For the past few months, I’ve been job hunting.
I’ve had the chance to learn about many different companies and talk with all kinds of people.
I’ve even met people who made me think, I want to become someone like that, and the whole experience has given me an opportunity to think again about what I want to do next.
Looking back, it has been a very fulfilling experience.
Of course, things haven’t always gone the way I wanted.
Sometimes my applications didn’t make it through.
Sometimes I didn’t pass an interview.
After spending several years living in Australia, I felt that I had grown and become capable of more than before.
That’s why there were moments when I found myself thinking,
Maybe society doesn’t need me after all.
Still, in the end, I received an offer for a job that would increase my salary by about JPY 1 million, with less overtime, while also allowing me to move closer to the kind of work I wanted to do.
So how was I able to keep going and reset my mind when things weren’t going well?
Looking back, I think one of the reasons was, surprisingly, my hobbies.
I Started Building Gunpla Again
While I was job hunting, some of the things I used to love gradually found their way back into my life.
One of them was Gunpla.
I loved building Gunpla when I was a kid.
I was so into it that, at one point, I even wanted to become a professional model builder.
There was someone who first got me into the hobby.
He was the manager of a supermarket near my home.
When I was in elementary school, he gave me some tools and a book about how to build Gunpla.
That was how I became more and more absorbed in it.
Many years later, I visited him again as an adult.
He said,
I’ll give you a Gunpla kit.
The same person who had introduced me to Gunpla as a child gave me another kit as an adult.
And that was how I started building again.
I Started Playing Yu-Gi-Oh! Again, Too
Another hobby came back into my life as well.
Yu-Gi-Oh!
This was also something I had loved for a long time.
Friends, my younger brother, and the people around me gave me opportunities to pick up the cards again.
Eventually, I started playing again with a friend I had played Yu-Gi-Oh! with years ago.
Playing something we enjoyed as kids together again as adults was much more fun than I expected.
With Gunpla, I can sit quietly and build by myself.
With Yu-Gi-Oh!, I can spend time playing with an old friend.
They are two very different hobbies, but looking back, I think both of them helped me a lot.
A Time When I Didn’t Have to Think About Myself
When you’re job hunting, you spend a lot of time thinking about yourself.
What can I do?
Does my experience have value?
Why didn’t this company choose me?
What should I do differently next time?
Before I knew it, I was constantly evaluating myself.
But when I was building Gunpla, it was different.
How can I make this look cooler?
That was all I was thinking about.
When I was playing Yu-Gi-Oh!, it was the same.
How can I beat my opponent?
That was it.
It wasn’t that I completely forgot about my job search.
It was something I needed to do, so it was always somewhere in the back of my mind.
But I was able to put some distance between myself and it.
I could focus on what was right in front of me and stop thinking about myself for a while.
Looking back, I think I really needed that.
When I Stopped Thinking, Answers Sometimes Appeared
What I found interesting was that when I stopped thinking about my job search, ideas for improving it sometimes came to me naturally.
I might be building Gunpla when suddenly I’d think,
Maybe I should have answered that interview question differently.
Things that didn’t come to me when I was actively thinking about them would suddenly appear while I was doing something completely unrelated.
Books about creativity often talk about the importance of stepping away from a problem for a while.
Maybe my hobbies were naturally helping me do exactly that.
Step away for a while.
Focus on something I enjoy.
Recharge.
Then come back.
After doing that, I could go into my next interview with a more positive mindset.
Even when something didn’t go well, I could stay calm and move on to the next opportunity.
Of course, my hobbies alone weren’t the reason my job search went well.
But to keep learning and improving, I think I also needed time to step away and recharge.
It’s Okay to Have More Than One Hobby
I’ve always loved basketball.
For a long time, it was my biggest hobby.
But basketball requires other people.
It also requires a court.
Even when I want to play, I can’t always do it.
In fact, since returning to Japan, I haven’t been able to play as often because I don’t always have people to play with, and getting access to a court can be difficult.
If basketball had been my only hobby, I might have had fewer opportunities to reset during this period.
I can build Gunpla by myself.
I can enjoy Yu-Gi-Oh! with friends.
I can move my body when I play basketball.
Each gives me something different.
This experience made me realize that I don’t need to have just one hobby.
I don’t need to let my world become too small.
When something isn’t going well in one part of my life, it helps to have somewhere else I can go for a while.
For me, hobbies became some of those places.
It Doesn’t Have to Be a New Hobby
That said, finding a completely new hobby as an adult can be surprisingly difficult.
You might not know what to start.
Buying equipment and learning all the rules can feel like work in itself.
But the hobbies I returned to weren’t new at all.
I had loved both Gunpla and Yu-Gi-Oh! when I was younger.
Because I had done them before, I didn’t have to start from zero.
More importantly, they brought back memories.
Building Gunpla as a kid.
Playing card games with friends.
As we get older, I think it becomes harder to experience that feeling of simply becoming absorbed in something because we love it.
But returning to an old hobby can bring a little bit of that feeling back.
Building Gunpla by myself gave me time to remember who I was back then.
Yu-Gi-Oh! gave me a chance to reconnect with a friend I had known for years.
I think that’s another nice thing about returning to an old hobby.
I Don’t Have to Do It the Same Way I Used To
There is one thing I try to be careful about, though.
When you return to an old hobby, your old standards can come back with it.
For me, that happens with Gunpla.
I was so serious about it as a kid that I wanted to become a professional model builder.
Even now, when I start building, I want everything to look clean.
I want to get better.
I don’t want to make mistakes.
I want every little detail to be perfect.
But if I care too much about those things, I never finish anything.
And something that was supposed to be a hobby can slowly turn into another thing I feel I have to do properly.
The Gunpla I recently finished isn’t perfect either.
From a distance, it might look pretty good.
But if you look closely…
There are plenty of imperfections.
My younger self probably would have been bothered by them.
I need to make this cleaner.
I need to fix that part.
Even after finishing something, I probably would have focused on everything I could have done better.
But now, I’m okay with this.
I’m not trying to become a professional model builder.
I didn’t return to Gunpla because I wanted to build perfect models.
I enjoyed the time I spent building it.
I enjoyed thinking about how I could make it look cooler.
And I finished it.
That’s enough.
Returning to something I loved in the past doesn’t mean I have to do it the same way I did back then.
I can bring back an old hobby without bringing back all of my old expectations.
That’s how I’ve started to think about it.
What Did I Love When I Was Younger?
During these months of job hunting, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what I can do and what value I have.
That’s probably why having time when I didn’t need to think about my value at all helped me so much.
Building Gunpla.
Playing Yu-Gi-Oh! with a friend.
Playing basketball.
When one part of life isn’t going well, that doesn’t mean my whole world isn’t going well.
I can step away for a while, do something I enjoy, and then come back.
This experience made me realize that having several places like that in my life might not be such a bad idea.
And maybe we don’t always need to find something new.
What did I love doing when I was younger?
Every once in a while, it might be worth remembering.
See More of My Daily Life
I share more of my everyday life on YouTube and Instagram.
My Vlogs include the things I write about on this blog—my hobbies, routines, work, studying, coffee, and everyday life in Japan.
If you enjoyed this article and would like to see more of how I spend my days, feel free to follow along.
Thanks for reading!
