What to do when you got too many hobbies?

20/9/2026

This originally was written to be a Youtube video, but I decided against it as it probably would just come across as Youtuber whining on there. So, it's now a blogpost for your viewing below. 

Some of us have too many interests. So many things to complete, so many hats we wish to wear. At some point new inspirations start being suspicious. Instead of welcoming them when they walk through the door, your first thought is how they are going to distract you from your current project your on. You almost want to stifle your own creativity or have a dial to turn it down temporarily so you can lock in to whatever in on your table right now. Can this even be done? I still dearly struggle.  

Right now, as I’m writing this, I’m learning GDscript to make a pen and paper inspired RPG video game. I’ve heavily planned the systems, stats, gameplay, and the kind of presentation I want. This of course feels exciting and even productive. I’m learning a new skill and beginning to make something I genuinely want to exist. The problem is that this burst of creative energy arrived precisely when I was sick of working on YouTube and ready to do almost anything else.

Because what I should be working on, or… at least what I feel like I should be working on, are my retrospectives for SegaSonic the Hedgehog and Sonic CD. I promised an audience to cover every Sonic game after all. These videos are not isolated projects anymore. Each one is another stop in a much larger journey, one I’ve already invested years into. Can someone just lock in on command? 

I have been successful at times in doing so. My video on Sonic 2 16-bit was the biggest one. I worked nonstop on that for around three months. Every bit of free time was absolutely consumed by it. And I was dreading it. It had been hanging over me since the start of the every Sonic game project. Three months is a long time to carry something you (seemingly) don’t want to do. I mean, you do, but it can be intimidating. So maybe the answer is just that: I’d been building up to it, the dread made me take it seriously, and I locked in. And that’s probably true. But it doesn’t feel like the whole story.

After wracking my mind more and more, I think the thing that actually kept me going was a promise. I’m a rabbit of honor. When I make a promise I intend to keep it even if it pains. Sometimes it takes me a long while to get there. My friends can attest to that, but I do it. For this one, I had a Patreon going. Two people were subscribed. If you two are watching, thank you. You’re both very cool dudes.

And practically, I broke the video into six acts. I treated each act as its own complete thing, the writing, the animation, the editing, the full pass, and I finished one before I started the next. On a project that long, the end is so far over the horizon you lose track of where you are. Six checkpoints I could actually see. That kept me moving.

But again, these don’t always work. Or hell, maybe I should say they usually don’t. And that starts to make me have some fear. 

Fear of being… lazy. Although that word alone is an over-simplification. ‘Maybe I don’t want it enough, maybe I just don’t care enough.’ Those kinds of thoughts. Am I lazy? I don’t know. Maybe I am. I don’t want to try and guess about neurodevelopmental stuff, cause I ain’t diagnosed with anything. Not that I checked either (maybe cognitive disengagement syndrome is right.)

The last third of the cause and part of the biggest part now that I’m typing this is that I cared, but not enough to get paralysis. The lingering spectre of perfectionism. Where nothing that you do is good enough and you might even throw out parts and restart or give up entirely cause its totally overwhelming. This doesn’t happen with my youtube retrospectives. This might not be smart to admit directly to my audience, but with these videos I really can say ‘Good enough.’ And move on. That is why they come out though. 

I’m suffered from that one plenty and when a work is to personal it still takes over. Like with a certain one… 

It’s not as if everything of interest gets completely left behind either. It might be weeks, months or even years. But I do keep returning to my world building project called, Higher Falls. Don’t worry, I ain’t gonna use this as an excuse to lore dump on you. Infer what you wish from the imagery I show. What is relevant is this character, her name is Tregg. The initial spark for Higher Falls was a reaction against generic western fantasy. I wanted something fully unique. No elves. dwarves or other overly common tropes. This had started awhile before Tregg came to be. But Tregg emerged organically while somewhat mindlessly sketching. That rare instance where a character design and their personality appear all at once. Those tend to be the best ones. That time in my life was rough, without going into detail, someone important had died in my life a year before and I had done almost nothing remotely constructive for a year.

Pieces of the artist always end up in their work and this might somewhat be an answer for me when being introspective. In this story, due to circumstances and just who she is, Tregg ends up leaving her home due to not wanting to confront her family. It’s just to uncomfortable for her. She also is a witch who can’t use magic, and she avoids confronting that as well. She’s an avoidant kind of person. 

How does this connect back to having to many interests? It’s about avoiding the hard part, particularly the ugly middle. It’s a term coined by a chick named Caroline Zook on a blog called Wandering Aimfully. The ugly middle is that point in a work where the sleek new shine has worn off and it gives way.

Where its most difficult to keep going. But its also where the end is most difficult to see. It's like being stuck in a gully and the end is above the cliff you need to climb. This is where you find out how badly you wish to accomplish the goal. Remember why you originally wanted to do this, keep yer eye on the prize is the common advice. 

Or thats how I was trying to think of it. But, I ain't so sure. Its an over simplification of the issue. Its something like telling a depressed person to be happy. Gee golly, never thought of that one. If the original reason was always strong enough, people would stay quite focused and nothing would get left behind. Life is impermanent, the world changes, and thus so do we in turn. The goal you started with might shift, it might morph, it might drag you into a different zone. Now, this is probably where I should say its ok to abandon a project and it is. Obviously it is. Sometimes what it offered just might not be needed or relevant to the current situation. But this is a video about the fact some of us rarely finish shit, and have a pile of half realized artifacts.

What is the answer? I want to say its being flexible. A couple chapters of the manga, The World God Only Knows comes to mind. The basic premise of this story is the protagonist, Keima, has to release spirits who are hiding inside girls. To do this, he must swoon them.

In these chapters (48 & 49), however he is asked to help another person with the same mission who is having trouble. The targets she was sent after are getting more and more corrupted. Keima accessed the situation and had a realization. There was no issue. She was just juggling all the possessed individuals. He declared there was no trouble, they will be saved and lo, they were. Seemingly all at once. It looked on the surface like nothing was getting done. But, if you poke and poke enough with care, eventually the garden will blossom.

Coming back to my projects, SegaSonic has actually been moving along. It took months, but it’s now close to finished, and I enjoyed the game more than I expected. Sonic CD is the more difficult one. It’s beloved by a large part of the fandom, and I just don’t like it very much. Covering something I dislike is already harder for me, but I also don’t want to dismiss something that means a lot to other people. If I’m going to criticize it, I want to explain myself properly. That takes time, and it requires a kind of energy that doesn’t come naturally to me. I appreciate art and don’t just want to bend over and take a dump on it without purpose. 

But, things aren’t always so clean. In my prior Sonic 2 example, it was finished but something happened during all of that. Something was lost in the chaos. I was rather deep into studying Japanese at the time and the number of flashcards was getting overwhelming and I knew I would not get much done on the video if I kept it up, so it was left behind and I still have yet to return to it. Course the juggling act would also lead to being spread to thin and nothing ever getting done. 

I do finish videos, partly because it does involve so many art forms or tasks in one. I would write, I could play, I could edit, I could do animation. There is many tasks and it holds my interest for longer than anything else really. Just doing any one thing for day and day gets bland. It’s something like juggling itself within one project. 

At this point, I do not care about the title of author, artist, game dev or whatever else. I just wish to be prolific and creative. For the longest time I was always wondering what I had to be. But lately I've come realize thats unneeded. A person can be many things and exchange the hats with the ebb and flow of life.

But, this does undoubtedly comes with a cost. Society wants people to specialize, we want people to fit into a role. Since we're on youtube I'll use that as the example, hopefully without sounding like I’m whining. Many gurus and such claim that the almighty algorithm learns about your channel and the topical niche it falls into. 

They say your only allowed to do Pokemon solo runs forever, your only allowed to cook wild west food, you can only do rage bait, you can only talk about crypto scams. Whatever topic the first video was that got some decent views. But over time I'm becoming less and less convinced that it works this way or that anyone really understands it. I'm not even sure the people who work on this mysterious blob of code knows how it operates in reality. And if it does... Not sure if I care anymore. 

Something I really respected James Rolfe for was that Cinnemassacre wasn't just AVGN. It had monster maddness, you know whats bullshit, board james. Fuck, sometimes he just sat down and talked about a book. I actually got into cinema thanks to him. I came for AVGN, but stayed because I thought those old monsters flicks were so cool. I, in turn, watched them and got a whole new interest. Maybe I could do the same for another. 

I’d like to give some clear answer to all of this. Something simple you could break down into steps. Focus on one project at a time. Break it into smaller pieces. Remember why you started. Make a promise to someone so you can’t back out. But, every one of those answers seems to have a counterexample.

So I’m not going to pretend I’ve found the correct system or that I even have much of one. I’d rather be honest than give you a step-by-step guide like some guru selling a handbook. Sometimes you need to lock in. Sometimes you need to let something rest. Sometimes jumping to a new project is avoidance. Sometimes it is the thing that gives you your creative energy back. The problem is that all of those can feel exactly the same while they’re happening.

So when that RPG concept stepped into the room, it felt like I had rediscovered some missing creative energy. But, it also appeared at the exact moment another project had become exhausting. That makes it difficult to tell what is happening. Am I following a legitimate new inspiration, or am I finding a more exciting and respectable way to avoid the ugly middle of something else?

That niggling answer is probably both. If I work on the RPG, I feel like I’m breaking a promise to my audience and abandoning this larger body of work before it’s complete. But if I force the RPG out of my mind, that feels like another kind of abandonment. At some point, imagining what a project could become starts to feel like accepting responsibility for it. Curiosity becomes a promise, without me ever consciously making one.

An unrealized idea doesn’t suffer because I failed to make it. But I can still experience its absence as a loss. And a finite creative life cannot fulfill every promise the imagination is capable of making. I understand that. I’m not sure understanding it makes the projects feel any lighter.

For a long time, I wondered which hat I was supposed to choose. Author, artist, game developer, animator, video essayist, whatever else might appear next week. I don’t think that is the question anymore. I know what I want to be. I want to be prolific and creative in many different forms. What I don’t know is whether moving among those forms will create that life, or leave me surrounded by promising beginnings.

When I look at the table, it isn’t entirely unfinished. There are videos, paintings, short comics, and even a small game that I managed to complete. There is also Higher Falls, the animated short, the RPG, miscellaneous writing, and everything else waiting for another pass. Maybe it is a pile of half-realized ambitions. Maybe it is a body of work that is still taking shape. Realistically, it is probably both.

For now, they all sit on the same table, and I keep telling them the same thing. ‘I’ll get to it.’ I just don’t know whether that is a promise or a postponement.