Midlife crisis is a bitch, and it knocks on the door when you least expect it. Who knew the timeline of the punchout was right there in the name?! I know it sounds silly, but crocheting and other granny hobbies helped me crawl out of a tricky time in my life when I felt stuck and pretty useless, photos to prove it are following the text. From the outside looking in, it is simple enough to grasp. You get a pattern (or like a million of them) online, get some yarn, start from simple, go to difficult, feel pretty good about yourself, start making tutorials, find a free online video creator, say, Clideo, edit your videos, and voila! You have an online following, a growing audience, patterns of your own, and live happily ever after.
But what if that’s not the goal at all? I don’t want to make my hobbies into a side hustle. I’ve been there, and it wasn’t fun. Let me tell you my point of view and you can argue in the comments about whether it has any validity at all.
Crochet, because murder is illegal
Joke, sure, but a little true as well. I started crocheting at 25, when I had my first kid, and picked up many granny hobbies since. Judge all you want, amigurumi and crochet gave me what I needed. Peace of mind. All you do in the beginning is count. Learn the right hand position, thank God that you don’t have arthritis, and count. One, two, three, increase. One, two, three, increase. Hands work, the head doesn’t. After a full day of diapers, teething, feeding, walks in any weather, wiping, and some more feeding, crochet was a fun release. It wasn’t something I HAD TO do, it was something I genuinely enjoyed for no apparent reason.It helps unload aggression, calm the nerves, disappear from the day-to-day for a little while. There’s even a crochet-specific international study with 8,391 participants across 87 countries, believe it or not. The most common reasons people gave for crocheting were creativity, relaxation, and a sense of accomplishment, which is actually an interesting point, those are often the three things missing from motherhood in the early stages, in other words, just what the doctor ordered. But back to the study. 89.5% said crochet made them feel calmer, 82% happier, and 74.7% more useful, with a significant improvement in self-reported mood after crocheting.
And the broader evidence gives us several genuinely interesting psychological mechanisms here, and ties what I was saying earlier in a neat little bow. Rhythmic repetition and attentional absorption/flow; mastery and visible progress; self-efficacy; purpose; identity; social connection; and the particular satisfaction of producing a physical object with your hands. A 2024 scoping review of 25 needlecraft studies found recurring themes around mental wellbeing, belonging, achievement, purpose, identity, family and cultural continuity.
I loved the mechanical repetition in the beginning, and the creativity too, after I mastered the basics. I started making one-of-a-kind toys, and never looked at a pattern again. I wanted to make something for my kids that no one else would have, and calm my nerves at the same time. Should it then be monetized? The modern culture says yes! Do what you’re passionate about! Blah blah blah! Turn what you love into work, and you’ll never work a day in life. Jeez… I’m so tired of the lies. Aren’t you? I think this part deserves a section of its own.
Hobbies are important & should probably remain hobbies
I’m not here to pretend that I know what’s best for anyone who picks up a new hobby and truly enjoys it. But I have discovered that repetitiveness is a key to understanding whether the hobby you picked up can be used as a side hustle or should strictly remain a hobby. What is any chosen hobby for you? Is it a creative outlet? Is it a way to keep one part of you busy (either the hands or the head) while freeing up space for the other part? In my experience, if the day job keeps your mind busy all the time, to use a sophisticated phrase, is cognitively demanding, what you crave is an outlet that helps your head rest while keeping the hands busy. Cooking, walking, and sometimes crocheting as well. When your day job is repetitive and fairly non-creative, you crave a creative outlet, and making something unique out of nothing gives you a drive like no other.But, now, the second you make your creative outlet a side hustle, you start running into the repetitiveness again. Ooooh, this amigurumi toy is so cute! Would you make it for me as well? And I caught myself thinking that I’d rather punch myself in the face than make that exact one again! I want to create new things, and I want the toys I create to have a character, a name, a backstory! They are not fungible. They are truly unique for me. So, no. I’d rather gift you my toy for free and make another one than create the same character twice.
Creative outlet is rewarding partly because it is voluntary, self-directed, and free from evaluation. Once money enters, the work acquires deadlines, customer expectations, performance metrics, and the possibility of failure. In motivation research, this is often described as crowding out intrinsic motivation: the activity stops being something you do because you want to and becomes something you do because you should. The creativity itself may remain, but its restorative value can shrink because it starts competing with the same pressures you were using it to escape. Catch-22.
No, I don’t want to monetize a hobby, I want to keep enjoying it.
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