My brain quickly flipped through a mental scrapbook of activities I do outside of work. I pictured myself cooking, reading, running on the treadmill, scrolling through Twitter. I wasn’t sure any of these constituted a hobby. Though I love to cook, one could argue (as my editor later did) that it was ultimately a means to an end—nourishing my body. I’m a voracious reader, but I also sometimes read for work , or review books for pay . Running is, for many people, a hobby, but for me it’s merely exercise I do to stay physically fit: I don’t run with other people, I don’t try to get any better at it, not really, and I don’t particularly enjoy it.

One evening in October, while I waited at the bar for a seltzer with lime, my friend Seth asked me a question I wasn’t sure how to answer: “Do you have any hobbies?”

Americans are working more than ever , so it makes a certain amount of sense that there’s less time to pursue extracurricular interests. And people are attuned to ways that work can make finding—and keeping—a hobby difficult.

There are some straightforward explanations for these circumstances, which may sound familiar to those of us—particularly young people—who participate in contemporary work life and have the financial security and privileges to seriously consider such questions. Millennials earn 20 percent less than boomers did at the same stage of life, despite a larger share of them having at least a bachelor’s degree compared to boomers. Last year, the United States set a record for the longest period of time without a federal minimum wage increase, and though the number of Americans with multiple jobs has fallen over the last couple decades, the current data may fail to account for the enormity of the gig economy , and the seamlessness with which many of us pick up side gigs to supplement our income.

Seth said he didn’t think he had any hobbies either, though he wanted one. I pointed out that I would consider biking—which Seth does often—a hobby, but he saw it as more of a form of transportation. Beyond our full-time jobs we seemed to be engaged mostly in the activities that sustained our lives: that is, the things that made work possible. And beyond that, we found that we spent much of our leisure time doing things out of habit that we wish we didn’t feel quite so drawn toward: reading Twitter, browsing Instagram, and other relatively mindless, internet-centric habits.

“Being raised in an upper-middle class family in the New York area, I was socialized to value success above all else,” Ryan Mandelbaum, who started birding after writing a story for the Washington Post about heron conservation efforts in New York, told me. “[At first] I couldn’t really figure out what I wanted to do because I got really stressed about wasting time and not doing something worthwhile.”

But there are also more subtle forces that prevent us from dedicating our time to activities outside of work. Over the last several years, “hustle culture” has pervaded nearly every facet of our lives, transforming work from something we do to pay our bills and feed ourselves and our families into a lifestyle or even an identity. “It is obsessed with striving, relentlessly positive, devoid of humor, and—once you notice it—impossible to escape,” Erin Griffith wrote for the New York Times last January. And we’ve assigned a high social value to the kind of hustle Griffith describes, or at least the appearance of it (which she calls “performative workaholism”): A 2017 study found that the busier someone appeared, the more important they seemed to others.

“Work feels to me like a really big obstacle to getting started with any new hobbies,” Seth, who does advocacy work in New York politics, later told me over the phone. “I don’t have regular evening or weekend work, but it happens often enough that signing up for music classes or something is kind of prohibitive for me.”

Not only does hustle culture encourage us to see any non-work passion or interest as a potential small business or “side hustle,” it also makes us acutely aware, as Mandelbaum suggested, that time is money.

In her 2019 book How to Do Nothing, the author Jenny Odell explains that under capitalism, we are forced to think of our days as being made up of 24 “potentially monetizable hours.” Even for those of us in less economically precarious situations than people who need to work a second (or third) job, these conditions make it so that “time becomes an economic resource that we can no longer justify spending on ‘nothing.’”

“Hobbies require time and, depending on the hobby, money,” Odell told me. (She went on to credit Feminist Bird Club for making birdwatching more inclusive and accessible: The club is a space for LGBTQ people, women, and people of color to discover birdwatching, and most walks are free.)

“But let's say it's free or affordable for you, and you have the time,” Odell continued. “It may still be hard not to see even your free time as money—in which case hobbies appear ‘expensive’ if they produce nothing but personal enjoyment and satisfaction.”