I grew up in a place, and a time, where hobbies — activities that had no place on your resume, no function in getting you into a better school — were still commonplace. Amongst the bourgeois American middle class, it’s becoming increasingly clear that Old Millennials were the last to experience this attitude towards activities and leisure. My partner spent his junior high and high school years at a competitive prep school on the Main Line in Philly, and has only recently come to realize that he had no hobbies, and no sense of what he actually liked to do, just what he needed to do in order to shape himself for school, then college, then work. Every hobby, for him, is an adult hobby — and thus all the more difficult to discover and adopt.

Hobbies are tough, especially hobbies that take up large chunks of a day (such as training for a marathon) or an actual entire day (such as getting season tickets to a sporting event).

I've got a few things that I'm thinking of getting into this year. First, tinkering with physical things. I am gonna try to restore some of my older broken tech that is laying dormant in my basement.

Second, flying. I want to get a discovery flight and possibly get my pilot's license.

Both of these things will take up "time", but frankly, after giving up most of my social media, I have a lot of free time in the evenings that gets eaten up with television. I'm ready to start trying some new things and being curious again.

“I think I still feel the same way about it that I did in the very beginning,” Whibley says. “The day that I get sick of playing a song that everyone knows and everyone goes crazy when we play it, and everyone starts jumping around and everyone sings it, I should just quit because I’m so fucking jaded. It’s the greatest feeling in the world. I’ve never understood that. I don’t get Radiohead, even though I love Radiohead, why they don’t play their big songs.”

I respect the hell out of that pull quote, it’s how more of us should feel about things that make other people happy.

It’s hard to express what this song meant to me back in 2001 as an impressionable sixth grader. I’m definitely not an edgy, punk skater kid (nor have I ever been), but this song is still in my regular rotation because it gives me so much life.

Instead of checking items off a list, the Buddha suggests shining a light on yourself and others. “Dwell as a lamp unto yourself,” he advised his disciple Ananda. He meant that happiness comes from the illumination of your greatest virtues, thus showing the way for other people, and making visible to yourself your true purpose.

Michael Schur, the creator of “The Good Place” and co-creator of “Parks and Recreation,” remembers the force of Weird Al’s 1992 parody of Nirvana.

“ ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ comes out, and it’s like the perfect voice for all the simmering anger of an entire generation of kids,” Schur said. “That song is vicious and angry and aggressive but also laconic and disaffected and scary. And it was immediately a gigantic thing in American culture. Then Weird Al does ‘Smells Like Nirvana’ and completely deflates it — the importance and seriousness and angst. That’s a service he has always provided: to remind people that rock is about grittiness and authenticity and finding your voice and relating to an audience, but it’s also fundamentally absurd. Being a rock star is stupid. We as a culture are genuflecting at the altar of these rock stars, and Weird Al comes out with this crazy curly hair and an accordion, and he just blows it all into smithereens by singing about Spam. It’s wonderful.”

Schur paused. He said there were heated debates, sometimes, in comedy writing rooms, about the merits of Weird Al’s work — some cynics argue that his jokes aren’t actually great, that people overrate them because they’re nostalgic for their childhoods. But Schur insisted that, regardless of what you think about this lyric or that lyric, Weird Al represented the deep egalitarian spirit of our culture.

“It’s a truly American thing, to be like: Get over yourself,” Schur said. “Everybody get over yourselves. Madonna, get over yourself. Kurt Cobain, get over yourself. Eminem, get over yourself. No one gets to be that important in America.”

This whole piece is a must-read, especially if, like me, you grew up listening to (and subsequently memorizing) Weird Al's entire discography.