Making Things: Creativity, Hobbies and Passion Projects

Introduction

Ask people what they will do when they no longer have to work, and many will mention something they have been quietly carrying for years: the novel in the bottom drawer, the guitar gathering dust, the allotment waiting list, the watercolour set bought one hopeful January and used twice. For most of adult life, these things live in the margins. They are squeezed into evenings when we are tired, and weekends that fill up with chores. They become “one day” projects.

Early retirement can turn “one day” into “today”. It gives you the one resource that creative work demands above all others: long, unhurried, uninterrupted time. Time to be bad at something before you become good at it. Time to take a class, fail a glaze firing, rewrite a chapter, re-dig a vegetable bed. Time, above all, to lose yourself.

This chapter explores the growing evidence that making things, whether art, music, writing, crafts or gardens, is good for body, mind and relationships, particularly in mid and later life. It then introduces people who stepped away from conventional careers before state pension age and found that creative work became central to a richer life: a carpenter, two late-blooming visual artists, a historian turned painter, a writer and a pair of homestead gardeners. We close with a balanced look at the limits of the evidence, practical ideas and questions for reflection.

What the research tells us

A decade of evidence on the arts and health

In 2019 the World Health Organization’s Regional Office for Europe published the most comprehensive review to date of the arts and health. Fancourt and Finn (2019) synthesised findings from over 3,000 studies and concluded that the arts, whether participating in them or experiencing them, play a significant role in preventing ill health, promoting health, and helping to manage and treat illness across the lifespan. The arts were understood broadly, from music and dance to visual arts, crafts, writing and cultural visits. The review drew on many kinds of evidence, from small case studies to large cohort studies and trials, so the strength of evidence varies considerably from one area to another.

Much of the strongest recent evidence comes from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA), which has followed thousands of people aged 50 and over in England for many years. In one analysis, Fancourt and Steptoe (2019) examined 6,710 adults over 14 years. People who engaged with “receptive” arts, such as going to museums, galleries, exhibitions, the theatre, concerts or the opera, every few months or more had a 31% lower risk of dying during follow-up than those who never did; even those who went only once or twice a year had a 14% lower risk. This was after adjusting for a wide range of demographic, economic, health and social factors. The authors stress that the study was observational and so cannot prove cause and effect, but the association was robust across many sensitivity analyses. Another ELSA analysis found that adults over 50 who visited museums every few months or more had a lower incidence of dementia over ten years than less frequent visitors (Fancourt et al., 2018).

Gene Cohen and the creative age

The late American psychiatrist Gene Cohen, founding chief of the Center on Aging at the US National Institute of Mental Health, spent much of his career challenging the idea that later life is only a story of decline. In The Creative Age (Cohen, 2000) and The Mature Mind (Cohen, 2005), he argued that creativity can flourish in the second half of life. In the latter, he described a series of developmental phases, including a “liberation” phase marked by a desire to experiment and try new things, often coinciding with the period when children leave home and retirement begins (Cohen, 2005).

Cohen also tested his ideas. In a landmark study, Cohen et al. (2006) followed 166 healthy older adults, aged 65 and over, in the Washington, DC area for a year. One group joined a professionally conducted community chorale; a comparison group continued their usual activities. After twelve months, the chorale members reported better overall physical health, fewer doctor visits, less medication use, fewer falls and fewer other health problems than the comparison group. They also reported better morale and less loneliness. While the comparison group’s number of activities declined over the year, the chorale group’s showed a trend towards increasing. The study relied mainly on self-report and was not a fully randomised trial, but it was one of the first rigorous attempts to measure the health effects of participatory arts for older people, and it has been widely influential.

Learning new skills and the ageing brain

Creativity often means learning something new, and there is evidence that demanding new skills can sharpen the mind. In the Synapse Project, Park et al. (2014) asked older adults to spend an average of about 16.5 hours a week for three months learning to quilt, learning digital photography, or both. Compared with people who took part in social activities or undemanding tasks at home, those who learned the new, cognitively demanding skills showed improvements in episodic memory. Interestingly, purely social engagement had limited cognitive benefit in this study. The lesson seems to be that stretching yourself matters: not just keeping busy, but tackling something genuinely challenging and unfamiliar.

Hobbies across the world

Is the benefit of hobbies universal, or specific to certain cultures? Mak et al. (2023) addressed this by harmonising data from five long-running ageing studies covering 93,263 people aged 65 and over in 16 countries. Having a hobby was associated with fewer depressive symptoms and with higher self-rated health, happiness and life satisfaction. Further analysis suggested the relationship ran over time from hobby to wellbeing, and the findings were strikingly consistent across countries, with national differences explaining less than 9% of the variation. The authors concluded that ensuring equal access to hobbies should be a priority for healthy ageing.

Why might leisure activities help? Fancourt et al. (2021) reviewed the literature and mapped more than 600 distinct mechanisms by which leisure activities, including hobbies and the arts, could affect health. These span psychological processes (such as self-esteem, sense of purpose and emotional regulation), biological ones (such as reduced stress responses), social ones (such as friendship and support) and behavioural ones (such as physical activity and healthier routines), operating at individual, group and societal levels. Creative hobbies are rarely one thing; they tend to bundle many healthy ingredients together.

Crafts and gardens

Specific creative pursuits have their own evidence base. In an international online survey of 3,545 knitters, Riley et al. (2013) found a significant relationship between how often people knitted and how calm and happy they felt. More frequent knitters also reported better cognitive functioning, and knitting in a group was linked to greater happiness and improved social contact. As a self-selected sample of enthusiasts, respondents were likely to be positive about their craft, so the findings are best read as describing what knitting offers those who love it.

Gardening, which blends creativity, physical work and time in nature, has been studied more rigorously. A meta-analysis by Soga et al. (2017) pooled 22 studies and found a significant positive effect of gardening on a wide range of health outcomes, including reductions in depression, anxiety and body mass index, and increases in life satisfaction, quality of life and sense of community. The authors detected some publication bias but found that the positive effect remained after adjusting for it.

Flow and serious leisure

Two ideas from psychology and sociology help to explain why creative pursuits can feel so absorbing and meaningful.

The first is flow, the state described by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in which a person becomes so absorbed in a challenging activity that self-consciousness falls away and time seems to transform. His research suggested that flow is most likely when an activity has clear goals, offers immediate feedback, and demands skills that are well matched to the challenge: too easy and we become bored, too hard and we become anxious (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990). As the epigraph to this chapter suggests, he argued that our best moments are not passive but come from voluntary effort towards something difficult and worthwhile. Creative crafts, music and writing are classic flow activities, and early retirement offers the long, uninterrupted stretches of time in which flow is most easily found.

The second is serious leisure, a concept introduced by the Canadian sociologist Robert Stebbins (1982). He distinguished casual leisure, such as watching television or relaxing, from the systematic pursuit of an amateur, hobbyist or volunteer activity that people find so substantial and interesting that they develop something like a career in it. Stebbins identified distinguishing qualities of serious leisure, including the need to persevere, significant personal effort to gain skills and knowledge, a sense of progression or “leisure career”, durable benefits such as self-fulfilment, a distinctive ethos and social world shared with others who pursue the same activity, and a strong sense of identity (Stebbins, 1982; Serious Leisure Perspective, n.d.). This matters for early retirees, because one of the hardest losses when leaving work is often identity and structure. Serious leisure can replace both.

Lives enriched: real stories

Pete Adeney (Mr Money Mustache) — the soothing work of a carpenter

Pete Adeney, better known as Mr Money Mustache, retired at the age of 30 and later became one of the best-known voices of the financial independence movement (Adeney, 2011; Carson, 2020). What surprises many readers is what he actually does with his freedom: a great deal of physical, hands-on work.

In a 2020 interview with Chad Carson, Pete explained that he still likes to work hard, and for him that means physical work. He bought a building in downtown Longmont, Colorado, where he does “a bunch of carpentry and renovation”, and turned it into a co-working space whose members became friends and collaborators (Carson, 2020). He described construction as deeply calming: “I’m just a carpenter and that’s very soothing for me.” Much of this work, he explained, is done free for friends and family or people who need it; sometimes it is paid, modestly, which he is happy with because he would much rather do this than earn far more doing something he did not believe in (Carson, 2020).

Pete’s story illustrates Stebbins’s (1982) serious leisure perfectly: a skilled craft pursued for its own sake, with its own progression, community and identity. It also shows that “creativity” need not mean fine art. Building a staircase, fitting a window or restoring an old building can bring all the absorption and satisfaction of flow.

Chris Motley and Mike Flynn — artists in waiting

In 2021, AARP profiled a group of people who had become successful artists after leaving conventional careers (AARP, 2021). Two of them stepped away from work well before the usual retirement age, and their stories show how a long-standing creative spark can catch fire once there is time to tend it.

Chris Motley learned to knit as a child. While still working as a lawyer, she began to see knitting “in three dimensions other than clothing” and started selling sculptural neck pieces. She retired from law in her late fifties, and her fibre art took off: she now creates sculpture from hand-knitted fibres. Her explanation is disarmingly simple: “Once I retired, I had time for creativity” (AARP, 2021). Her path echoes the knitting research described above (Riley et al., 2013): a familiar craft, practised with more time and ambition, became a serious artistic identity.

Mike Flynn began taking weekly art classes while still working as a US postal inspector, and retired in 2001, in his early fifties. “I was taking workshops and lessons, and I got hooked,” he told AARP. His school had offered no art classes, and he felt he had missed out on something important; retirement gave him the chance to catch up, and he went on to work in watercolours, oils and mixed media (AARP, 2021). Both stories illustrate Stebbins’s (1982) idea of a leisure “career”: a pursuit begun modestly alongside paid work, which deepens over years into skill, recognition and a new sense of self.

Nell Irvin Painter — old in art school, and glad of it

Nell Irvin Painter was an acclaimed historian and professor of American history at Princeton University. On retiring in 2005, at the age of 64, she decided not to take a gentle adult-education course but to go to art school properly: first for a new bachelor’s degree at the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers, and then for a Master of Fine Arts at the Rhode Island School of Design, studying alongside students a third of her age (Simon, 2018). She became an income-producing professional artist and wrote a memoir of the experience, Old in Art School (Painter, 2018).

In an interview with NPR’s Scott Simon, she described how art school changed not only her work but how she saw: she had to bring her “20th century eyes” into the 21st century, a process she said was still continuing (Simon, 2018). As a historian she had to be faithful to the archive; as an artist she found she could do whatever she wanted with the figure and with history. She is also refreshingly honest about the difficulties, including encountering racism and ageism, and the cost. Her advice to anyone considering a serious second creative career is to ask how much money, time and energy you can afford, how your health is, and whether you can psychologically stand being ignored, while adding that “You don’t have to do it whole-hog like I did” (Simon, 2018).

Tanja Hester — filling a creative vacuum

Tanja Hester left a career in political communications at the end of 2017, aged 38, with her husband Mark, then 41 (Hester, n.d.). Before they retired, the couple worked through a “purpose mapping” exercise and identified three things they wanted their next life to be about: adventure, creativity and service (Hester, 2016).

Writing on her blog Our Next Life before she retired, Tanja reflected that her greatest dissatisfaction with her career was the lack of a creative outlet at work, and that she had built creative outlets of one kind or another at every stage of her life, often without realising it. It was in large part this “creative vacuum”, she wrote, that led her to start blogging in the first place (Hester, 2016). She also wrestled with a question many would-be creative retirees face: whether to keep creative work free of any pressure to earn money, or to allow that some of it might one day pay.

In early retirement, that creative drive became the centre of her working life. She went on to write two books, Work Optional (Hester, 2019) and Wallet Activism (Hester, 2021), alongside her blog and public speaking (Hester, n.d.). Her story shows how the freedom of early retirement can let a long-suppressed creative impulse move from the margins to the middle of life, and how creative work can itself become a form of service.

Elizabeth and Nate Thames (Frugalwoods) — growing a creative life on a Vermont homestead

Elizabeth Willard Thames and her husband Nate had, by their late twenties, the office jobs they had once thought of as dream careers. But at 30, in March 2014, they shared what she calls a “quarter-life crisis”: they realised that all their creative energy and best ideas were going into work for their employers rather than into things they found personally rewarding (Thames, n.d.). They dreamed of a simpler life in the woods and, rather than wait until 65, saved hard to make it happen sooner. In May 2016 they left urban Cambridge, Massachusetts, for a 66-acre homestead in Vermont, where, she writes, they “now live a simpler, more creative life closer to nature” (Thames, n.d.; Thames, 2017).

Her monthly homestead diaries capture the creative, hands-on joy of learning to grow food from scratch. In their second summer, Nate began raising tomatoes, peppers, beans, sunflowers and more from seed under grow lights in their upstairs bathroom to beat Vermont’s short season. After months of weeding, mulching and tending, finally enjoying the harvest was, she wrote, “nothing short of exhilarating” (Thames, 2017). He pruned and hand-pollinated neglected plum trees, which rewarded him with a single, tiny, “fiercely delicious” plum; they made rhubarb compote, pickles and preserves. She describes themselves cheerfully as “neophyte gardeners” learning as they go, and calls the balance of homestead work with the rest of life “a deeply rewarding aspect of living close to nature and in alignment with the seasons” (Thames, 2017). Elizabeth also went on to write a book about their journey, Meet the Frugalwoods (Thames, 2018).

A balanced view

The evidence that creative activity is good for us is broad and growing, but it deserves a careful reading.

Much of it is observational. Large cohort studies such as those from ELSA (Fancourt and Steptoe, 2019; Fancourt et al., 2018) and the multinational hobby study (Mak et al., 2023) adjust carefully for confounding factors, but they cannot completely rule out the possibility that people who are healthier, wealthier or more socially connected are simply more likely to take part in the arts. The authors themselves are clear about this.

Intervention studies are often small or self-reported. The influential chorale study (Cohen et al., 2006) relied largely on participants’ own reports and was not a fully randomised trial. The knitting survey (Riley et al., 2013) was of self-selected enthusiasts. The Synapse Project (Park et al., 2014) was a genuine experiment, but its benefits were for specific types of memory over a limited period, and we do not know how long they last.

Creative pursuits can bring frustration as well as flow. Flow depends on a match between challenge and skill (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990), and the early stages of learning anything are often awkward and discouraging. Nell Irvin Painter’s account of art school is honest about isolation, prejudice and the discomfort of being a beginner again (Simon, 2018). Anne Youngson, the engineer turned novelist whose story appears in Chapter 7, describes a panicky first year of retirement before she found her creative direction (Bellamy, 2024).

Money can complicate things. Tanja Hester’s reflections show the tension between keeping a creative pursuit pure and allowing it to earn (Hester, 2016). Some hobbies, such as pottery, photography, sailing or instrument-making, can be expensive, and not everyone can afford studio space, classes or materials. Mak et al. (2023) highlight inequality of access to hobbies as a public health concern. Many of the most rewarding creative activities, though, are cheap or free: singing in a community choir, sketching, writing, gardening an allotment, or using a public library.

Survivorship bias affects our stories. The people in this chapter have written about their experiences because those experiences went well enough to share. Many others try a creative pursuit in retirement and drift away from it, and that is fine. The point is not to become a published novelist or exhibited artist, but to find activities that absorb, stretch and connect you.

Putting it into practice

• Write your “sweet peas” list. Anne Youngson (see Chapter 7) eased her doubts about retiring at 56 by listing everything she could do with more time, including “really silly” things like growing sweet peas (Bellamy, 2024). Write your own list, including the silly and small. Notice which items make you feel most excited.
• Take a proper course. Structured learning, whether an evening class, a community-college course or a degree, provides progression, feedback and companions, which are key features of both flow and serious leisure (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990; Stebbins, 1982).
• Choose something genuinely challenging. The Synapse Project suggests that learning demanding new skills does more for memory than simply keeping busy (Park et al., 2014).
• Do it with others. Join a choir, a knitting group, a community garden, a makerspace or a writing circle. Social creative activities combine several of the mechanisms Fancourt et al. (2021) identify.
• Engage with arts as an audience, too. Regular visits to museums, galleries, concerts or the theatre are associated with better health outcomes in later life (Fancourt and Steptoe, 2019).
• Get your hands dirty. Gardening combines creativity, exercise and nature, with a solid evidence base behind it (Soga et al., 2017).
• Protect long, uninterrupted blocks of time. Flow rarely arrives in ten-minute fragments. Guard a few mornings a week for your creative work.
• Be patient with the beginner stage. Expect to be clumsy for a while. Keep a record of your progress to remind yourself how far you have come.
• Decide your relationship with money consciously. Will this pursuit be purely for joy, or might it one day earn? Either answer is valid, but choosing deliberately can prevent resentment later (Hester, 2016).

Questions for reflection

1. What did you love making or doing as a child that you set aside as an adult? What would it take to pick it up again?
2. When did you last experience flow, that feeling of being so absorbed that time disappeared? What were you doing?
3. If you could study any creative subject properly, at any level, what would it be?
4. Would you prefer a creative pursuit that is solitary and reflective, or one that is shared and social? Why?
5. What skills from your working life, such as problem-solving, design, listening or organisation, might transfer to a creative project, as Anne Youngson’s engineering career did for her fiction (Bellamy, 2024)?
6. How would you feel about being a beginner again, perhaps among people much younger than you? What would help you persist?
7. What might you like to have made, grown, written or performed by the end of your life?

References