"I'm into pottery, actually"

Have you considered feeling bad about yourself

You go to work every day. You feel like you should be grateful because your parents had it worse and were struggling to survive. They wore rags so you could eat.

You go to work every day. It’s monotonous. You feel like you could be doing more. Or that you should be doing more? You’re only vaguely confident that you could be doing more.

You go to work every day. And so to make yourself feel like you aren’t a dead-inside boring drone, you find a hobby or something—you need to be doing something fun with your off hours, or else what are you suffering through work for?

You go to work every day. And because you do, you don’t really have time or energy to do anything else. Or maybe you got in this trap because you’re not very motivated or smart. Who can say?

You go to work every day. So you pick a hobby that’s hard to judge, because that way people can maintain the polite fiction that it matters to you, and that it’s commendable follow-your-dreams stuff if it brings you joy. And we can all ignore the fact that you wanted to be doing something meaningful for the world, something big, but you failed, because sitting down and learning was hard and maintaining resolve was hard and sacrificing other parts of your life is hard and trying to do that too many times butts you up against the brutal fact that you are the cause of your painfully mediocre life and that you’re not going to change and therefore nothing is ever going to change.

You go to work every day.

(“Seems like you’re trying to muster up some enthusiasm for a side thing so that people don’t accurately conclude that you really are this boring and dead inside!”)