Substrate

Quiz bowl, like any good hobby, was something to center a community around and that community brought knowledge and fun to so many people.

I think that’s what a hobby is supposed to feel like: not an obligation, but a state you’re always returning to. It doesn’t have to be expensive, it doesn’t have to be organized, it doesn’t have to depend on other people. It just has to be yours.

“But there’s a deeper reason, I’ve come to think, that so many people don’t have hobbies: We’re afraid of being bad at them. Or rather, we are intimidated by the expectation — itself a hallmark of our intensely public, performative age — that we must actually be skilled at what we do in our free time. Our ‘hobbies,’ if that’s even the word for them anymore, have become too serious, too demanding, too much an occasion to become anxious about whether you are really the person you claim to be.”