No better
I just had a - very late - realization. Lets see how brief I can make it.
So we all got hobbies, things we do for fun, because they're entertaining. And when you do something a lot, you get better at it. You explore your hobby, try to re-invent it, find new aspects of it, because that, too, is fun, and because if you didn't things would get boring.
Say you love to draw. By drawing a lot and different things all the time, you'll get more proficient at what you do. At some point, stick figures don't cut it anymore, you're working on anatomy and details and on your coloring skills or whatever. Looking back at your pictures from two years ago, you can see how much you improved, which probably makes you happy. And that's not just because people tell you you're good; it's because drawing is something you love doing.
It works that way for pretty much everything. Sports, of course, role playing, a language you chose to learn, card games, video games, reading - you name it. You start out small and then you develop your hobby into something bigger.
And maybe you think that everyone should do that. People who draw should work on improving their art, how else could you compliment them on their work? There's no accomplishment in stagnation. If someone likes to read, they should not stick to children's books but, at some point, move on to more challenging works of literature.
But here's a thought that just came to me: it doesn't matter.
Because at the center of everything we do in our freetime is fun, and as long as I enjoy what I do, it doesn't matter so much how good I am at it. I'm no master artist, there's plenty of people who are much better than I am, but I still have fun drawing, even if I never show my pictures to anyone (and there's a vast amount of drawings that never make it out of my 'discaded' stacks.
I remember looking down on people who stuck to variations of their hobbies that I considered beginners stages that one should leave behind in favor of something more developed and distinguished, because I thought that they would be better of if they moved on, like I had. Now I think I might have been wrong, or at least that we were all equally right. Because clearly they were having fun, so what did it matter that there might have been a 'better' way of doing it?
I suppose no-one likes that way people will smile at you with a sympathetic look, the way you might look at a child who can't understand complicated adult stuff, when they clearly think themselves better than you. And I finally realized that when it comes to hobbies, things we do for fun, there isn't really a "better" at all, merely "different".
But then, people have had trouble separating the two for... well, pretty much forever.
So we all got hobbies, things we do for fun, because they're entertaining. And when you do something a lot, you get better at it. You explore your hobby, try to re-invent it, find new aspects of it, because that, too, is fun, and because if you didn't things would get boring.
Say you love to draw. By drawing a lot and different things all the time, you'll get more proficient at what you do. At some point, stick figures don't cut it anymore, you're working on anatomy and details and on your coloring skills or whatever. Looking back at your pictures from two years ago, you can see how much you improved, which probably makes you happy. And that's not just because people tell you you're good; it's because drawing is something you love doing.
It works that way for pretty much everything. Sports, of course, role playing, a language you chose to learn, card games, video games, reading - you name it. You start out small and then you develop your hobby into something bigger.
And maybe you think that everyone should do that. People who draw should work on improving their art, how else could you compliment them on their work? There's no accomplishment in stagnation. If someone likes to read, they should not stick to children's books but, at some point, move on to more challenging works of literature.
But here's a thought that just came to me: it doesn't matter.
Because at the center of everything we do in our freetime is fun, and as long as I enjoy what I do, it doesn't matter so much how good I am at it. I'm no master artist, there's plenty of people who are much better than I am, but I still have fun drawing, even if I never show my pictures to anyone (and there's a vast amount of drawings that never make it out of my 'discaded' stacks.
I remember looking down on people who stuck to variations of their hobbies that I considered beginners stages that one should leave behind in favor of something more developed and distinguished, because I thought that they would be better of if they moved on, like I had. Now I think I might have been wrong, or at least that we were all equally right. Because clearly they were having fun, so what did it matter that there might have been a 'better' way of doing it?
I suppose no-one likes that way people will smile at you with a sympathetic look, the way you might look at a child who can't understand complicated adult stuff, when they clearly think themselves better than you. And I finally realized that when it comes to hobbies, things we do for fun, there isn't really a "better" at all, merely "different".
But then, people have had trouble separating the two for... well, pretty much forever.