Earlier today, I ran into my neighbor Troy from across the street. He is a tall, cheerful man who talks to everyone in the neighborhood, and in fact, he was chatting with a woman at the Whole Foods when I ran into him.

He introduced us and told me, “I’m going to give you a call.” He had found out recently that I am into fountain pens, and now he told me he had just bought a Kaweco pocket pen (I told him it’s a very nice pen, and a good choice) and he wanted to talk to me about it. He showed me the Lamy Safari he already owned. The Lamy Safari is an inexpensive pen, and the Kaweco is a less inexpensive one; I have pens that cost close to a thousand dollars, but I also have a Safari and a Kaweco, too, because I’ve been using fountain pens for over sixty years and the price is not the point. The point is the experience of writing with them.

“What are your hobbies?” I asked the woman he was talking to.

She laughed nervously and said, “I have so many.”

“What are they?”

“I eat out a lot,” she said. “That’s where all my money goes,” and I laughed amiably and left them to their conversation, because she did not look like someone who eats out as a hobby. Frankly, she didn’t look like she had any hobbies. She looked thin, tight, and expensive, and I am willing to bet that her real hobby is creative starvation.

I’ve had a lot of hobbies in my life, and have given up many of them. One of them, once, actually was losing weight. I was responsible about it, because I am a well-informed person who doesn’t believe in fads, and at various times in my life I have weighed as much as sixty pounds less than I do now, though I looked ill at that weight (it did allow me to complete a marathon in under four hours, mind you, but I’m not doing that ever again). The fact is, I don’t actually need to lose weight, and I have given up trying. I’m healthy, with strong bones, good cholesterol, excellent blood pressure, and moderate blood sugar, and any physical problems I have are the result of being 74 and a lifelong exerciser.

I was also a fencer, and I took that hobby as far as I could considering I didn’t start until my early 40s; I have several over-50 world championships and a lot of good stories about thirty years of fencing, but I gave that up a couple of years back.

I also have done sewing, knitting, crocheting, embroidery, quilting, visual arts, home organization, calligraphy, and a vast panoply of other creative activities; I count writing as a hobby rather than a profession even though at one point I had an agent and my books were published conventionally. That’s because I make less than $100 a year from writing now, mostly by accident. Currently, my writing hobby is composing one blog post a day for a year. My previous hobby was decluttering my house and setting it up for aging in place, but I seem to have reached a stopping point with that. There’s only so much you can clear things out before you’re living in an empty warehouse.

Fro some reason, my brain believes in hobbies. A job can certainly be absorbing–I was absolutely consumed and delighted by my profession–but my definition of an inner life seems to be doing something that you don’t get paid for. It could be gardening, cosplay, or renovating houses. Those seem to be popular. I have plenty of plants, but they don’t interest me the way fountain pens do, and I basically choose plants that don’t need much maintenance.

I can’t bring myself to make a hobby of cooking; I seem to be unable to break the habit of thinking of food as fuel when I’m hungry and uninteresting when I’m not hungry. Every once in a while I try a recipe; last night I made spaghetti with slow-roasted tomatoes from a New York Times recipe, and it took four hours. Then we ate it and it was gone. That’s not my kind of thing as a regular practice.

Some hobbies, like fountain pens, also function as “communities of consumption,” a phrase my adult child introduced me to; that is, they exist for people to encourage one another to spend money on the things they’re fascinated with. And I certainly spend enough money on pens. But the point, to me, is not economic.

It’s to be interested in something–anything–really, truly interested.

Last night, my family came over as they always do on Thursday nights. I had put out a jigsaw puzzle, which my adult kid promptly started finishing, and I had also placed a few new graphic novels in my grandchild’s room on the second floor, which he immediately discovered and started reading. While my kid and I assembled the puzzle and (in between) ate dinner, the grandchild devoured one of the books; he finished it before he left. I’m looking forward to chatting with Troy about his new Kaweco and, perhaps, slyly suggesting r/fountainpens on Reddit.

Obviously, one of the hobbies I practice is enticing other people into being interested in things. Everyone should have a hobby or twelve.