Georgia Barker
Key Takeaways
- In this week’s Mini Philosophy inteview, I spoke with the nature photographer and birdwatcher Georgia Barker about the importance of hobbies and how we can find our passions.
- To cultivate our passion, we must embrace boredom, commit to activities we already enjoy, and let go of shame or social judgment.
- Living authentically — and sharing what we love — leads to greater happiness, deeper relationships, and a more meaningful life.
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Clara opens her door on Friday night. She throws the keys on the table, takes off her jacket, and plops down on the sofa. Scroll, scroll, scroll. She messages Tom to ask how his meeting went. Scroll, scroll, scroll. She goes to the toilet, puts her food in the microwave, and waits.
The food will take three minutes, so Clara goes back to get her phone. There’s not a chance in hell she’ll just stand there. Three minutes staring into space? She’s not a psychopath. Scroll, scroll, scroll. Ping.
Back to the sofa, TV on, Tom replies. She settles in. She won’t be doing much else until Monday morning, when work pulls her away.
Of course, Clara is a foil — an exaggerated archetype representing the modern human. Her life is filled with necessity. She has to work, she has to eat, she has to go to the toilet. The majority of her day is already decided. But what does she do with the hours she has remaining? What does she do with her evenings, weekends, and “free time”?
According to a 2024 UK survey, one in four adults now list “scrolling social media” as their main hobby, and 8% say they have no hobby at all. Paper, after paper, after paper shows that more and more people are turning from real-life passions to digital surrogates. And this lack of passion is a real problem because it’s getting us down.
In this week’s Mini Philosophy interview, I spoke with the nature photographer Georgia Barker about her passion: birdwatching. And one of the things we talked most about was how she learned to spend her time more wisely and experience what the world has to offer.
Here are three tips for how we can all find and cultivate our passion.
Be bored
I am Clara. I cannot stand around for three minutes to wait for a microwave. I go to the toilet with my phone and find my hand reaching for my pocket the moment life pauses for even a moment. And I feel less bored because of it.
It is no coincidence that the things I consider to be passions began when I was bored. In the long, tedious summer holiday of 2003, I picked up a guitar. In a pre-phone, pre-internet world, a book was a last-resort attempt to battle boredom.
It’s long been understood that silence, stillness, and an undistracted mind are essential. Many religious and philosophical communities would insist that initiates meditate for days or remain silent for weeks, because if you create space, revelation and inspiration will pour in. In Gestalt therapy, there is the idea of the “fertile void,” where we commit to “nothing much” for a sustained period, fully knowing that “nothing much” becomes “something incredible” before long.
In The Martian, astronaut Mark Watney finds himself stranded alone on Mars with only death and boredom to deal with. He copes by treating his isolation as an opportunity to experiment and innovate. As he famously quips, “I’m left with only one option: I’m gonna have to science the shit out of this.” With no one to help, Watney spends his solitary days tinkering — devising a way to grow potatoes in Martian soil, jury-rigging equipment, and solving one problem after another. His ability to embrace the silence and “just begin… solve one problem… then the next” is what keeps him alive and entertained until rescue.
As Georgia put it, “When I started birdwatching, I realized it’s so hard to sit there. Everything in your instincts is telling you to pick something up — pick up your phone, pick up a book, do something. To sit in a box for 40 minutes or hours is difficult. But it’s so good to do it.”
Upgrade your likes
Passion is not something that you “find,” like a lost treasure in the woods, but rather something you have to cultivate. The more you do something, the more you like it.
At the start of the year, I spoke with the mythologist Martin Shaw. I’ve always liked his imagery: We are all disciples at a temple, and the gods and goddesses that live there will claim us if we spend enough time there. Move away from the digital temple to someplace new.
The trick here is to invest more in what you already “kinda like.” Find something you enjoyed doing in the past or like but only occasionally do, and take it one step further. Find a local (or online) community devoted to that thing. Spend money on buying the gear. It’s hard to “spend too much money” on the things that bring you joy.
When Walt Disney was a young boy, he would doodle in class. When other kids liked to play sports, read books, or listen avidly to the teacher, Walt would doodle away. And he leaned into it. He drew cartoons for the school newspaper, took evening classes, and got his first job as a commercial illustrator at 18. A like — a “silly” or “childish” thing — grew into a life-changing, life-defining passion.
You are not Walt Disney. You will not die a billionaire and a household name, but you have your doodle equivalent. You have those things you find yourself turning to in the evenings. You have things you end up Googling, Instagram accounts you end up watching, and Subreddits you like to read. The only thing silly about a hobby is hiding it away and letting it wilt in the corner.
Grow out of the cringe
Cringe is a young person’s game. In the hormonal zoo that is young adulthood, it’s common to feel embarrassed for liking something. When everything is about social cachet, you want to make sure you’re seen to only like what everyone else likes. But as you grow up, you realize how wasted and unhappy that time was. As Georgia put it, you learn that “the most important relationship you have in your whole life is with yourself.”
Being told your passion is “weird” or “worthless” can sting, no doubt. Social animals crave group validation. But what kind of petty and sad person mocks someone else for enjoying things they do not? If someone mocks you for a passion, then it’s always best to reflect on how much sadder their life is. How painful it must be to force every thought and action through the mangle of social expectation. How tiring it must be to wear a mask and choreograph your life all the time.
As you get older, you come to realize that people are far more interesting when they share their passions. You recognize that relationships are far deeper when both parties can reveal a bit about themselves. There is a fair body of research showing that people who are open and authentic with each other are happier. In 2019, a large meta-analysis of 36,000 people found that “the more authentic people are, the greater their well-being and engagement. The size of these effects indicates that authenticity makes a substantial contribution to individual well-being.” It’s better just to let yourself show.
When you cultivate your passion and finally open up to others about what you love doing, you will often find not mockery or laughter, but warm acceptance. You will find people respond to you better because you’ve offered a bit of yourself. As Georgia put it, talking about her passion and meeting other birdwatchers, “gives you hope because humanity is largely good. People are kind, people will help you.”
Psychology and philosophy both agree that the authentic life is the happy life. Few people get to their deathbeds and say, “Well, at least I wasn’t cringey.” Passions are what make us happy. Be weird and esoteric because humans are weird and esoteric.
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