Are there any activities or hobbies you’ve outgrown
or lost interest in over time?
I used to spend hours in the city, moving from one second-hand record store to another, scanning the shelves for comedy albums. Not music this time—comedy. Victor Borge. Peter Sellers. Shelley Berman. Bob Newhart. They were old even then, and that was forty years ago. Every now and then I’d find a gem and feel that small, private triumph: this one was worth rescuing.
In one sense, I outgrew the hobby. In another, it simply changed form. Because even when the records went, a few things stayed.
What I left behind
The hunt.
I loved the searching—the slow scan of spines, the odd smell of dusty cardboard sleeves, the chance discovery. But hobbies built around collecting eventually create their own gravitational pull: more shelves, more clutter, more things to store and move and justify.
The solitary listening.
Comedy, at least the way I listened to it, was intensely individual. You have to listen closely, concentrate, catch timing. Music can fill a room and create a sense of us. Comedy tends to narrow the focus. Put it on at the wrong time and conversation dies, because you can’t half-listen to a punchline and half-listen to a person. Over time I realised I was choosing private amusement over shared presence more often than I wanted.
The surface-level distraction.
This was the bigger shift. I began to notice that what I was consuming was often shallow—shallow in the sense of “surface.” It kept me light, but it also kept me there. It became a way of staying at a safe distance from my own inner world, rather than allowing the real me to come to the surface. I didn’t want my default setting to be distraction.
A certain style of comedy.
I also felt comedy changing. More crass. More dependent on expletives—as if profanity could do the heavy lifting that imagination used to do. I found it boring and, frankly, lazy.
The physical medium.
Then there was the simple fact that technology moved on. People bought CDs rather than records. My record player stopped working and I didn’t replace it. I took my collection to a charity shop and let the cycle begin again.
What stayed
The love of insight.
What I was really chasing in those shops wasn’t just a record—it was intelligence. Timing. Craft. The sense that words could be arranged in a way that surprised you.
The joy of a well-made thing.
Even now, part of me understands why vinyl has returned, and why CDs are circling back too. There’s something good about physical media: you can hold it, choose it, return to it. It’s yours in a way streaming isn’t. It pushes back against the algorithm deciding what comes next.
A deeper standard.
Behind the jovial façade, comedians were often burdened people. Over time that became hard to unsee. I didn’t want laughter that skimmed the surface. I wanted something that could carry a bit of truth.
What replaced it
These days, I stream. No storage. No stacks. No packing and unpacking every time you move. Everything is available online.
And I still like comedy—when the time is right.
But my appetite has changed. I’m less interested in comedy as a private soundtrack and more interested in comedy as something with craft and resonance. I want it to be engaging. I want it to be imaginative. I want it to be emotionally honest.
The hobby didn’t disappear so much as it refined itself. The records went to someone else. The desire for good humour stayed. And somewhere along the way, the point shifted from collecting laughter to seeking the kind of laughter that helps you live more deeply in the world, not less
The Afterword 
Leave a comment