y mum started crocheting a few years ago. Retirement, coupled with the arrival of her first grandchildren, compelled her to pick up the hooks, and soon she was churning out more blankets than she knew what to do with. My siblings and I urged her to sell them online. “We’ll set you up on Instagram! We can call the account ‘Sewn by Sue’.” Our mother, folding her most recent creation, scoffed at the idea.
“As soon as something is commodified, we can view it in more transactional terms,” says Australian Psychological Society president Tamara Cavenett. That can “erode the strong and positive emotional attachment we had previously”. Mollymook-based Jodie Esler experienced a similar loss in enthusiasm for quilting, a hobby she’d started in 1990. “I was going through IVF and infertility treatments, and [quilting] helped to take my mind off things at the time,” she says. The meditative nature of the craft and portability of its materials quickly entrenched quilting in Esler’s day-to-day life. “I’d go to bed and think about ideas and wake up doing the same,” she says.
The perfect work-life balance is subjective, however Chan says replenishing your body’s resources is vital for avoiding burnout and resentment. She encounters the struggle for balance frequently in students. “We ask them if they’re doing any planning for the week ahead, to actually factor in rest and recovery, where they do something that they really enjoy,” she says. A good hobby should refill “our energy levels, our time, our attention, our concentration”.
Encouragingly, not all leisure activities-turned-businesses are condemned to the graveyard of lost hobbies. Monetising your passion project can jeopardise its appeal, but “if the gap between your passion and what you’re actually good at is small, or they are aligned, that can obviously be a great outcome,” says Chan. The key to success, along with scheduled rest and recuperation, is managing growth expectations and, where possible, accepting support from friends and family.