Last week was my birthday and for sure, every time a birth date is brought up in a discussion people need to talk about horoscopes, which even though I do not believe in them, I still enjoy the small talk –especially when someone is pretending to refer to the horoscope, but in reality saying what they truly think about you.
Meanwhile, on the internet people now even write the paragraph-long personality traits of every birthday from January 1 to December 31. When reading about my birthdate, I just noticed – in my twenties – that I am a person destined to have many hobbies, according to a website.
All in all, I think the “revelation” makes some sense to reality: chess, music, reading and gaming are some of my favourite things to do in my life. Unfortunately, when I started working and studying, I had less time for them and eventually gave up playing chess altogether: it is just way too exhausting to think about the moves. Nonetheless, even though I stopped playing chess and online games, particularly League of Legends, regularly in recent years because it is not productive and consumed too much time, I still enjoy watching the chess and gaming competitions which reminds me of the period when I spent a lot of time on them.
To transform one’s hobby from participation into speculation, I think, is a great fortune, because time becomes more and more precious inevitably once we get older, but watching competitions still kind of makes me feel the thrill of the activities, and thanks to the internet, watching competitions is very convenient, everything is just a click away to watch them even if I missed the time schedule of the competition. Meanwhile, even though my skills aren’t as good anymore because I seldom play nowadays, I am still able to appreciate the spectacular performances of the professional players.
For example, a clutch gameplay with excellent execution within seconds is just as brilliant as a single chess move with meticulous calculation that changed the tide of the hours-long chess game, but both required some knowledge of the game to know why it is a genius play or move. When watching the games, I feel nostalgia and am constantly reminded about how carefree I was in the past to spend hundreds of hours playing online games.
The case can also be made for music, even though I am still an active player: a great trumpet high note is always appreciated and respected by those who spent years of training and understand how hard it is. But of course, doing the activities myself instead of watching them from the sidelines is much more meaningful, because one of the reasons to commit time on hobbies is to improve and master it.
At the end of the day, we have to give up some of our hobbies at some point in our lives for various reasons. Nonetheless, there are still many ways that we can appreciate them in other forms– watching others do it professionally is one of them.
This screenshot of a League of Legends livesteam taken from YouTube yesterday shows two Korean teams competing in the quarterfinals for the World Championship in New York City. Photo: William Chan
