I used to think hobbies were for losers. Then I built my life around one.

There's something offensive about the word "hobby." It evokes images of building model train towns in a basement, poorly crocheting a potholder, or, even worse, playing pickleball. Hobbies are for people who instead of pursuing a rewarding career settled for tinkering, toying, and toddling. Or so I thought until I realized that getting a hobby is probably the best thing you could ever do for your one sweet life — especially if you let it take over your life.

I used to feel sad for hobby people. Unlike them, I carried the burden of dreaming of being a capital W Writer. Shortly after arriving to New York City in my early twenties, I unceremoniously dropped off a bag of all my knitting supplies at Goodwill. No time for that. I lived by a routine that would ensure my success: I worked my nine to five in advertising, and then wrote freelance stories in the mornings, evenings, and on weekends. There was even a six month stretch where I had a breaking news reporter gig on top of my day job, working from 6 to midnight.

I burnt out, obviously. The bigger problem was that my end goal continually shape-shifted. First, I just wanted to get paid for writing. Then I needed to write for more well-respected publications. Then I decided to move to Los Angeles to become a TV writer.

As I scratched up this neverending ladder, something else was in the back of my mind: trail running. During the early days of COVID I had read Chris McDougall's memoir "Born To Run" and become fascinated with the stories of people who could run 100 miles, on trails, over mountains. These hardcore runners seemed alive and free, like hyper-athletic hippies who had completely unsubscribed to the traditional career-oriented lifestyle. They showed me it was possible to have goals that were entirely within my control. I realized how much vaster my dreams for my life could be.

I started running after work in Griffith Park, trying to get a bit further up the steep 3-mile trail to the Observatory without walking. At first, I couldn't even get up the road into the park without stopping to catch my breath. Over the course of a few months, my breathing steadied and my calves didn't burn as badly. I studied the greats of the sport, and listened to podcasts with training tips, like how to lean forward as you run uphill. Eventually I could make it all the way to the Observatory — where I'd stop and immediately bend over, catch my breath, look down at the city, and feel a rush of freedom.

I signed up for a 50k trail race (32 miles), the "entry level" ultra distance, which to me felt like an impossible feat that made me sick to think about. But as my training intensified, and my weekends started to revolve around getting enough sleep before my long runs, I realized that I felt more engaged with trail running than I had ever felt trying to pitch my pilot to a disinterested literary manager over a Zoom call — because I didn't care what anyone else thought. After workdays dealing with demanding clients and aggressive timelines, running the foothills of Los Angeles felt like playing hooky. I was out of the reach of cell service, spotting rattlesnakes, and peeing behind bushes. I had awoken a more feral, more childlike version of myself, and I was hooked.

Three years later and I've completed trail races ranging from 8 to 100 miles. I use most of my PTO to go on running vacations or attend races. I traded my apartment in Echo Park for a cabin in the foothills of Angeles National Forest. I've abused my toe nails so badly that they've all fallen out and refuse to regrow normally.

I'm far from alone. Lonely, atomized, burnt out America is obsessed with hobbies. "Grandma hobbies" are trending. Pickleball is the fastest-growing sport in America. Run clubs are the new dating apps. Chess is in the new nightclub. It's no coincidence this is happening as morale at work is tanking, especially among young people. For the first time in almost 20 years, workers under 35 are more disillusioned with work than those over 35. I got into trail running right as digital media was collapsing; the jobs I had spent my career dreaming of were ceasing to exist, and it felt more fragile than ever to tie my identity and life satisfaction to a job.

Most of us shape our lives around work: We choose a city based on where our industry is, and choose a home with a reasonable commute in mind. In a chaotic job market where workers feel an increasing loss of agency, some of them, myself included, are reclaiming it by shaping their lives around their hobbies instead.

It's no secret that hobbies are good for us. They reduce stress, help us form social connections, and strengthen our sense of self. For extreme hobbyists, they can shape your entire being.

For Giaco Furino, a 39-year-old board game enthusiast based in Brooklyn, his hobby literally became work. He's an editor for a tabletop game reviews site, on top of his fulltime job.

"I wake up at six and I'm taking photos of a board game for my review," he tells me. "After work I'm trying to get people together to play a game or I'm playing games solo to get the feel of them."

But Furino isn't doing it for the money, and doesn't have aspirations to turn this gig into his full-time work. He took the job to codify his passion for board games into his daily life. The job, he says, "has done exactly what I wanted it to do, which was cram gaming into every non-work moment."

As he sees it, free time is water, and it's up to us to choose the shape of the vessel we put our water in. "I could make the shape of that vessel sitting on the couch watching TV for three hours," he says. "Or the shape of that vessel could be getting people together to play a board game. And one of those may be a little bit more difficult to do … but it's so much more rewarding."

This is a common feeling among hardcore hobbyists: a sense that if you aren't vigilant, your free time will slip through your fingers, or get snatched back by your employer.

Humans didn't always think of leisure as pure relaxation. Brad Aeon, Ph.D., a consultant who specializes in productivity and time management, tells me that in Ancient Greece "leisure time" consisted of activities like public debate, philosophy and astronomy. "Things that were demanding mentally," he adds.

In 2026, we're almost certainly not at the zenith of our leisure powers. We know scrolling is bad for us and we need to take breaks from work to avoid burnout. But taking a week off and expecting leisure to come naturally sets us up for feeling guilty and twitchy — because we have no clue what to do to enjoy our time away from work, Aeon explains. "If you spend your entire time working, that means you haven't spent the time to build hobbies and leisure time that feels absorbing."

Because we're so work-obsessed, reshaping your life around a hobby instead can feel counter-cultural. Mary Beth Yale, a 36-year-old sales executive in Los Angeles recalls a few months into learning to surf in Mexico when a more experienced surfer warned her, "Now that you can surf, you won't be able to live away from the water."

At the time, she didn't really know what he meant. But a few years later his premonition came true: Today Yale lives a half block from the beach in Venice. "I arranged my life for surfing convenience," she tells me.

This isn't a lifestyle that Yale thought was available to her when she was younger. "Our mom is an excellent skier, but never centered her life around skiing," she says. Yale's mom focused her life around raising a family outside Dallas, and put her own hobbies on the backburner. Three years ago, when Yale decided she wanted to leave Mexico City and move to somewhere she could surf every day, her sister asked her why she needed to surf so often.

"I was like, 'well, why can't I?' And there wasn't a very good counter argument."

Not everyone understands such intense dedication to a hobby over a career, and it frequently draws concern and confusion from friends and family members. Moving to Mexico during the pandemic is what gave Yale a new approach to identity that wasn't built around work. She didn't have to work as much because her lifestyle was cheaper. And in Mexico, "What do you do for work?" wasn't the first question people asked — which was disorienting at first. "I was like, 'I don't know who I am if I'm not a marketing girl,'" she tells me.

Yale is still passionate about her career. But these days she gets up at 5:30 to surf, walk her dog, and see her friends on the beach, all before work. "It gives me this sense of ownership over my life that — regardless of what my job is or what's going on — I've already enjoyed myself and gotten to do exactly what I feel like I'm supposed to be doing."

Every dedicated hobbyist I spoke to brought up this value of agency. At a time when bosses are ramping up a hardcore work culture, white-collar job security grows more precarious, and Slack messages are sent at all hours of the day, a hobby is a resistance, a reset, and maybe even a way to reenergize your career.

Andy Pearson, 41, is a fellow runner who has completed over a dozen 100-mile races. He's also the VP of creative at Liquid Death, where he produces award-winning creative campaigns for the $1.4-billion water brand, and travels the world speaking at conferences and industry events. In his twenties, he says, he was working for an infamously demanding agency and didn't take a single day off, including weekends, during his first five months on the job. He took up ultrarunning as "an equally extreme thing to my extreme job," he tells me.

The counterbalance helped Pearson carve back time in his life in a way that perhaps pickup basketball wouldn't. In a strange way, he says, "they kind of helped cancel each other out."

Some people assume hobby obsessives are addicted to self improvement. But hobbies aren't just an activity — they grant us entry into niche worlds, each with their own culture, history, science, and drama. When we take up a hobby, we can return to its world simply by thinking about it. Yale introduces me to the term "mind surfing" which she describes as "the surfing that happens out of the water." She's in the midst of planning a dream surf vacation to Indonesia, and has surf podcasts she listens to regularly. "It almost makes the world 4D," she says.

Similarly, Pearson isn't a hardcore fitness enthusiast for the gains. He sees running as a sandbox to play in. "It's about curiosity, and about 'what happens if I try this?' Or 'what do I see if I get over the top of this mountain?'"

These worlds take time to learn, but that's part of the fun. When we treat leisure as something that should be simple and easy, we shortchange ourselves and what we can get out of it.

My guidance for finding a worthwhile hobby is to identify an activity with lore, history, and key players to follow. You want to be able to fall down the rabbit hole, whether through books, message boards, podcasts, or Instagram follows — something that a kickball league likely doesn't offer, but flyfishing probably does. Second, you want to be able to measure your progress at whatever hobby you choose. There is so much joy and excitement in being a novice and improving quickly, and then later on so much satisfaction with smaller, subtler growth. Third, my personal preference is to choose a hobby that requires a little gear but not too much. Learning about which yarn and needles you like to knit on, or which trail running shoes make you feel light on your feet is all part of the fun, and spending money on a hobby feels wholesome in a way other retail therapy doesn't.

Though I'm now fully on the hobby train, "hobby" still feels diminutive for how seriously I take trail running. But as someone who excels at ruining the things she loves by being overly competitive about them, I like that the word reminds me of the role I want running to play in my life. I don't want running to become my job. Calling it my "hobby" helps me safeguard my fun, without discouraging myself from giving it my very best.

Most surprisingly, going all-in on trail running is what helped me embrace and level up my career. Once I was no longer spending all my free time lusting after a specific version of a writing career, I looked around and realized my job as a creative director in the advertising industry is … pretty fun! Inspired by the curiosity and whimsy with which I approached trail running, I started to take the same approach with advertising and video production — treating it as a niche world to explore versus a test to pass. I decided to become a manager, started reading the trades more closely, and took time to seek out creative inspiration and share it with my coworkers. At the same time, running put healthy boundaries on my work and the role it plays in my self-esteem.

In the last year, I've even returned to my old hobby I once swore off: knitting. I've acquired an ever-expanding bag of knitting supplies, and sometimes I have a hard time pulling myself away from my knitting to go out for a run. I used to be someone who didn't know who they'd be without work. Now I'm amassing so many hobbies that work is simply what I do when I'm not doing my hobbies. My hobbies have taught me that I'm going to be really good at retiring.

Catherine LeClair is a writer, runner and creative director living in California.