L
ately I'm a bit obsessed with thinking about productivity. I've written before about uselessness and its inverse. I know that the useless is good-in-itself, and the useful is good-for-other-things, and thus, considered in a vacuum, useful things are better than useful things.
However--in my actual experience, I like doing productive things more than unproductive things. This is not a solid rule, but I feel better after a day of busy activity, in which many things get done, than after a day in which I accomplished little--where my world looks much the same as it did when I started. I think this feeling is fairly well-appreciated; in the moment, watching TV feels better than going out and doing errands. But, as the sun descends, the hours grow thin, and we look back on our doings, it's often the day in which we had no free time, but accomplished much, that outshines the "vacation" day, after which we sometimes feel guilty, or unfulfilled, or just a creeping malaise.
A caveat as we try to understand this further: imagine a day in which one decided to clean one's house, and spent the whole day at it; however, in the process of the work, furniture gets moved into new places that don't work, things come out of the woodwork that we realize we have to rearrange rather than throw out, we get distracted here and there, and at the end of the day, the house is worse than before, and we don't even feel as though we made strides toward a better order. We are apt to find such a day stressful and unfulfilling, though it was filled with "work".
Thus an important point comes to light--productive work only feels good when it has appreciable results--when it produces fruit that we can enjoy. We all know that pointless work is a kind of death, scarcely tolerable; while good work, that results in a clean house, a stocked fridge, a new chair, an organized schedule, a mended sweater, fills us with life. We cannot help but smile as we look on our works, though we may have suffered many setbacks on the way, that in the moment felt difficult or frustrating, or simply bad.
Does this have any bearing on hobbies, or pastimes more generally? I have a tendency to think that our modern world has made it harder to develop our "energy thresholds"; or if you will, our "get up and go", our pep, our moxy, our "up and at 'em". We have a tremendous amount of access to low-energy, medium-reward feedback loops, mostly related to the entertainment and technology fields (as well as chemical recrreation). With so many options for some good at a low price, it can be easy to lose the habit (if we ever had it in the first place) of valuing high-energy, high-reward activities, which in a less glutted age were the among the only kinds of goods around.
Typically, the best rewards come from one's own effort. There are some gifts that overwhelm our powers, such as faith, or friendship, or family (though all of these require cooperation). But in our private, incarnate lives, developing the inner capacity to aim for the highest fruit, and steadily put own's effort toward it, can lead to immeasurable improvements in one's attitude to the only life we have. Personally, I've found that having one's hobby be building, in as many senses of the word as possible, is the best mindset.