Our parents refused to put us into ‘hobby classes’. No abacus. No art. No dance. No nothing. Their friends kept asking them why and they just said ‘If the kids want to learn something, they will.’

My sister plays 5 instruments now. I write and cook. We found our ‘thing’ and because there was no pressure around the ‘thing’ we truly enjoyed exploring on our terms.

The greatest gift they gave us was the gift of boredom. Most people have an abject, unarticulated fear of boredom derived from the overarching fear of boring. People are terrified of being boring and truly believe that if they don’t find time to be bored, they’ll automatically be entertaining.

This is a false trade.

People think if they don’t “let themselves” be bored, they’ll automatically become interesting. Like boredom is a bad smell you have to cover up with constant activity. Hobby class, gym class, pottery class, networking breakfast, “I’m learning Spanish” (you are not learning Spanish), some new obsession every ten days.

Boredom, however, is the moment your brain stops being fed and starts hunting.

The first few minutes are genuinely unbearable. Your mind starts clawing at the walls. You want to check your phone. You want to open Zomato (and you’re not even hungry). You want to message someone. Anything to avoid sitting in a room with yourself and hearing the mundane little thoughts you’ve been drowning out.

You start making up things to do. Not “productive” things. Just… things. You start fiddling. You pick up a book and read the first page properly instead of doing that half-scan we all do. You try making one dish again because you want it to taste like the one time it tasted perfect. You write a line, then another, because it feels good, not because it’s going to become ‘content’. You get obsessed with some tiny detail and fall into it like a rabbit hole.

That’s how hobbies actually happen, I think. Not because someone enrolled you into a class at 5, but because you had enough empty time to wander into a room inside your own brain.

Also: hobby classes are not evil, obviously. Sometimes they’re amazing. But a lot of Indian parenting treats hobbies like resume padding for children. Like “my kid does Bharatanatyam” is a badge, not a joy. The moment it becomes performance, it becomes stressful. You’re not learning dance, you’re learning how to not disappoint an adult.

My parents opting out of all that gave us something I didn’t realise was rare. They gave us space to be bad at things in private. Space to try, quit, return, try again, without someone going “so what’s the outcome.”

My sister picking up instruments wasn’t a plan. It was just… boredom plus curiosity plus time. Same with me writing, cooking- none of it came with a timetable or a prize. Which is why it stuck. Because it belonged to us. It wasn’t a “thing about us.” It was just what we did when we had nothing to do.

I genuinely think most adults are terrified of boredom because boredom makes you confront a scary question: what do I actually like when nobody is watching? Not what makes me look cool, not what will make a good caption, not what signals “I have range.” Just, what do I like?

And if you’ve never had to answer that, you end up building a life that’s very full but somehow simultaneously hollow. Busy, but not intimate. Constantly entertained, but never really met.

So yeah. Maybe the gift wasn’t “no hobby classes.”

Maybe the gift was allowing us the chance to meet our own boredom at our own terms, and in that extra ten minutes of doing nothing, we found the beginning of a self.