My hobbies are in entertainment and media – it’s no surprise, obviously. I watch movies, anime, and television, immerse myself in technology, and play a lot of games. But probably just as much as doing those things, I’m also constantly educating myself about doing those things, via websites, magazines and podcasts.

But more importantly, one has to realize these are just hobbies. I also have a “regular” life – a family, a career outside of the industry – that sometimes support, but mostly conflict with, these hobbies. So as I read websites, or listen to podcasts, I’ve come to the understanding that sooner or later, one has to decide to turn their hobbies into their regular life, or to disband them entirely.

Let me tell you what brought this on. I’ve been listening to several podcasts, and have been interjecting my comments and rebuttals on more than one occasion. For example, in gaming I realize that I am nearly as well-versed in the daily news as the “experts”. And it amazes me that someone who treats it as their hobby can enter a debate with those who make it their career. But where I am lacking is the breadth of exposure to the industry, such as hands-on experience with a wide array of games. See, my carreer helps support my hobby, but only to a limit, which is why I have an Xbox but not a PS2. I’ve never played Dragon Quest VIII or Guitar Heroes or Shadow of the Colossus, although I really would like to. And although I only have an Xbox, I still don’t have the ability to play every game available, due to both cost and time constraints because of my other regular life commitments. Looking at my forums, I finished 13 games in 2005. That’s just over a game a month. The average time to complete a game is 10-20 hours, so for argument’s sake I’ll say 15 hours.

15 * 13 = 195 hours

Then there are my regular commitments. A regular work day is 13 hours. That factors in getting ready in the morning, my commute to and from work, the lunch hour away from home, and dinner. So for an average work week, that’s 65 hours. For an average of 50 weeks a year, that’s:

65 * 50 = 3250 hours

On average, I sleep around eight hours a night.

8 * 365 = 2920

There are total 8760 hours in a year. 3250 + 2920 = 6170 hours already spent on just functioning. 8760 – 6170 = 2590 “free” hours in a year. Or an average of seven hours a day.

Now let’s take my gaming hours out of the total. 2590 – 195 = 2395. That reduces the average to 6.5 hours available a day. That’s based on a 365 day average, so weekends skew that number higher a bit. That means I have 6.5 hours a day to:

Spend time with family
Shop for groceries or necessary household items
Household chores such as cleaning, maintenance, etc.
Watch network television
Watch anime
Read (constitutes the internet, books, magazines, etc.)
Provide internet content (writing internet blogs, creating podcasts, forums, etc.)

I’m sure I’m leaving some things out here, but basically that would be less than one hour a day for the tasks mentioned above, give or take. And that’s 100% efficiency, which never happens unless you are a robot.

Now if I turned my hobbies into a career, I could free up some of that time in the average work day. Before I said 13 hours a day during the week, so effectively I could allocate 40% of that time toward my hobby, or about 5.2 hours a day. That would be about 26 hours a week I could spend toward my hobby. Over a year (50 weeks), that is 1300 hours I could allocate, meaning I only would spend 1950 hours a year for regular daily commitments.

Now, my available free time per day does not change, but that means I now have seven hours per day to allocate on non-hobby tasks. Or nearly double the time available for each task.

Two good examples are CheapyD from CheapAssGamer.com and Alex Albrecht from Diggnation. CheapyD was able to move to Japan and run his website as his day job, which allows him to become fully immersed in his former hobby. I’m trying to figure out if Alex is a gamer who acts or is an actor who likes games, but either way he was able to leverage gaming and technology as his career, and uses his personal interests to fuel his career choices. In each case, both individuals are able to have normal, uninterrupted “regular” lives because they have integrated what they do for fun into what they do out of necessity (work).

I can’t even get into how much money one could save if they were able to have their career subsidize their personal expendiures on hobbies. But how great would it be to say you would never have to buy another game or DVD again, because you get them free from work? For me, that’s 10% of a paycheck easy, and after house, car, and utilities, 10% is a big deal.

So it all comes down to a) doing what you love for a living; and b) getting your career to pay for what you love. But the whole point to this article was, how can one person who doesn’t have this luxury get by? No wonder video game sales are on a decline. No wonder the anime industry in the US is scaling back. A normal person just does not have the capacity, either time or money, to be able to support such hobbies consistently.

Which argues the point – has the entertainment industry grown too large? Are we on the verge of an imminent crash across the board? As everything is going toward a portable and on-demand model – gaming, video/television, music/radio, books/magazines – would it be safe to say that only those forms of entertainment which people can do anytime, anywhere, namely music/radio, survive such an industry shakeout? For example, companies are pushing video everywhere – through iTunes, the internet, our cellular phones and portable devices – but how likely are we to dedicate attention to these, when our attention is required elsewhere? Music and radio is the easy choice because it is merely background noise or a quick diversion – nothing that might remove us from our primary tasks, such as driving to work, writing a report, etc. And as this same model of pushing content to us, what does that do to conventional means of receiving entertainment? We’ve already started to see the impact on network and cable television. Does this mean that our PSP or DS will eventually replace our Xbox 360 or PS3? Does this mean our iPods will replace our HDTVs? It is an interesting thought. For now, we can only theorize what the future may bring. It isn’t as linear as the manufacturing age, because unlike metal and steel, we are dealing with bits and bandwidth that have no boundaries. They can travel anywhere, anytime, at speeds that make information available globally and real-time.

To bring home the original question, “how can one person do it?”, it is clear that those outside of the entertainment industry simply cannot keep up with the streams of information that is fed to the general public. It used to be that digests were a way of combining and condensing these, but now these same digests are the streams responsible for flooding our attention. Then the simple but unfortunate answer is, either blur the line between hobby and necessity, or make do without.