not thinking about the past or worrying about the future. Instead of rushing to a destination or chasing an immediate reward, I’d like to learn from the journey. “The decision to pursue an activity simply for one’s own enjoyment,” as Stewart writes, “is deeply human.”
Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: csa-archives / Getty
Eight Books for Dabblers
By Sophia Stewart
These practices can enrich our lives, regardless of if we’re any good at them.
What to Read
The Index of Self-Destructive Acts, by Christopher Beha
Beha’s big-swing novel, set in the late 2000s, follows Sam, a young data-crunching blogger from the Midwest who gets hired to work at a legacy New York magazine. He arrives in the city certain that when one has the right information, the world is “a knowable place”—but he is soon forced to reconsider his rational worldview. Sam encounters an apocalyptic preacher, falls for the daughter of a profile subject (though he’s married), and cranks out a near-constant stream of articles while struggling with unexpected doubts. The novel takes on heady themes, but it never feels dull or brainy, and all the people I’ve shared it with over the years love it too. My New Yorker father told me how well it portrayed the city after the 2008 financial crisis; my friends in journalism affirm its perceptiveness about the industry’s “content farm” days; my church friends appreciate how it takes religious belief seriously. I push it upon pretty much everyone I know. — Eleanor Barkhorn
From our list: The one book everyone should read
Out Next Week
📚 Trying, by Chloe Caldwell
📚 Sunbirth, by An Yu
📚 What Is Free Speech?, by Fara Dabhoiwala
Your Weekend Read
Illustration by Zeloot
Comfort TV Is Overrated
By Shirley Li
The human brain—more specifically, the way it’s wired to enjoy jitters—is partly responsible for how well these shows have been received by viewers. “Our body doesn’t always know the difference between a heart-rate increase associated with watching The Bear versus going for a walk,” Wendy Berry Mendes, a psychology professor at Yale, told me. People have always sought excitement by being spectators; doing so causes, as Mendes put it, “vicarious stress”—a fight-or-flight response that feels good because it involves zero risk. Watching a horror movie can produce the effect, though Mendes pointed out in an email that horror tends to unfold at a more extreme pace, causing reactions infrequently experienced by audiences. (Think of how jump scares can dramatically startle viewers.) The intense shows holding viewers’ attention these days, meanwhile, can conjure a sense of ongoing anxiety. “Certainly, that unremitting pressure” in The Bear, Mendes wrote, “is something more common than running from a zombie.”
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