When it all gets heavy
The Last Thing You Should Give Up
Money gets tight, life gets loud, and the thing that makes us happy is the first thing off the list. Here is why it should be the last, and what the research says about keeping it.
By Dan Pearce, founder of The Clay Hole in Draper, Utah.
It is eleven at night and you are at the kitchen table with your phone, scrolling through everything that leaves your account every month.
You know this exercise, and every line gets the same question. Do I need this?
Insurance, yes. Phone, yes. That streaming service nobody has opened since spring, fine, gone.
And then your thumb lands on the one that is just for you.
The pottery. The paint set. The guitar leaning in the corner. The one night a week you do not owe anybody anything.
You cancel it.
Not because you stopped loving it. Because it was the only line on the screen you could cut without anybody being upset.
I have heard the rest of this list in so many versions that I could recite it.
Money gets tighter, we give it up. A relationship gets rocky, we give it up. Time turns into a problem, we give it up. Something goes sideways with a kid, we give it up. Depression settles in, we give it up.
Every one of those reasons is real, and I am not going to tell you the money is not tight or the kid is not struggling. I believe you.
I just think we are cutting in the wrong order.
Here is why it goes first, and it is a little ridiculous once you see it.
Look at everything else on that list. The rent complains if you skip it, the kid needs dinner, the job notices when you do not show up, and every other line on that screen pushes back.
The hobby does not.
Cancel it and nothing happens. Nobody calls, the lights stay on, and not one thing breaks that day, or that week.
The thing that makes you happy is the only line on your list that will not argue back.
The thing that makes you happy is the only line on your list that will not argue back.
Quiet is not the same as unimportant. It only means the damage is slower, and nobody is standing there to point at it.
Think about what you are actually doing. You are in the stretch where you are the least happy you have been in a while, and you just removed the one thing that was putting anything back.
That is a speed bump on top of a speed bump. And the second one does not stay the size you think it is.
You stop going, you sleep a little worse, and you are shorter with your kid, which you feel awful about, which makes the sleep worse. The one evening that used to be yours turns into a couch, a phone, and forty minutes of nothing you even enjoy.
The hard thing you started with has company now.
What do we think is going to happen when we pile a loss on top of a loss? It is a chain reaction. Not a dramatic one. Each link just makes the next one easier.
There is an actual name for it, and a psychologist named Stevan Hobfoll built a whole theory on it in 1989. Early loss, he argued, makes later loss more likely. And the less you have left, the more likely you are to lose what remains. He called them loss spirals.
He described the other direction too. Gain one good thing and you are more likely to gain the next. I would like to be in that one, please.
Then there is the finding that made me laugh, the way you laugh when something is not funny.
Researchers who study stress at work have a name for it. The recovery paradox. The more stressed people get, the less they tend to do the things that would help them recover. People in high-strain jobs exercise less. Heavier workloads go with worse sleep and less ability to switch off. The moment you need it most is the moment you stop doing it.
That paper is from 2018 and it is about people with brutal jobs, not people with clay under their fingernails. But I read it and thought, oh. That is the shape of a cancellation email.
So what is the thing you are about to cancel actually doing in there? I looked. I am not a scientist, I am a man with a lot of clay and an internet connection, but I looked.
In 2009 a team of psychologists pooled four studies, 1,399 people in all, and asked how often they did enjoyable things in their free time. Hobbies, sports, time outside, time with friends, quiet time alone. Then they measured the people.
The ones with more enjoyable hours had lower blood pressure, a smaller waist, less of the stress hormone cortisol, and fewer signs of depression. They also rated their own bodies as working better.
Now the honest part. It was a survey, and it shows an association, not a cause. Healthy people might simply have more fun, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.
So here is a different kind. In 2016 a researcher at Drexel University put 39 adults in a room for 45 minutes with markers, collage supplies and modeling clay. No instructions. Then they measured everybody’s cortisol again.
About three quarters came out lower. It did not matter whether they had ever made art before, and just under half said they had limited experience making art. A quarter went the other way. It was 39 people on one afternoon.
Neither study proves a hobby fixes a hard year. What they say, together, is that the thing you are about to cancel is doing real work in you, and it does not need you to be good at it.
If you want more of the research, I put it on its own page: hobbies for burnout and what the research says.
One more, and it is the one I would send a friend.
Stuart Brown is a psychiatrist who spent decades studying play. In 2008 he gave a talk at TED that runs twenty-six minutes and earns every one of them. He argues that play is not what we do once the real work is finished, and that keeping it up matters at any age.
There is one line from it I have never been able to shake. The opposite of play is not work. The opposite of play is depression.
He is not talking about pottery. He is talking about the thing you do for no reason except that you love doing it. Which is the only definition of a hobby I have ever trusted.
But in all seriousness.
Here is what I actually believe, and it has nothing to do with a study.
I do not think money is the real reason the hobby goes first. Money is just the reason we give. The real one is older and quieter.
Somewhere along the way, a lot of us picked up a rule. The rule says the good stuff is a reward, and you get it after the hard stuff is handled. When everything is on fire, an evening that belongs to you feels like stealing.
It is not stealing.
When everything is on fire, an evening that belongs to you feels like stealing. It is not stealing.
You are not a machine that has to earn its maintenance. You are a person, and a person in a hard stretch needs the thing that makes them feel like themselves more than a person in an easy one does.
Holding onto it does not fix the hard thing. It keeps you in one piece while the hard thing gets fixed. And a person in one piece fixes things faster.
I think you are worth the hour. I think you were worth it before the hard stretch started, and nothing about the hard stretch changed that.
Not after the money recovers. Not after the kid turns a corner. Now. Especially now.
A hobby is not treatment. If the stretch you are in is darker than a hard month, please get real help for it, and keep the hobby alongside it. Not instead of it.
I am not going to pretend the budget is not real. Sometimes the math is just the math.
So if something has to go, here is the order I would go in.
Cut what gives nothing back.
The subscription you forgot about. The app that exists to take your hours. The midnight scroll that leaves you feeling worse than when you sat down. None of those do for you what a Thursday night does, and none of them will miss you.
If you think time is the problem, I wrote a whole letter about that one: you have more time than you think.
Make it smaller before you make it zero.
Go less often. Skip a bad week. Skip a bad month. Your unused classes carry forward for as long as you stay a member, so nothing you have paid for goes to waste.
Cancel, and they go with the membership. I would rather you know that now than find out later.
Here is where I land.
Everything works out.
I believe that all the way down, and I do not mean nothing bad happens. I mean you are still here at the end of it.
Not always the way you drew it up. Not on the schedule you wanted. But the money comes back, or you learn to live on less. The kid turns a corner. The relationship mends, or it ends and you get through that too. The dark month lifts.
Look at every hard stretch you have already lived through. You are standing on the far side of every one of them.
So keep the thing. Keep the Thursday night, the guitar, the brushes, the wheel.
Everything works out. Keeping it just helps it work out faster.
Dan Pearce
Founder of The Clay Hole
About the author
Dan Pearce
Founder of The Clay Hole · Draper, Utah
Dan Pearce is an author, artist, and the founder of The Clay Hole in Draper, Utah. Before pottery, he spent a decade as one of the most-read bloggers in the world. His blog, Single Dad Laughing, ranked #2 among personal blogs worldwide and drew more than a billion reads before he retired it in 2020. He has published six books, including the memoir The All-Important, Well-Fed, Giant White Man, and built an audience of more than three million followers. He has also worked professionally as an animal artist, illustrator, body painter, and poker player. Not in that order, and yes, all of those are real.
In 2022 he launched Dan Pearce Ceramics, known for one-of-a-kind pieces he has never once duplicated, and every sale went toward building The Clay Hole: 10,000 square feet, more than a million dollars invested, and a community of hundreds of members built from the ground up to put people first. Of everything he has made in twenty-five years of chasing creative work, he considers the community the best of it.