The hobby you abandoned when you got serious about success is the thing that was keeping you whole.

Many people know the type of empty feeling that comes with success; this type of feeling doesn’t fit into the clean categories of professional language. It's also dangerous to admit since it can seem to be a form of ingratitude. It is not burnout, depression, or lack of motivation, but there is a quietness and specificity to this feeling; you’re very good at your job and yet somehow don’t feel fully connected to it. Functional, always producing, outwardly together, and inwardly somewhere just off the wall, watching everything go by and making competent decisions that don’t really feel like you.

When people think about why they feel this way, they usually look at the wrong things. Most people will look at their workload, their relationships, their sleep, and their food; these are all important, but they aren't looking at the thing they were doing before the work became serious and the calendars became full. That's the thing they loved and lost the fight for.

Losing that isn't coincidental to the feeling. Losing that is the feeling.

A longitudinal study on professionals appeared in the Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology. The study followed professionals over a three-year span and found something that may have altered how we speak about high performers (and didn’t). People who continued to engage in non-work activities showed greater resilience under peak pressure conditions, reported less emotional exhaustion than peers who engaged in no other pursuits, and made better quality decisions under times of organizational uncertainty. The researchers saw the hobby as a mechanism for maintaining a strong psychological structure among highly performing people. That is a much larger claim than saying it helped mitigate stress.

What a hobby provides is a means of keeping connection to parts of ourselves that our work cannot judge, can’t fixate upon optimizing, and can’t absorb us into. A place where output is truly inconsequential, where it matters only that you’re present in the experience, where you are free to be uncertain and inept and consumed without having that affect your self-worth professionally. For founders/leaders whose jobs require them to perform and monitor themselves constantly, there is no “space” in which to keep that aspect of oneself alive. This is literally one of the last places left in our culture where the full range of humanity remains in touch with itself.

If we lose this, something happens in our psyche that is both difficult to articulate (in terms of degree) and far worse in its impact over time. We narrow ourselves down. Not drastically, not so much that others might even notice or that it would appear in your productivity metrics but in terms of the quality of presence you bring to the things that matter most. The decisions continue to be made with the same level of technical competence as before. Leadership continues as well. However, the aspects of you that make uncomfortable discussions comfortable, the genuine interest in seeing a team as opposed to merely managing them, and your ability to remain inside ambiguity without immediately deciding on a course of action, all of these qualities begin to dissipate in ways that are easier for those around you to recognize than for you to identify in yourself.

One founder built her second business after selling her first business successfully. Three years prior to starting her current business, she had painted seriously throughout her twenties. At that point she quit painting as soon as the demands of early-stage development began to fill her day-to-day schedule, and she believed engaging in any activity outside of her company was frivolous. In a recent board meeting she sat with an air of confidence and was clearly "present"; however, she was otherwise disengaged and couldn't recall ever experiencing such a lack of engagement with her work as she now felt. She began painting again not because someone told her she needed to paint for her well-being, not as a strategic wellness decision, but because she was out of ideas for how to connect with herself outside of her professional performance. What came back wasn't creative expression per se. It was access to herself, to the part of her mind that moved at its own pace that remained curious and didn't need to arrive anywhere. Her leadership changed in ways she wouldn't dare say were related solely to painting; however, she wouldn't say anything else either.

By 2026, when time optimization has become a benchmark for professional seriousness, when it has never been clearer culturally that each hour needs to provide quantifiable proof of value, protecting something in your life simply because it brings you joy has become an act requiring courage. Not because it is selfish, but because the forces pushing against it are powerful and relentless and masquerade as ambition, focus, and discipline aspects of professionalism perceived positively from the outside while eroding a vital piece of who we are.

Your abandoned hobby was never secondary to who you were. It was part of what created you. And the part of yourself that knows how to exist inside that hobby without agenda, without output, and without justification is likely to be similar to the version your leadership is attempting to reconnect with today. More than you've likely acknowledged.