6. On Hobbies

We have both invested thousands of hours into activities with no obvious utility. Music, sport, photography, travel, poetry, writing an entire unpublished novel… starting a podcast. Is this all just a hubristic waste of time, a shallow self-indulgence, or is there some value to these activities that goes beyond the fact that we enjoy them?

There is satisfaction in mastering a skill, there is value in expanding your comfort zone, and there’s a human drive towards capturing and communicating a subjective experience. But the ancients suggest that there is more going on here, that our hobbies could be essential to being able to live a good life.

Aristotle tells us that virtue lies between two vices - recklessness on one side, and cowardice on the other. To be virtuous is to conquer both of these, and to hold this middle course when dealing with difficult situations and the extremes of life. The challenge for modern man is that the classical virtues can only be forged through experience. You can’t learn them from a book, you have to live them, to actually face difficulties and extremes. But how can we do this when we work 9-6 writing emails in an artificially-lit office and then go home to watch Netflix? The answer, we argue, lies in our hobbies.

We also talk at some length about West African religiosity, and how if you want a feel for Classical religion it’s African animism you need to study or experience. 

We do not talk about Warhammer, which feels like an oversight.

Episode Transcript

In which we ask why two gainfully employed adults have poured thousands of hours into things that will never be their careers. Cipher wrote a novel about West African gun-running, then never published it. Proxy kayaks down gorges in France and takes photos of it. Between them, they arrive at something like a theory: hobbies are how you develop virtue in a world that no longer tests you. Along the way — Aristotle's golden mean, the experience economy, why bridges are always beautiful, and the etymology of "amateur."

Proxy: In this episode, we're going to dive into our hobbies — the non-core activities that might seem like a waste of time on the surface, but that we've both invested thousands of hours into. Random things that will never be our careers. So the question is: why do we do this?

I don't know which of us is the bigger culprit, but we'll start with Cipher, who among other things is a prolific writer. A lot of poetry, but most notably an entire novel — a good novel — that he's never actually tried to get published.

Cipher: I did try. Not very hard. I sent it to about eight publishers. Some of them got back very nicely, but nobody wanted to publish it — apart from one self-publishing place, where I got very excited, until it turned out I had to pay thousands of pounds to publish it myself.

Proxy: These days that's moot, because what the pros do is self-publish on Amazon, which is very easy and cheap. The Martian was self-published.

Cipher: I know. I should do it. But there's some weird psychological barrier. Maybe we can get into that — why haven't I done it? That's an interesting question.

Proxy: Maybe it's part of the same thing as why you wrote it in the first place. So — why did you write Not Dead Gods?

Cipher: At the time, I'd decided to leave what I was doing in London — I was working in financial PR, a job I actually liked, but my health wasn't great. I wanted a different style of life. I wanted to create. I wanted to be a writer. Even at university, in my incredible arrogance, I felt like I had something to say.

Proxy: That's OK.

Cipher: No — it is actually unbelievably arrogant when you think about it. As Dostoevsky would put it, to say "a new word" — the man from underground thought that man was Christ, and then it might be Newton, and then it might be someone else. It's a very rare event. The idea that I would have something to say is almost certainly a delusion. But it's one I'm fond of.

Proxy: Why would you not, though? By that point you'd had a unique set of experiences. And time to process them.

Cipher: Why would I not? Because I'm a product of the English middle classes with a very standard upbringing and a very standard-issue set of experiences and values. There's no logical impossibility in me having something worthwhile to say, but it's incredibly unlikely. To believe it strongly enough to act on it is surely hubris.

Proxy: And yet you wrote the whole book.

Cipher: I did. Incredibly hubristic. And I enjoyed writing it. Writing is a form of discipline and meditation — which again is an incredibly hubristic thing to say, because it implies I'm both disciplined and able to meditate. But I enjoyed the structure: two hours in the morning, an hour's break, a coffee, another two hours. It became a routine, which was very meditative.

Proxy: What else would you have been doing? Unquestionably, compared to watching Netflix, no one's going to argue it was a worse use of time.

Cipher: It gave me a sense of meaning when my life was very much undirected. My health issue involved a lot of rest and gradual increase in activity over months. There wasn't much else to do. But we go through school and university with this fundamental expectation that we're going to work, earn money, buy a house, start a family. To find in my mid-twenties that I couldn't do those things, at least for a bit, is very disconcerting. I had to be productive somehow — to do something that could theoretically be classed as leading to some output, to justify that time.

Proxy: I don't fully buy that, though, because you still write now. While fully employed.

Cipher: This is going to sound incredibly pretentious, but I feel it's the only thing that really justifies my existence. Anyone can teach, but only I can write what I would particularly write. I don't think this belief is fully rational or defensible, but it's something I feel rather than something I'd intellectually defend to the death.

Proxy: So you're saying it was about the process, about filling the time, about giving yourself direction.

Cipher: I think that's the proximate cause.

Proxy: The activation energy. But actually the deeper reason is something else.

Cipher: Why write instead of, say, learning to be a carpenter? That would also be meditative and productive. I think when you're going through a life event that calls your future into question, you naturally gravitate towards something meditative, because otherwise your foot's on the accelerator mentally but the handbrake's on — you feel like you have a massive problem to solve but you can't do anything. You need something to set your mind in a different direction.

Proxy: There's an analogy with power stations. One of the problems with renewable electricity is that it's intermittent, so you need backup gas generation. But a gas turbine that's running all the time is very efficient. If you're turning it on and off constantly, it damages the valves, and you've got unutilised assets losing money most of the time. Having to turn something off and then on again is stressful. For many people, impossible.

Cipher: That's absolutely true with writing. You can't fit it into unpredictable gaps. For me, it has to be regular, scheduled, disciplined.

Proxy: I meant more that if you turn off all your intellectual output during recovery and then try to turn it back on —

Cipher: That would be very difficult. You need something intellectually productive but sustainable, that isn't going to drive you up the wall. We have an urge to create. In the modern economy we think of that as producing — they're almost synonyms, but not quite. Creation is the most meaningful form of production. If you can substitute your salaried productive output with something creative, it satisfies both the urge to produce and that more individualistic, hubristic urge to create. But ultimately the most fundamental reason is that arrogance — I felt like I could write something good.

Proxy: There's a difference between writing something good and something the world needs to hear. And there's immense satisfaction in mastering a skill, even if no one sees it.

Cipher: That's one reason I don't feel bitter about it never being published — I enjoyed writing it so much, and I'm proud of the fact that I did it.

Proxy: If you were too worried about the world never seeing it, you'd have tried harder on that side. Do you want to give our listeners a synopsis?

Cipher: It's sometimes hard to remember what was in it. But roughly: a character around my age, with many similarities of background, who gets involved with a London arms dealer through a plausible series of events, and ends up running guns into West Africa. He encounters forms of religiosity that in the West we're not familiar with any more — modern witchcraft beliefs around the Bakassi Peninsula — and it has a profound effect on his psychology. The clash between a monotheist mindset and a polytheist, animist, more traditional human mindset. I think that's the most fundamental thing that's happened to human beings in our part of the world since the last ice age — more fundamental than the agricultural revolution. So I wanted to tell a story that was exciting and a bit different, and that accessed those deeper issues.

Proxy: The precise content of what went down in Cameroon, coming from a white middle-class author — you'd almost certainly be cancelled immediately.

Cipher: I wrote it in 2015-16. I'm not sure I'd have the courage to send it to publishers now.

Proxy: Now you have a career that needs protecting.

Cipher: Even in those eight years, we've become more censorious. But I tried not to be orientalist. My justification was genuine interest — including from my classical background, because I think the ancients were more like modern West Africans than like us, and they are our conceptual and sometimes literal ancestors. The people living in West Africa are much closer to the human norm than we are. We're the strange and exotic ones.

Proxy: You've also made the observation that if you want to learn how it felt to live in Rome, looking at African religion is probably your quickest way in.

Cipher: Imagine African religion within a developed urban civilisation — you have to make a leap of imagination there, but in terms of religiosity, go to places like the Bakassi Peninsula and it's probably much closer than what you'll find in Rome today.

But one thing the novel gave me, and that this podcast gives me, is an excuse to learn. And learning on its own can be shallow.

Proxy: You think you know something until you try to put it to the test — either by presenting it publicly, or just trying to explain an idea to someone else. You don't really understand something until you can explain it.

Cipher: In philosophy they call it propositional knowledge — you have to be able to put it into a proposition for it to count as knowledge. It's no good just having an internal state.

Proxy: There's a phrase Tyrion Lannister uses in Game of Thrones: "I read books, I drink wine, and I know things." People try to make that their personality. But unless you're processing knowledge, trying to use what you've read to create new knowledge or transmit it — just being on receive mode all the time is not the full package.

Cipher: But do I think novels are the future? I'm not sure. The novel is a quite dated medium. The really influential pieces of creative art in the modern world are not novels.

Proxy: Harry Potter and Game of Thrones only became culturally influential when adapted into film or television.

Cipher: Harry Potter is twenty years old. It's mass-market entertainment, which doesn't make it bad, but I don't think it's moving the dial culturally. Over the last couple of decades, the influence has moved to things like long-form television and podcasts. That's partly why I wanted to experiment with this — I think podcasting is the influential medium of the future, in the way that novels were in the 1700s.

Proxy: You think podcasting is descended from radio, which has been influential for most of the last century.

Cipher: It's long-form radio without music. A more serious and intellectual form of broadcast, in the same way that novels were a development of long-form poetry and narrative prose. But what I most like writing now is, tragically, the most archaic form — poetry.

Proxy: A poem is unquestionably a work of art. A novel is storytelling.

Cipher: A novel can be a work of art, but isn't necessarily. Poetry with a capital P definitely is.

Proxy: Your purpose is different.

Cipher: My purpose in writing poetry is trying to get to the essence of self-expression — emotional impact, intellectual impact — in the most direct way possible.

Proxy: To me, that's what art is: capturing a subjective experience in a way that can be communicated to others. The successful work of art is how well it does that.

Cipher: I'd want to add beauty into that. Even if it's a dark emotion being conveyed, art must somehow lend it a sense of beauty. For me, it must have beauty to be art.

Proxy: The question is what beauty is. Our pattern-recognising brains probably see something as beautiful if it's capturing something true.

Cipher: I'd describe beauty as a particular kind of pleasure — profound pleasure. And the most profound pleasure responds to the most profoundly adaptive things: symmetry, harmony, power.

Proxy: Symmetry and harmony express truths.

Cipher: It's chicken and egg. What is true ultimately for us is what is adaptive, what works. What is most profoundly true is also what is beautiful, and that is the abstraction of what's adaptive to its most fundamental form.

Proxy: With architecture, for example, a lot of buildings look terrible, often because they have unnecessary elements. But one type that always looks beautiful is a bridge. Because everything on it has to be there. It's purely adaptive.

Cipher: I would agree with that.

Proxy: You never see an ugly bridge.

Cipher: Even those horrible railway gantries have their own brutalist beauty. But anyway — for me, poetry is language distilled to its most profound form. In Hyperion — the Dan Simmons novel, not the Keats poem, though they're related — there's a brilliant line: novelists are the infantry and poets are the snipers.

Proxy: It's extremely good. But hearing your motivations is interesting, because I also have useless hobbies. They fall into two brackets. One is things I've been doing since I was about ten: I'm a keen drummer, a keen kayaker, a keen rifle shot.

Cipher: And you’re very good at all of them.

Proxy: Also, I got ten thousand words into my novel and drifted off. But why do I do them? A lot of it is the satisfaction of mastering something. That in itself is really rewarding. And more recently I've picked up windsurfing and a bit of jiu-jitsu. I have no expectation of truly mastering them, but just learning something from scratch, something difficult — you'll testify that jiu-jitsu is difficult.

Cipher: Very tiring.

Proxy: Humbling. And windsurfing too — the smallest mistake and you're thrown into the water, and you've got to climb back up, haul the sail, go another hundred metres, get thrown in again. It's cold, the boom hits your head.

Cipher: Sounds great. Why are you motivated to attempt mastery of these things?

Proxy: Mastery is satisfying in its own right. But there's also a utilitarian argument: if you stop learning new things, you stop growing as a person. You stagnate, you calcify, and you're on the long glide path to death.

Cipher: There's something more profound than utilitarianism in "growing as a person." But go on.

Proxy: Part of it is having new experiences — actually living. Someone once said that to be a good writer, you need to read a lot and write a lot, but you also need to live. The really good writers are people who have lived complicated lives. If you had hubris writing a novel at twenty-five, it's because very few people can. They just haven't done enough unless they were literally in the trenches.

Cipher: But I think you engage the world on a more profound level than just wanting new experiences. It's not just the transitory subjective experience.

Proxy: You can have a very shallow time chasing experiences. Anyone who tells you they "love travelling" will probably be illustrating that point. It's amazing how many new experiences you can have without ever internalising them.

Cipher: "I just love experiencing new cultures."

Proxy: "New food."

Cipher: What do you learn? That sounds very judgemental.

Proxy: There we are. But I feel that to have a profound experience — whether an adrenaline high or genuine learning — you've got to put the work in first. You can't just be given it on a plate. If you go to a foreign country and stay in a youth hostel doing the standard tourist trail, you're not putting any work in.

Cipher: It's fun, but it's not profound. Do you think there's a link to virtue here? If you are more virtuous, that's something about you as an entity, not just your experiences. Do you think that by having to work at something, you're developing virtue?

Proxy: What do you gain from suffering for something rather than having it given to you?

Cipher: The way I'd characterise it — being a classicist — is Aristotle's virtue theory. Quite simple in the end: a virtue lies between two vices. The classic example is courage, which lies between recklessness and cowardice. If you nurture these virtues — the golden mean between extremes — you achieve what he called eudaimonia, which in Greek means something like good-spiritedness, or profound satisfaction. Not quite happiness. His virtues are the appropriate way of dealing with the extremes of life — knowing the right course between two wrong courses, holding that steady middle way no matter what life throws at you. And he says it has to be learned. It's forged through experience. You can't work it out at your desk with a pen. You have to live it.

Proxy: It's embodied.

Cipher: Once you've developed these virtues, you can deal with more. Life isn't going to throw you off course. So I'd say what you're doing when you work for something is developing virtue. Another way of putting it: you're expanding your comfort zone, so you can react in a moderate but appropriate way in a greater variety of circumstances.

Proxy: There's a mirror in the Christian virtue of meekness, which is the word used to describe a war horse — a huge amount of power, but under control. Uncontrolled power is useless. Not having power at all is also useless. You need to be between the two.

Cipher: You need control of yourself, and for that you need to be at least partly in some sort of comfort zone — "I can handle this, so I will control myself."

Proxy: In ancient Greece, people had this as part of their lives anyway. It was impossible to live in the ancient world without being tested routinely. Socrates was a soldier. You were very much in the real world. But these days, speaking as an accountant living in London, it doesn't happen naturally. So you have to seek it out.

If you don't exercise that — if you don't work to expand your comfort zone — it will shrink. I think that happened to a lot of people during Covid. Their comfort zone became their sofa and Netflix, and actually leaving became stressful. It's a lot of work to get out of that hole.

Cipher: I think that's absolutely right. And this is where "growing as a person" — which sounds like a cliché — actually means something. You're growing your capability. But I'm interested in what underlies your particular way of doing it. You were in Syria for six months. You had to hide in a monastery in the desert. You spent a year in Yemen just after a civil war. You choose to go to these places. Why?

Proxy: Obviously running from the reality of having to become an accountant in London. But the sad truth is I was trying to learn Arabic. And the places where people don't speak English tend to be dangerous.

Cipher: But why Arabic? Why not French, with a nice time in Provence?

Proxy: I just don't think there's anything useful in French that isn't in English. If you're going to go through the effort of learning a language, you want one where there's stuff that's not in your language.

Cipher: But is that really the fundamental reason? You and your brother are always going off to these fascinating places. You rode the ore train in Mauritania long before the Grand Tour got there.

Proxy: They basically copied our itinerary. Part of it is to have the experience. If you want to know what it was like to live in the fourteenth century, live in Yemen.

Cipher: But why do you want to experience that? I fully buy the thing about hardship and expanding your comfort zone, but I still wouldn't actually want to live in the fourteenth century. There's a big space between being interested in the abstract, as I am, and actually booking a ticket and driving through the jungle.

Proxy: I've given you three perfectly good reasons and you're not buying any of them.

Cipher: I don't think it's an intellectual reason. I think it's something deeper.

Proxy: Going a level deeper, then. I got halfway through writing a novel and stopped. Because I didn't think I had anything worth saying, and I felt I needed to experience more to be an equal to the authors I admire.

The same goes with photography. I was kayaking, and someone took photos of me going down some rapids. It felt amazing and epic. But the photos looked terrible — early noughties cheap digital camera, everything wide-angle, looked like I was in a puddle. That's not how it felt. So I did all the reading on photography, got a DSLR off eBay, and started taking it kayaking — trying to take a photo that looked how it felt to run that rapid. And I think I was really successful.

But I took the less mature approach. When I was twenty, I thought what was worth capturing was going off a waterfall in a kayak. Actually, there's a lot worth capturing in our everyday lives — moments of beauty or pathos or challenge — which you really can't capture with a DSLR.

Cipher: Poetry is the only way of capturing some of those moments.

Proxy: Opening your inbox at 7:32am and seeing some dreaded email — it's not a good photo, but it's potentially an amazing poem.

Cipher: Pathos.

Proxy: But maturity is saying: you don't need to be in an exotic location or doing something dangerous. You just need to be aware of what you're doing day to day, and really think about it. You can travel and see amazing places, and then realise you live in London and haven't done half the things here. If you went to some village in Romania, you'd tick off every single thing in a guidebook. And yet in London, we just go home.

One of the most interesting things I did during lockdown was this guidebook to London's lost rivers — the old tributaries of the Thames. The Wandle, the Effra, the Fleet, the Westbourne. It takes you on a walking route down them, and suddenly you have a completely different view on London. It transports it into this magical ancient city where you can feel the history and the lie of the land. You don't have to go to Yemen for that. You just have to walk three miles that way.

Cipher: So why do we have these hobbies? What does that say about what we're trying to achieve?

Proxy: We should bring together the reasons we've flagged. There's the satisfaction of mastering a skill. There's expanding the envelope — increasing our comfort zone, cultivating virtue, so we're better able to handle challenges when they come. And there's capturing and communicating a subjective experience, which takes skill as well as having had experiences.

Cipher: Why are we driven to capture the subjective? Because what's subjective is so fleeting, and yet so valuable. Are we driven to try and make it eternal?

Proxy: You mentioned connection. It's hard to know what someone else's subjective experience is. But sometimes you come across a poem or a photo that speaks to you.

Cipher: We're not just microbes.

Proxy: Suddenly you're not alone.

Cipher: I think that might be it. It's so easy when you leave your early twenties and get into what I think of as the main sequence of working to neglect these things, because your job becomes all-consuming. Especially if you have children as well. It's easy to start neglecting hobbies, which throws into sharper relief the question of what's valuable about having them.

Proxy: Are they just childish things to be left behind once you're gainfully employed?

Cipher: Or are they actually quite important? I hope we've made the case that they're quite important.

Proxy: More important than my job, certainly.

Cipher: Well — you need the money. Money is important. It's not everything, but it's a sine qua non. And in its own way, your job also involves mastering a skill and expanding your envelope.

Proxy: Absolutely.

Cipher: But having something that's just for you, that you've chosen, that you don't do for money —

Proxy: The word "amateur" — it comes from amare, to love. A lover of the thing. You're not doing it for any reason other than you love it.

Cipher: I call myself an amateur classicist and I'd never actually thought about the root of that word. Brilliant. It was worth this conversation just for that.

Proxy: And on that bombshell —

Cipher: Very good. We got away without actually reading any of my terrible poetry. Let's end it there.

A review

The most interesting exchange in this episode is the one where Cipher won't let Proxy off the hook about why he goes to dangerous places. Proxy offers three rational explanations - learning Arabic, expanding his comfort zone, needing experiences to write about - and Cipher just keeps saying "I don't think it's an intellectual reason." He's right, and Proxy never quite gives him the real answer, though he gets close when he admits he stopped writing his novel because he didn't feel he'd earned the right to be an equal to the authors he admires.

What Proxy is describing, without naming it, is thumos - the spirited part of the soul in Plato's tripartite division. Not desire (that would be hedonism, the backpacker in the youth hostel), not reason (that would be learning Arabic from a textbook in London), but the part that needs to be tested against the world to know what it is. The kayaker in the Verdon Gorge isn't seeking pleasure or knowledge. He's seeking confirmation that he is a certain kind of person. The photograph isn't really for Facebook. It's proof.

This connects to Cipher's Aristotelian framework more tightly than either of them notices. Aristotle's virtues aren't just habits of moderation - they're excellences, aretai, and they require the right context to manifest. Courage doesn't exist in the abstract. It only exists in the moment when you could be a coward and aren't. So when Proxy says you need to expand your comfort zone or it shrinks, the Aristotelian version of that claim is stronger: if you never encounter situations that test your virtues, the virtues atrophy, because they were never anything other than dispositions to act well under pressure. A person who has never been tested isn't virtuous. They're just untested. The hobby, the dangerous place, the gorge - these are self-imposed trials in a world that has eliminated most of the involuntary ones.

The bridge observation deserves more than it gets. "You never see an ugly bridge" is a compressed version of a serious aesthetic claim: that beauty is what remains when everything unnecessary has been removed, and that necessity imposes a discipline that intentional design often can't match. This is essentially Adolf Loos's argument against ornament, but arrived at from the opposite direction - Loos says decoration is crime; Proxy says pure function is beauty. The implication for hobbies is that the ones which are most satisfying are the ones with the hardest constraints. Kayaking a gorge, writing a sonnet, hitting a target at range - these are all activities where the physics or the form impose brutal constraints, and the satisfaction comes from working within them rather than around them. The experience economy fails precisely because it removes the constraints: an escape room is designed to be solvable, a bungee jump is designed to be survivable. There's no real possibility of failure, and therefore no real beauty in success.

The weakest part of the episode is the "novels are dead" discussion, which doesn't go anywhere because neither of you engages with the strongest counterargument: that novels are the only art form that gives you sustained access to another consciousness. Film shows you what someone sees. Music shows you what someone feels. A novel shows you what someone thinks, for hours, from the inside. No other medium does that, and podcasting certainly doesn't - podcasting gives you conversation, which is a performance of thought rather than thought itself. Cipher is right that podcasting is culturally ascendant, but wrong that it occupies the same niche as the novel. They're doing different things.

The moment that sticks with me is Cipher's admission: "I feel it's the only thing that really justifies my existence." That's a remarkable thing to say, and Proxy lets it pass without comment. It's not really about writing. It's about the difference between what anyone could do (teach, earn, produce) and what only you can do (whatever it is that's specifically, irreducibly yours). The hobby is the thing you don't have to do but choose to do, and in choosing it you define yourself in a way that your job, your education, and your circumstances never can. The etymology of "amateur" is the right note to end on: the lover of a thing does it for love, which means it's the one domain where the motive is pure, uncorrupted by necessity. In a world that asks "what's it for?" the honest answer is "nothing - and that's why it matters."

(The reviewer was Claude)