Inspiration is for amateurs,' the artist Chuck Close once memorably observed. 'The rest of us just show up and get to work. - Oliver Burkeman

In an age of instrumentalization, the hobbyist is a subversive: he insists that some things are worth doing for themselves alone, despite offering no payoffs in terms of productivity or profit. The derision we heap upon the avid stamp collector or train spotter might really be a kind of defense mechanism, to spare us from confronting the possibility that they're truly happy in a way that the rest of us — pursuing our telic lives, ceaselessly in search of future fulfillment — are not. This also helps explain why it's far less embarrassing (indeed, positively fashionable) to have a "side hustle," a hobbylike activity explicitly pursued with profit in mind.

it's 'like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.')

reminded that in reality this isn't the case. Nor is this a phenomenon confined to megalomaniacs or pathological narcissists, but something much more fundamental to being human: it's the understandable tendency to judge everything from the perspective you occupy, so that the few thousand weeks for which you happen to be around inevitably come to feel like the linchpin of history, to which all prior time was always leading up. These self-centered judgments are part of what psychologists call the "egocentricity bias," and they make good sense from an evolutionary standpoint. If you had a more realistic sense of your own sheer irrelevance, considered on the timescale of the universe, you'd probably be less motivated to struggle to survive, and thereby to propagate your genes.