Hobbies are basically jobs that you don’t interview for and where you don’t have a boss. As a hobbyist, you chose the job and it’s yours.

The downside is that hobbies don’t come with benefits such as health insurance. Not much of a problem if your chosen hobby is cake decorating or cat juggling, but more so if you chose stained glass.

Stained glass is a hobby fraught with danger. Almost everything about it can maim, poison, or kill you. And like most hobbies, it has its essentially useless side to it. If a hobby is too useful, then it’s more of an apprenticeship; hobbies should either result in well-executed but intentionally useless product, or product that would be useful if only it had been better executed.

So stained glass begins with a simple design created by somebody else, from which you then struggle to produce a poor rendition out of crudely cut pieces of lurid glass, partly held together with materials known to the State of California to cause birth defects. The quality of the finished piece is often inversely related to the number of cuts, burns, and toxic incidents involved in its creation. But it’s a hobby, so there’s no-one to tell you you fell short of the required standard, though neither is there anyone to arrange your workers’ compensation if you are permanently enfeebled by ingesting powdered glass and lead dust.

If after due consideration stained glass isn’t the thing for you, there is of course cat juggling. Here you have a ready and eager internet audience who will always thank you for exposing them to any sort of cat. As a hobbyist cat juggler all you need is a cat, an internet connection, and a tetanus shot. There is a very slight learning curve (during which the tetanus shot may come in handy), after which you can claim some level of expertise in your new hobby almost immediately with little likelihood of anyone challenging you.

For some people though, an essential feature of any hobby they consider is that there is some sort of challenge involved. They may not get that challenge from their everyday occupation (where they have a boss and receive benefits), so they look to the hobby to compensate for the resulting lack of satisfaction. Even a first class professional brain surgeon may receive less satisfaction from brain surgery than she does from second-rate cat juggling.

Or, like Renaissance men, a person may not have any other occupation so they are free to dabble in whatever they like.

Renaissance men were lucky to live in possibly the only period of history when, paradoxically enough, you could be a professional hobbyist. They were full-time dabblers. Of course, their goal wasn’t just personal satisfaction. Their patrons allowed them broad freedom to dabble in whatever they liked, but they were expected to come up with the occasional product of genius that would be of general benefit to mankind. Well-juggled cats would not cut it for a Renaissance man. You won’t find a nicely decorated cake among Leonardo Da Vinci’s drawings. No; in his day, hobbies cut people free from mundane professions in order to create scientific, artistic, and technological breakthroughs.

And by the way, you won’t find any stained glass designs among Da Vinci’s notebooks either (although subsequent hobbyists have made gaudy windows out of some of his paintings).

Maybe that’s why he lived to the ripe old age of 67.