When I was twelve, I distinctly remember being coached for interviews. The tuition centre I went to back then thought it fitting, since students at that age would be making the transition from elementary to high school in my country. This process was harrowing for students, parents and teachers alike.

In preparation for this process, our teacher drilled us with commonly asked questions and made us fine-tune our responses, sometimes to the extent of rewriting them entirely. One piece of advice he gave, which I still remember to this very day, is this: When they ask you about your hobbies, say one that’s productive. Reading and playing an instrument were the examples he gave.

I used his advice, along with all the draft responses the tuition centre gave us all in one neat little booklet, as I later went for aforementioned interviews, hoping to land a spot in a good high school. It worked out, I was successfully enrolled in a high school that had made a decent name for itself. Yet to this very day, I find his advice a little sad.

According to the Cambridge English dictionary, the textbook definition of a hobby is this: an activity that someone does for pleasure when they are not working. Yet a sad trend I find nowadays among us students is this: many activities we take up in our spare time, time that should be spent on leisure and relaxation, are being used to bolster our resume instead.

When you are a teenager, you live life in a purgatory- the chasm between the freedom of childhood and the uncertainties of adulthood. You need preparation; getting a good job is crucial, so getting into a good university is crucial, so building up a good resume is extremely, extremely crucial. And as such I see so many, too many of my classmates dedicate these years solely to these preparations, and nothing else. 

I too fell into the trap of such behaviour. When I was young, I began feverishly taking on all the commitments my peers were also slaving their lives away to. Why? I never really stopped to ask myself that question. It was just the expected thing to do. Many of these activities I did not feel any particular sense of attachment or passion for, but I did it anyway. All of us did. Sure, the months would be hard, and uninspiring, but what a mark it would leave on our portfolio! What were hours of drudgery in the face of a shining student record, all in work for a successful future?

What a fool I was. For a good long time, I did not stop to ponder, not once, this question: what successful future was I working towards, exactly? What did I want to do? This dilemma became all the more apparent during my thin slivers of free time, having been whittled down by the pressures of all my other activities, whether it be academic or extracurricular. What did I want to do, when I was no longer pushed by this invisible pressure? What did I want to do, when I finally had space to breathe? The answer I had for myself terrified me. I had no idea.

The only solution I saw was to double down. I could focus on finding more about myself at a separate time; if I took a second to pause on this fervent rat race, I would only fall behind by an irreversible amount. Yet I was sinking, slowly, surely... It was as though I had a black hole, stretching deep within my stomach, hungry, bottomless. I tried to pile it up with commitment after commitment, distraction after distraction, and yet...satisfaction eluded me. All I wanted was to feel full, but I never was. I only felt heavier.

Eventually, I finally woke up. I felt like a puppet with its strings cut: lonely, lost, limp. Yet I felt freer than I ever had before. I took a hard look at the life I had been living: one with my head bowed, nose buried in studies, and for once, looked up. I wondered: if all these activities I had taken on were solely just for what came next, what was it that was coming next that I was so looking forward to? What was this success I was searching for, and why had I been so fixated on it? Would it not be enough for me to make a humble living on a humble career, and spend the remainder of my time on simple pleasures?

I decided to set more time aside for myself. For hobbies that perhaps would not make for anything on my resume, would not reflect on me and portray the image of a holistic, well-developed student that many people strived to achieve, but I enjoyed nonetheless. Video games, television. Anything I felt like doing. It felt as though a window had opened up in the ivory tower I had locked myself in, and a breath of air was finally coming through.

The truth is this: as one transitions from childhood to adulthood, it is when we begin to develop a sense of self. Hold on to this sense of self; unfortunately, there is an inordinately high amount of pressure for this self to be molded into one of productivity. After being a teenager for quite some time I discovered this: there is no need to be that way. Not all clay is meant to be molded into a bowl, after all. Mostly, clay is just there to exist; to be beautiful, and to exist as it should.