Hobbies generally only occupy your mind when you are doing them, or on occasion otherwise. Passions stick with you all day and you’re always thinking about some aspect of them. If you are always looking for garage sales and thrift shops, checking your online seller accounts, and trying to find buyers, buying and selling used goods is a passion of yours.
For example, let’s say in the course of a week you play guitar every day, shoot baskets twice, write bits of poetry four or five times and play Xbox once. Guitar and poetry are top contenders to be passions, while basketball and gaming are hobbies.
For example, a half-hour of basketball is plenty, but two hours of picking guitar strings passes like minutes because it’s a passion.
Say you are working on a research project. Instead of reading up on the topic, you spend an hour taking the perfect picture for the presentation. Photography is your passion. If your dirty dishes pile up for a week because you spend an hour practicing drums, it’s because you’re passionate about playing.
This may seem crazy, but passions tend to cause you a bit of suffering. You care a lot about it, so pursuing a passion is not usually a calming experience. Hobbies are enjoyable and pleasant, so you should feel pretty at peace when you’re engaging in a hobby. For example, head out to your woodshop and start building something. If you are in deep concentration and feeling on edge, you’re passionate about woodworking. Otherwise, you’d feel relaxed.
You work to be the best at a passion, but you are satisfied with having fun with a hobby. For example, if you are always cooking new recipes that challenge you, it’s a passion. If you like to cook chili and cinnamon rolls repeatedly, that’s more of a hobby.
This takes some abstract thinking, so give yourself time to look over the lists. For example, you might list hiking, singing, and gaming as hobbies. You might list being adventurous, staying healthy, admiring beauty, and unplugging from technology as values. As you can see, hiking aligns with those values, so it’s a passion.
When you are talking about your passion, you will probably speak louder, faster, and more. You’ll get worked up talking about it. You’ll sound excited and won’t want to stop talking. If they say you didn’t seem to know very much, or you kept a pretty even tone, it’s a hobby. You’ll feel much more excitement talking about a passion than you will talking about a hobby.
If you typically play ultimate frisbee every Wednesday, skip it this week. If you fill the time with something else and barely think about it, it’s a hobby. Take a break from editing the film footage you are always shooting. If after two days you can’t think straight because you want to be at the computer, you know it’s a passion.
A quiz like this can’t tell you without a doubt whether something is a passion or a hobby. However, it forces you to be more objective about the activity than you are on your own. The websites of Clarity on Fire, Goodnet, and Paid to Exist offer different types of quizzes that help you gain a better idea of what hobbies could be passions.
