BoumTAC

Without Children, Without Hobbies

Published on December 4, 2025

I recently had a discussion with someone in their thirties, in a relationship and childless, who was looking for new hobbies to pursue. Like many people in their thirties, he has a stable situation: regular income and a house. We had a lengthy exchange about the possibilities available to him.

This is a topic I know well. Living alone, I've often asked myself these same questions about what it's possible to do with one's free time.

The Abundance of Free Time

When you don't want children, you have an enormous amount of free time. In theory, this should allow you to test and invest in multiple activities. But reality is more complex.

We reviewed several hobbies, and for each one, constraints quickly became apparent:

Mountain biking downhill seems wonderful at first glance, but obstacles pile up. Equipment costs a fortune, and there's the practical question: how do you get to the top? Pushing your bike for kilometers of elevation gain is no fun. Even more problematic, crashes at 25 km/h on rocks become dangerous with age. At 40, a dislocated shoulder, a broken knee, and two cracked ribs can immobilize you for a year. Unable to work, risk of depression, weight gain... It's a sport for young people; at 20 you recover quickly and the consequences of injury are less severe.

Canoeing seems more accessible, but is only practicable in spring when river flow permits. Winter is impossible, autumn is boring due to lack of water. And then there's the same logistical problem as with mountain biking: you drop your car at one place, go downstream for kilometers... how do you get the vehicle back? Constraints accumulate.

Travel represents a passion common to many of us. But after twenty years of regular travel, you eventually see it all. When you've visited all of Europe and the distant destinations that interested you, what's left? Returning to Rome or Barcelona every two years brings nothing new. Even road trips in Thailand, Indonesia, or the Philippines end up feeling similar.

Motorcycles attract with their apparent freedom, but constraints are numerous: cold, night, dangerous rain, summer heat, inability to transport belongings. Once you've done a few rides around your area, boredom sets in. This is the fate of most motorcyclists: license, purchase, then resale within five years because ultimately, it serves no purpose.

Flying (PPL) poses exactly the same problem. Learning to fly is fascinating, flying provides unique sensations. But then what? You go to the airfield, take off, do a two-hour tour, come back. Difficult to repeat this every weekend without getting tired of it.

Music is familiar to me, having played bass for more than ten years. After a while, you know how to play everything you want. And contrary to popular belief, "good" music isn't necessarily the most technically difficult. Playing in a group becomes a logistical challenge: finding people your age, at the same level, with the same availability, who get along well and play complementary instruments. In adult life, this is nearly impossible. Not to mention social perception: at 25, playing in a band is cool; at 40, you come across as an eternal adolescent who refuses to grow up.

Paragliding suffers from the same logistical constraints as canoeing and mountain biking: you drive up the mountain, jump... but how do you get the vehicle back? You also need to get a license, which requires several weeks of training. You really have to love this activity to devote so much time to it.

The Experience of Pen Pals

This problem of ephemeral hobbies, I experienced it concretely more than six months ago. I signed up on Global Pen Friends to find pen pals around the world. The experience was wonderful at first: I was corresponding with seven people, we wrote regularly on various subjects. Through the letters, we got to know each other and discussions became increasingly rich.

But writing takes considerable time. Like writing this article, you have to think about the content of each letter. Handwriting is slow, then you have to put it in an envelope, write the address, go mail it, wait in line at the post office which is never open at convenient hours, pay for shipping... The complete process takes at minimum two hours, often four for my multi-page letters.

When you receive two letters the same day and another two days later, that represents eight hours of work at once, then four additional hours. Pressure accumulates because you can't delay: mail takes time to cross oceans, and the other person also takes time to respond. If they're very busy or very far away, delays stretch even longer.

All my pen pals, like me, had signed up on the site to discover this activity. They had free time and the desire to do something new. This lasted six months. Then, as in any adult life, complications arose. Free time diminished, summer arrived, and the first thing that got dropped was correspondence. Within two months, they all stopped responding to me.

Yet they were all, like me, adult men without children with lots of free time. But when something shifts in their lives, they no longer have time. Six months of exchanges to build relationships, only to end up with nothing.

This is the reality of adult life: we do ephemeral things that no longer serve us a few months or years later. Never for the long term.

The Reality of Adult Hobbies

Once you're an adult, actually practicable activities are limited. In sports, there remains: running, CrossFit, rock climbing. Everything else becomes impracticable. Even futsal poses problems: finding a stable team with enough players of the same level and compatible availability is a feat.

Among other hobbies, reading remains accessible: you buy the books you want, it doesn't cost much, you read when you have time. On the creative side, there's everything done with a pencil: writing (like what I'm doing now on this blog), drawing, painting, sculpting. You can add small DIY projects and gardening.

But here's the problem: when you're 35, have no children, have money and little meaning in your life, doing your climbing session twice a week and jogging on weekends works for about two minutes. After ten years of regular reading, you no longer know what interesting things to read. It's not certain I'll always have interesting subjects to write about on this blog in 5 years.

There's still seeing friends, but as with my pen pal experience, friends are lost over time. Everyone has their life, and often they have children. They then have much less available time, but more meaning in their existence. A Sunday jog and a bit of DIY suits them perfectly.

If you're lucky, you can spend two evenings a week with friends. That's enormous in adult life, but it remains trivial: there are still five other evenings, weekends, and five weeks of vacation per year to fill.

The Temporal Impasse

When you're young and starting your working life, it's normal to think this way. You want to discover lots of activities. But the more time passes, the more you refuse to move to the next stage — starting a family — and the more boredom spreads. At 25 it's exciting, at 30 you start looking for activities, at 35 it becomes problematic. But at 45, what do you do? I don't know, I'm only 32. But it's a question we all must ask ourselves. If I continue in this situation, do I see myself like this in ten years? Will I be satisfied?

This tweet precisely captures the essence of the problem. It's not necessarily about loneliness — you can control your social relationships, choose when and with whom to spend time. The real challenge is the absence of a higher purpose, of a project that transcends our small individual existence.

This observation also aligns with a broader trend observed since the 1970s:

The data seems to confirm this feeling: despite gains in financial independence and freedom of choice, life satisfaction decreases. It's a troubling paradox of our modern era.

The difficult truth to admit is that there's no future without children. You may desire not to want them, it's a respectable choice. But you must accept having a life emptied of meaning and filled with boredom. At 50, it will be living in despair after having spent 30 years practicing various hobbies.

This reflection doesn't aim to guilt those who choose not to have children, but to highlight a reality that's often obscured: abundant free time doesn't guarantee happiness. Without a project that transcends us, without responsibilities that give meaning to our actions, even the most beautiful hobbies eventually lose their flavor.