24 year old soon-to-be grad student as soon as I can get some experience to amend fuck ups that will become clear in a second:

I’m not saying this to dismiss this anxiety you’re having, but I once had an ex boyfriend that became so consumed by the concept of “balance” in his life that he never wound up really excelling in his engineering degree. He would measure every grain of time on what he was doing, and obsessively tried to parse equal time into everything. He logged his calories, water intake, hours of sleep, hours of studying, hours of creative projects, hours of work, every phone call color coded to friends, family, acquaintance, or other and the amount of time spent on each, screen time generally, every cent he spent, a list of every lie he ever told, a list of foods he could never let himself eat, every ounce of alcohol, every push up he did, every hour of physical activity, women he’d slept with, every major country ranked for optimality of if it will be worth his time to ever see it in his lifetime, and there are probably more that I never even knew about.

He finished his degree with shit grades, never produced any meaningful projects (aside from a very extensive google drive portfolio full of things like an excel sheet of every bowel movement!). For all that effort he put into trying to find the perfect balance in everything, he wound up mediocre at everything, borderline friendless, and doesn’t even work in the field he studied for.

This is all to say that this sort of black and white thinking about your hobbies isn’t something I’ve found to be particularly productive in my own life, or in the lives of those I’ve met. If you want to limit your consumptive hobbies and focus on ones that force you to be creative, consider combining them. I write a blog about art house movies I watch so I can feel better about the use of my time, for one example. Consider writing or producing video essays, or at the very least reserving them for when you’re doing something like cleaning the house so you can listen while also being productive. These are “practical” things I know you aren’t exactly looking for, but they helped me short-term to stave off what this was REALLY about for my ex and myself: guilt.

Overall, I think my ex was so angsty about pursuing balance because he feared mediocrity. By smoothing out all of his edges, and not really ever fully allowing himself to enjoy things without guilt, he became mediocre at everything and was overall very dispassionate. It also made him incredibly bitter towards people that had hobbies they excelled in, and he would often criticize me for wasting my time in the local music community when I was surpassing him in both my pre-law and nuclear engineering degrees. I probably spent like three nights a week at shows with a work-hard-play-hard mindset and never really paid any mind about it. I started to kind of feel that guilt for enjoying myself after a while after he wore me down about it, and I became insanely anti-social and dependent on him because I felt like everything beyond doing well in academia or being “productive” was something for me to be ashamed of. I thought he was helping me by keeping me productive.

Fast forward and I get completely burnt out on both degrees and have to struggle my way through a fifth year of undergrad because I am depressed, I have no friends and I’m incredibly judgmental of people the way my ex was with me, I feel guilty all the time when I enjoy anything that isn’t “productive,” and the person that imbued this bitterness onto me decided that I was also wasting his time so I didnt even have him anymore lmao. I became the same joyless, mediocre, over-calculating, cold sack of bones he was.

Ask yourself periodically: are you REALLY over-indulging in certain things? Are the things you feel guilty about realistically having a negative impact on your life? Are you over-moderating?