Author: Nick Pelios
There is a word we have managed to turn into something of an insult, which is strange considering what it originally meant. Amateur comes from the Latin amator, meaning lover, someone who does something because they love it. Not because they are being paid, not because they are particularly good at it and certainly not because they have worked out how to turn it into a business. They simply enjoy doing it. Somewhere along the way, though, amateur became associated with incompetence, a lack of seriousness or somebody who hasn't quite reached the level of a professional. If someone describes your work as amateur, they are probably not complimenting your enthusiasm.
I think that's a shame, because there was something rather nice about the original meaning. It allowed people to be genuinely interested in something without needing to justify the time they spent on it. You could play the guitar badly for twenty years and still get enormous pleasure from it. You could paint pictures nobody would ever buy, spend your weekends photographing birds or go running without having the slightest interest in your pace. The activity didn't need to produce anything beyond the enjoyment of doing it.
Freediving is a good example of how that relationship can begin. Most people don't take their first course because they have ambitions of becoming world champions. They are curious about what it feels like to go underwater on a single breath. Maybe they have spent years snorkelling on holidays and want to explore a little further. Maybe they watched a documentary, met somebody who dives or simply like the idea of moving through the ocean without a tank on their back. Whatever the reason, the attraction is usually pretty straightforward. It looks interesting, and they want to try it.
Then something happens that is common to almost every hobby. You discover there is an entire world behind the thing you thought you were casually getting into. There are techniques, courses, training methods, equipment choices, communities, competitions and people who have dedicated decades to understanding details you didn't even know existed. You start learning, and naturally, you want to improve. There is nothing wrong with that. In fact, becoming better at something is one of the most enjoyable parts of having a hobby.
The problem begins when improvement stops being an option and becomes an expectation.
You take a course, and someone asks when you're taking the next one. You reach thirty metres, and suddenly forty becomes the obvious target. You buy decent fins, and within a few weeks you're researching whether another model might give you better performance. You post a photograph from a dive, and somebody wants to know how deep you went. None of these things is particularly unreasonable on its own, and most people asking are simply being friendly. But gradually, the activity starts acquiring a set of measurements and expectations that weren't there when you began.
Before long, you can find yourself approaching something you originally loved with the same mentality you bring to work. There are objectives to meet, improvements to demonstrate and other people whose progress you can compare with your own. The thing that was supposed to provide a little freedom from everyday obligations begins to look suspiciously like another obligation.
And the strange part is that nobody necessarily forced this on you. You may have done most of it yourself, simply because the culture surrounding hobbies increasingly encourages us to treat everything we enjoy as something we should become exceptionally good at.
Apparently, Enjoying Something Isn't Enough Anymore
Modern life has developed a remarkable ability to turn almost any interest into a project. If you enjoy running, there is an app ready to measure every kilometre and compare your performance with thousands of strangers. If you like cooking, you can start a food account, develop recipes, build an audience and eventually launch a newsletter. If you enjoy photography, someone will suggest selling prints. If you make pottery, you should probably open an online shop. Even reading books has become something people track, count and publicly display, as though finishing forty novels this year is automatically better than reading twelve and remembering them.
The pressure isn't always explicit. Nobody sits you down and explains that your hobby needs a business plan. It arrives through small suggestions, usually disguised as encouragement. You're good at that, you should start charging. You should make videos. You should enter a competition. You should take it seriously. You could actually make something out of this.
That last suggestion is particularly revealing. Make something out of it. As though the hours of enjoyment, friendships, experiences and personal satisfaction somehow don't count as something.
Of course, there is nothing wrong with turning a passion into a career. Many people have built wonderful lives doing exactly that, and some of the best coaches, athletes, photographers and craftspeople began as enthusiastic amateurs. The issue is not professionalisation itself. It's the growing assumption that professionalisation is the natural destination of enthusiasm, and that remaining an amateur represents a failure to fulfil your potential.
Social media has accelerated this mentality because it makes performance visible and rewards the people who package their interests most effectively. A person who quietly enjoys an activity for twenty years may receive little attention, while somebody who has been doing it for six months but produces excellent videos can become an influential voice within the community. That doesn't necessarily mean the second person lacks knowledge or sincerity. It means that being good at an activity and being good at presenting that activity online are two very different skills, and modern platforms frequently reward the latter.
Freediving provides some excellent examples. A beautiful photograph of a diver descending beside a line can generate enormous interest, particularly when accompanied by an impressive depth or a dramatic caption. A technically excellent but completely ordinary training session is much harder to turn into something people want to watch. Nobody is particularly excited about a video showing somebody spending forty minutes working on an equalization problem and eventually deciding that today isn't the day.
Yet anyone who has spent time around serious freedivers knows that those unremarkable sessions are often where the real work happens.
The danger is that we begin valuing experiences according to how well they can be presented rather than how much they mean to us. A dive becomes more interesting if it produces a personal best. A trip becomes more successful if it provides good photographs. A training session feels more worthwhile if there is something measurable to show for it. Gradually, the experience itself risks becoming secondary to the evidence that the experience happened.
There is also a financial dimension. Hobbies have always involved spending money, and specialist activities genuinely benefit from good equipment and proper instruction. But the modern hobby economy is extraordinarily effective at convincing us that enjoyment requires constant upgrading. There is always a better watch, a lighter bicycle, a more advanced camera or another piece of equipment promising to improve the experience.
Sometimes those improvements are real. Other times we are simply purchasing the feeling of progress because purchasing something is easier than developing a skill.
In freediving, high-quality equipment can make a meaningful difference to comfort, efficiency and performance, but there is a limit to what any product can accomplish. A new pair of fins may improve the way you move through the water. It cannot teach you patience, replace consistent training or make you comfortable with a depth you are not ready for. Those things take time, and time is considerably harder to sell than equipment.
Perhaps the bigger issue is that we've become uncomfortable with activities that don't produce measurable returns. We want our exercise to improve performance, our hobbies to develop skills, our experiences to generate content and our free time to contribute to some larger objective. Even relaxation is frequently presented as a technique for becoming more productive when we return to work.
Apparently, doing something because it makes Tuesday evening more enjoyable is no longer a sufficiently ambitious explanation.
When A Hobby Starts Feeling Like Work
There is a psychological reason why turning everything into an objective can eventually make an activity less enjoyable. Researchers studying motivation distinguish between intrinsic motivation, doing something because the activity itself is satisfying, and extrinsic motivation, doing something for an external reward or outcome. These categories aren't mutually exclusive. A person can love freediving while also wanting to win a competition, attract sponsorship or achieve a particular depth. The interesting question is what happens when external rewards begin dominating the experience.
Decades of psychological research suggest that certain forms of external pressure and reward can undermine intrinsic motivation, particularly when people begin feeling controlled rather than autonomous. This doesn't mean competition, recognition or financial rewards automatically destroy enjoyment. Plenty of professional athletes remain deeply passionate about their sports. It means that the reasons we believe we are participating can change our relationship with the activity.
Think about someone who starts running because it helps them clear their head. They enjoy getting outside, moving their body and having an hour when nobody needs anything from them. After a while, they buy a watch and begin tracking their pace. That makes training interesting, so they set goals, follow a programme and enter a race. Progress feels fantastic. Then a few years later, they discover they can no longer enjoy an easy run without checking whether their performance was good enough. What began as freedom has acquired a performance review.
Freediving can follow a similar path. At first, simply being underwater is enough. Then you discover the satisfaction of improving, and depth becomes an increasingly important part of the experience. You start following training plans, comparing results and arranging trips around specific objectives. All of that can be enormously rewarding, especially when you're motivated and progressing. But there may come a point when a perfectly enjoyable day in the water feels disappointing because the computer didn't show the number you wanted.
I've always found the contrast between different types of freedivers interesting. You can meet somebody who has been diving for fifteen years, knows the sea incredibly well and is perfectly content spending an afternoon exploring a reef at fifteen metres. Then you meet somebody who has been training for eighteen months and seems genuinely distressed because they haven't improved their personal best in six weeks. The second diver may eventually become an outstanding athlete, and there's nothing wrong with taking performance seriously. But it's worth asking which of those people is currently getting more enjoyment from the sport.
The same question becomes even more interesting when people turn their hobbies into careers. Imagine somebody who loves underwater photography. They spend years taking pictures simply because they enjoy being in the water and trying to capture something beautiful. Eventually their work attracts attention, and they begin accepting paid assignments. Suddenly there are deadlines, client expectations, commercial requirements and photographs they need to produce whether they feel inspired or not.
They may still love photography, but the relationship has changed. What used to be entirely their own is now partly somebody else's.
Professional freedivers and instructors experience versions of this too. Teaching can be incredibly rewarding, and helping somebody discover the sport is often one of the best parts of working in the industry. But once diving becomes your livelihood, it inevitably involves responsibilities that have little to do with the reasons you originally fell in love with it. There are schedules, administration, customer expectations, logistics, maintenance and days when you would rather stay in bed but have a boat full of people waiting.
None of this is an argument against becoming a professional. It's simply a reminder that loving an activity and earning a living from it are different experiences. One doesn't automatically improve the other.
Sometimes the healthiest thing a professional can do is protect a small part of the activity from work. A freediving instructor might need an occasional dive without students, objectives or cameras. A professional photographer might take pictures nobody will ever see. A musician might play something badly in their living room without recording it.
There is something important about having experiences that don't belong to clients, audiences, algorithms or expectations.
They're just yours.
The Strange Pressure To Become Exceptional
Another thing modern hobby culture has made surprisingly difficult is being average at something.
We are surrounded by extraordinary performances. Open your phone and you can watch a teenager playing an instrument at a level most people will never reach, an amateur runner producing times that would once have seemed exceptional or a freediver descending to depths that were world records not so long ago. These people are genuinely impressive, and watching them can be inspiring. The problem is that when extraordinary performances become part of our daily entertainment, our understanding of what constitutes ordinary achievement begins to change.
A person who can comfortably freedive to thirty metres has developed a skill that the overwhelming majority of the population does not possess. Within a community where sixty, eighty or one hundred-metre dives appear regularly on social media, however, thirty metres can begin to feel almost insignificant. The achievement hasn't changed. Only the reference group has.
Psychologists describe this tendency through social comparison theory. We evaluate ourselves partly by comparing our abilities, achievements and circumstances with those of other people. Comparison can motivate improvement, but it can also distort our sense of progress when the people we compare ourselves with represent an unusually high-performing group.
And online, that is often exactly what happens.
Algorithms are not particularly interested in showing you a representative sample of humanity. They show you things likely to capture your attention, and extraordinary performances tend to do that rather well. As a result, somebody who spends enough time watching elite athletes can begin feeling inadequate despite being objectively very capable.
There is also the question of how much improvement we actually need. If freediving is your profession or you're preparing for a competition, structured training and ambitious goals make perfect sense. But if you're diving because you love the ocean, who decided that you need to keep going deeper? Why should the natural progression of your hobby involve increasingly difficult objectives?
Maybe you are perfectly happy at twenty metres. Maybe you enjoy photography more than depth. Maybe you love spending time on the boat, meeting people and doing a few relaxed dives. Maybe you've reached forty metres and have absolutely no interest in reaching fifty. None of these preferences makes you less of a freediver.
We tend to talk about progress as though it only moves in one direction, but hobbies can develop in all sorts of ways. A runner might stop chasing faster times and discover trail running. A cyclist might lose interest in racing and begin enjoying long rides with friends. A freediver might spend years pursuing depth before realising that the most satisfying part of diving has become exploring new places rather than reaching new numbers.
That isn't necessarily a loss of ambition. It may simply be a change in what the person values.
There's a difference between wanting to improve and believing you have an obligation to improve. The first comes from curiosity and enthusiasm. The second can become a source of pressure, particularly when our identity is closely connected to performance.
And perhaps that is one of the more unfortunate consequences of turning hobbies into public projects. Once other people know what you're trying to achieve, it can feel as though you owe them an update. You announced the marathon, so now you have to finish it. You shared your training progress, so now you need another personal best. You built an audience around a particular activity, so stepping away from it becomes something you feel compelled to explain.
Sometimes the simplest way to enjoy something is to stop reporting on it.
You don't need an audience to have an experience, and you certainly don't need to be exceptional for that experience to matter.
In Defence Of Doing Things Badly
I sometimes wonder how many people have abandoned something they genuinely enjoyed because they weren't particularly good at it. Not because the activity stopped being interesting, but because they began feeling that enjoying it wasn't enough. They weren't improving quickly, couldn't compete with people around them or simply didn't have the time to become as skilled as they thought they should be.
That's a strange reason to give up something that makes you happy.
One of the best things about being an amateur, in the original sense of the word, is that you don't owe anybody excellence. You can take something seriously without making it your entire life. You can work hard, invest in good equipment, take courses and genuinely care about becoming better while still accepting that your progress may be slow, inconsistent or limited by everything else happening in your world.
You can also decide not to improve at all.
That last idea probably sounds almost irresponsible in a culture that treats constant development as a virtue, but why should every activity require an upward trajectory? There are people who have played tennis at roughly the same level for thirty years and still look forward to every match. There are musicians who know a handful of songs and enjoy playing them every weekend. There are divers who have spent decades exploring the same coastline without ever developing an interest in competition or extreme depth.
Their enjoyment doesn't become less legitimate because they aren't chasing something bigger.
In fact, there may be something worth learning from people who have managed to preserve that relationship with their hobbies. They have found a way to care without turning enjoyment into obligation. They can appreciate skill without feeling personally threatened by somebody else's ability. They can recognise progress when it happens without requiring progress every time.
Freediving offers a particularly good environment for rediscovering this attitude because, once you remove the numbers, the basic experience remains extraordinary. You are moving underwater on a single breath, experiencing a place where the normal rules of everyday life seem temporarily suspended. You can hear very little, your movements become slower and your attention naturally shifts toward things you might otherwise overlook. You don't need an impressive depth to experience any of that.
And perhaps more importantly, you don't need to share it.
Not every dive requires a photograph. Not every training session needs to appear on Strava or social media. Not every holiday needs to become a collection of content. Some of the best experiences happen when nobody is documenting anything, nobody is comparing results and everybody is simply enjoying being there.
That doesn't mean we should reject technology, competition, professional ambition or social media. These things have brought enormous benefits to freediving. They have helped spread knowledge, connect communities, develop equipment and introduce people to a sport they might otherwise never have discovered. The point isn't to return to some imaginary golden age when everyone supposedly enjoyed their hobbies more authentically.
It's to remember that we still have a choice about how we participate.
You can train for a world record if that's what genuinely excites you. You can build a career around freediving, become an instructor, create content or develop products that help other people enjoy the sport. Those are perfectly worthwhile ambitions. But you can also remain somebody who dives a few weekends every summer, owns a pair of fins, loves the sea and has absolutely no intention of becoming anything more.
There is no hierarchy of personal worth between those two people.
Perhaps the amateur isn't dying because people have stopped loving their hobbies. People clearly still love them. The problem is that we've become so accustomed to measuring, improving, monetising and displaying everything that we sometimes forget love was supposed to be enough.
We don't need to make every interest productive. We don't need to turn every skill into a source of income. We don't need to become exceptional at everything we enjoy, and we certainly don't need to explain why we spend time doing something that produces no obvious reward.
Sometimes the reward is that you had a really good afternoon.
You went diving, the water was beautiful, you spent time with people you like and you came home feeling better than when you left. There was no personal best, no impressive footage, no competition result and nothing particularly interesting to post online.
And somehow, that was more than enough.
The Death Of The Amateur
Author: Nick Pelios
There is a word we have managed to turn into something of an insult, which is strange considering what it originally meant. Amateur comes from the Latin amator, meaning lover, someone who does something because they love it. Not because they are being paid, not because they are particularly good at it and certainly not because they have worked out how to turn it into a business. They simply enjoy doing it. Somewhere along the way, though, amateur became associated with incompetence, a lack of seriousness or somebody who hasn't quite reached the level of a professional. If someone describes your work as amateur, they are probably not complimenting your enthusiasm.
I think that's a shame, because there was something rather nice about the original meaning. It allowed people to be genuinely interested in something without needing to justify the time they spent on it. You could play the guitar badly for twenty years and still get enormous pleasure from it. You could paint pictures nobody would ever buy, spend your weekends photographing birds or go running without having the slightest interest in your pace. The activity didn't need to produce anything beyond the enjoyment of doing it.
Freediving is a good example of how that relationship can begin. Most people don't take their first course because they have ambitions of becoming world champions. They are curious about what it feels like to go underwater on a single breath. Maybe they have spent years snorkelling on holidays and want to explore a little further. Maybe they watched a documentary, met somebody who dives or simply like the idea of moving through the ocean without a tank on their back. Whatever the reason, the attraction is usually pretty straightforward. It looks interesting, and they want to try it.
Then something happens that is common to almost every hobby. You discover there is an entire world behind the thing you thought you were casually getting into. There are techniques, courses, training methods, equipment choices, communities, competitions and people who have dedicated decades to understanding details you didn't even know existed. You start learning, and naturally, you want to improve. There is nothing wrong with that. In fact, becoming better at something is one of the most enjoyable parts of having a hobby.
The problem begins when improvement stops being an option and becomes an expectation.
You take a course, and someone asks when you're taking the next one. You reach thirty metres, and suddenly forty becomes the obvious target. You buy decent fins, and within a few weeks you're researching whether another model might give you better performance. You post a photograph from a dive, and somebody wants to know how deep you went. None of these things is particularly unreasonable on its own, and most people asking are simply being friendly. But gradually, the activity starts acquiring a set of measurements and expectations that weren't there when you began.
Before long, you can find yourself approaching something you originally loved with the same mentality you bring to work. There are objectives to meet, improvements to demonstrate and other people whose progress you can compare with your own. The thing that was supposed to provide a little freedom from everyday obligations begins to look suspiciously like another obligation.
And the strange part is that nobody necessarily forced this on you. You may have done most of it yourself, simply because the culture surrounding hobbies increasingly encourages us to treat everything we enjoy as something we should become exceptionally good at.
Apparently, Enjoying Something Isn't Enough Anymore
Modern life has developed a remarkable ability to turn almost any interest into a project. If you enjoy running, there is an app ready to measure every kilometre and compare your performance with thousands of strangers. If you like cooking, you can start a food account, develop recipes, build an audience and eventually launch a newsletter. If you enjoy photography, someone will suggest selling prints. If you make pottery, you should probably open an online shop. Even reading books has become something people track, count and publicly display, as though finishing forty novels this year is automatically better than reading twelve and remembering them.
The pressure isn't always explicit. Nobody sits you down and explains that your hobby needs a business plan. It arrives through small suggestions, usually disguised as encouragement. You're good at that, you should start charging. You should make videos. You should enter a competition. You should take it seriously. You could actually make something out of this.
That last suggestion is particularly revealing. Make something out of it. As though the hours of enjoyment, friendships, experiences and personal satisfaction somehow don't count as something.
Of course, there is nothing wrong with turning a passion into a career. Many people have built wonderful lives doing exactly that, and some of the best coaches, athletes, photographers and craftspeople began as enthusiastic amateurs. The issue is not professionalisation itself. It's the growing assumption that professionalisation is the natural destination of enthusiasm, and that remaining an amateur represents a failure to fulfil your potential.
Social media has accelerated this mentality because it makes performance visible and rewards the people who package their interests most effectively. A person who quietly enjoys an activity for twenty years may receive little attention, while somebody who has been doing it for six months but produces excellent videos can become an influential voice within the community. That doesn't necessarily mean the second person lacks knowledge or sincerity. It means that being good at an activity and being good at presenting that activity online are two very different skills, and modern platforms frequently reward the latter.
Freediving provides some excellent examples. A beautiful photograph of a diver descending beside a line can generate enormous interest, particularly when accompanied by an impressive depth or a dramatic caption. A technically excellent but completely ordinary training session is much harder to turn into something people want to watch. Nobody is particularly excited about a video showing somebody spending forty minutes working on an equalization problem and eventually deciding that today isn't the day.
Yet anyone who has spent time around serious freedivers knows that those unremarkable sessions are often where the real work happens.
The danger is that we begin valuing experiences according to how well they can be presented rather than how much they mean to us. A dive becomes more interesting if it produces a personal best. A trip becomes more successful if it provides good photographs. A training session feels more worthwhile if there is something measurable to show for it. Gradually, the experience itself risks becoming secondary to the evidence that the experience happened.
There is also a financial dimension. Hobbies have always involved spending money, and specialist activities genuinely benefit from good equipment and proper instruction. But the modern hobby economy is extraordinarily effective at convincing us that enjoyment requires constant upgrading. There is always a better watch, a lighter bicycle, a more advanced camera or another piece of equipment promising to improve the experience.
Sometimes those improvements are real. Other times we are simply purchasing the feeling of progress because purchasing something is easier than developing a skill.
In freediving, high-quality equipment can make a meaningful difference to comfort, efficiency and performance, but there is a limit to what any product can accomplish. A new pair of fins may improve the way you move through the water. It cannot teach you patience, replace consistent training or make you comfortable with a depth you are not ready for. Those things take time, and time is considerably harder to sell than equipment.
Perhaps the bigger issue is that we've become uncomfortable with activities that don't produce measurable returns. We want our exercise to improve performance, our hobbies to develop skills, our experiences to generate content and our free time to contribute to some larger objective. Even relaxation is frequently presented as a technique for becoming more productive when we return to work.
Apparently, doing something because it makes Tuesday evening more enjoyable is no longer a sufficiently ambitious explanation.
When A Hobby Starts Feeling Like Work
There is a psychological reason why turning everything into an objective can eventually make an activity less enjoyable. Researchers studying motivation distinguish between intrinsic motivation, doing something because the activity itself is satisfying, and extrinsic motivation, doing something for an external reward or outcome. These categories aren't mutually exclusive. A person can love freediving while also wanting to win a competition, attract sponsorship or achieve a particular depth. The interesting question is what happens when external rewards begin dominating the experience.
Decades of psychological research suggest that certain forms of external pressure and reward can undermine intrinsic motivation, particularly when people begin feeling controlled rather than autonomous. This doesn't mean competition, recognition or financial rewards automatically destroy enjoyment. Plenty of professional athletes remain deeply passionate about their sports. It means that the reasons we believe we are participating can change our relationship with the activity.
Think about someone who starts running because it helps them clear their head. They enjoy getting outside, moving their body and having an hour when nobody needs anything from them. After a while, they buy a watch and begin tracking their pace. That makes training interesting, so they set goals, follow a programme and enter a race. Progress feels fantastic. Then a few years later, they discover they can no longer enjoy an easy run without checking whether their performance was good enough. What began as freedom has acquired a performance review.
Freediving can follow a similar path. At first, simply being underwater is enough. Then you discover the satisfaction of improving, and depth becomes an increasingly important part of the experience. You start following training plans, comparing results and arranging trips around specific objectives. All of that can be enormously rewarding, especially when you're motivated and progressing. But there may come a point when a perfectly enjoyable day in the water feels disappointing because the computer didn't show the number you wanted.
I've always found the contrast between different types of freedivers interesting. You can meet somebody who has been diving for fifteen years, knows the sea incredibly well and is perfectly content spending an afternoon exploring a reef at fifteen metres. Then you meet somebody who has been training for eighteen months and seems genuinely distressed because they haven't improved their personal best in six weeks. The second diver may eventually become an outstanding athlete, and there's nothing wrong with taking performance seriously. But it's worth asking which of those people is currently getting more enjoyment from the sport.
The same question becomes even more interesting when people turn their hobbies into careers. Imagine somebody who loves underwater photography. They spend years taking pictures simply because they enjoy being in the water and trying to capture something beautiful. Eventually their work attracts attention, and they begin accepting paid assignments. Suddenly there are deadlines, client expectations, commercial requirements and photographs they need to produce whether they feel inspired or not.
They may still love photography, but the relationship has changed. What used to be entirely their own is now partly somebody else's.
Professional freedivers and instructors experience versions of this too. Teaching can be incredibly rewarding, and helping somebody discover the sport is often one of the best parts of working in the industry. But once diving becomes your livelihood, it inevitably involves responsibilities that have little to do with the reasons you originally fell in love with it. There are schedules, administration, customer expectations, logistics, maintenance and days when you would rather stay in bed but have a boat full of people waiting.
None of this is an argument against becoming a professional. It's simply a reminder that loving an activity and earning a living from it are different experiences. One doesn't automatically improve the other.
Sometimes the healthiest thing a professional can do is protect a small part of the activity from work. A freediving instructor might need an occasional dive without students, objectives or cameras. A professional photographer might take pictures nobody will ever see. A musician might play something badly in their living room without recording it.
There is something important about having experiences that don't belong to clients, audiences, algorithms or expectations.
They're just yours.
The Strange Pressure To Become Exceptional
Another thing modern hobby culture has made surprisingly difficult is being average at something.
We are surrounded by extraordinary performances. Open your phone and you can watch a teenager playing an instrument at a level most people will never reach, an amateur runner producing times that would once have seemed exceptional or a freediver descending to depths that were world records not so long ago. These people are genuinely impressive, and watching them can be inspiring. The problem is that when extraordinary performances become part of our daily entertainment, our understanding of what constitutes ordinary achievement begins to change.
A person who can comfortably freedive to thirty metres has developed a skill that the overwhelming majority of the population does not possess. Within a community where sixty, eighty or one hundred-metre dives appear regularly on social media, however, thirty metres can begin to feel almost insignificant. The achievement hasn't changed. Only the reference group has.
Psychologists describe this tendency through social comparison theory. We evaluate ourselves partly by comparing our abilities, achievements and circumstances with those of other people. Comparison can motivate improvement, but it can also distort our sense of progress when the people we compare ourselves with represent an unusually high-performing group.
And online, that is often exactly what happens.
Algorithms are not particularly interested in showing you a representative sample of humanity. They show you things likely to capture your attention, and extraordinary performances tend to do that rather well. As a result, somebody who spends enough time watching elite athletes can begin feeling inadequate despite being objectively very capable.
There is also the question of how much improvement we actually need. If freediving is your profession or you're preparing for a competition, structured training and ambitious goals make perfect sense. But if you're diving because you love the ocean, who decided that you need to keep going deeper? Why should the natural progression of your hobby involve increasingly difficult objectives?
Maybe you are perfectly happy at twenty metres. Maybe you enjoy photography more than depth. Maybe you love spending time on the boat, meeting people and doing a few relaxed dives. Maybe you've reached forty metres and have absolutely no interest in reaching fifty. None of these preferences makes you less of a freediver.
We tend to talk about progress as though it only moves in one direction, but hobbies can develop in all sorts of ways. A runner might stop chasing faster times and discover trail running. A cyclist might lose interest in racing and begin enjoying long rides with friends. A freediver might spend years pursuing depth before realising that the most satisfying part of diving has become exploring new places rather than reaching new numbers.
That isn't necessarily a loss of ambition. It may simply be a change in what the person values.
There's a difference between wanting to improve and believing you have an obligation to improve. The first comes from curiosity and enthusiasm. The second can become a source of pressure, particularly when our identity is closely connected to performance.
And perhaps that is one of the more unfortunate consequences of turning hobbies into public projects. Once other people know what you're trying to achieve, it can feel as though you owe them an update. You announced the marathon, so now you have to finish it. You shared your training progress, so now you need another personal best. You built an audience around a particular activity, so stepping away from it becomes something you feel compelled to explain.
Sometimes the simplest way to enjoy something is to stop reporting on it.
You don't need an audience to have an experience, and you certainly don't need to be exceptional for that experience to matter.
In Defence Of Doing Things Badly
I sometimes wonder how many people have abandoned something they genuinely enjoyed because they weren't particularly good at it. Not because the activity stopped being interesting, but because they began feeling that enjoying it wasn't enough. They weren't improving quickly, couldn't compete with people around them or simply didn't have the time to become as skilled as they thought they should be.
That's a strange reason to give up something that makes you happy.
One of the best things about being an amateur, in the original sense of the word, is that you don't owe anybody excellence. You can take something seriously without making it your entire life. You can work hard, invest in good equipment, take courses and genuinely care about becoming better while still accepting that your progress may be slow, inconsistent or limited by everything else happening in your world.
You can also decide not to improve at all.
That last idea probably sounds almost irresponsible in a culture that treats constant development as a virtue, but why should every activity require an upward trajectory? There are people who have played tennis at roughly the same level for thirty years and still look forward to every match. There are musicians who know a handful of songs and enjoy playing them every weekend. There are divers who have spent decades exploring the same coastline without ever developing an interest in competition or extreme depth.
Their enjoyment doesn't become less legitimate because they aren't chasing something bigger.
In fact, there may be something worth learning from people who have managed to preserve that relationship with their hobbies. They have found a way to care without turning enjoyment into obligation. They can appreciate skill without feeling personally threatened by somebody else's ability. They can recognise progress when it happens without requiring progress every time.
Freediving offers a particularly good environment for rediscovering this attitude because, once you remove the numbers, the basic experience remains extraordinary. You are moving underwater on a single breath, experiencing a place where the normal rules of everyday life seem temporarily suspended. You can hear very little, your movements become slower and your attention naturally shifts toward things you might otherwise overlook. You don't need an impressive depth to experience any of that.
And perhaps more importantly, you don't need to share it.
Not every dive requires a photograph. Not every training session needs to appear on Strava or social media. Not every holiday needs to become a collection of content. Some of the best experiences happen when nobody is documenting anything, nobody is comparing results and everybody is simply enjoying being there.
That doesn't mean we should reject technology, competition, professional ambition or social media. These things have brought enormous benefits to freediving. They have helped spread knowledge, connect communities, develop equipment and introduce people to a sport they might otherwise never have discovered. The point isn't to return to some imaginary golden age when everyone supposedly enjoyed their hobbies more authentically.
It's to remember that we still have a choice about how we participate.
You can train for a world record if that's what genuinely excites you. You can build a career around freediving, become an instructor, create content or develop products that help other people enjoy the sport. Those are perfectly worthwhile ambitions. But you can also remain somebody who dives a few weekends every summer, owns a pair of fins, loves the sea and has absolutely no intention of becoming anything more.
There is no hierarchy of personal worth between those two people.
Perhaps the amateur isn't dying because people have stopped loving their hobbies. People clearly still love them. The problem is that we've become so accustomed to measuring, improving, monetising and displaying everything that we sometimes forget love was supposed to be enough.
We don't need to make every interest productive. We don't need to turn every skill into a source of income. We don't need to become exceptional at everything we enjoy, and we certainly don't need to explain why we spend time doing something that produces no obvious reward.
Sometimes the reward is that you had a really good afternoon.
You went diving, the water was beautiful, you spent time with people you like and you came home feeling better than when you left. There was no personal best, no impressive footage, no competition result and nothing particularly interesting to post online.
And somehow, that was more than enough.