Exploring Flow States: Uncovering Unique Hobbies and Their Potential Alternative Career Paths

Introduction: The Plight of a 3/5 Profile in Human Design

Speaking from experience, the biggest plight of a 3/5 Profile in Human Design is feeling like you don’t have a hobby, when in fact you may have dozens. I struggled with this a lot in the first half of my life. It wasn’t until recently that I permitted myself to have many hobbies, and once I did, something incredible happened. I found a way to tie up each of my hobbies in a fun little package, with a cute Passenger Princess ribbon in the shade of STARRYUU green. The next step? Figuring out whether these hobbies could become my main source of income, because, to riff off the adage, “I don’t want to work a day in my life.”

Identifying and Defining Flow States in Personal Passions

The funny thing about hobbies is that they're something you could enjoy doing endlessly. In an age where creators, artists, and people who make stuff are even making their own economic sector, why should hobbies and business ventures be different things? And if they’re the same, then what differentiates a hobby from you simply being in your flow state?

Once I accepted that I had many interests and decided to pursue a possible career avenue from them, I began to get curious about how I could sustain my hobbies long enough to generate revenue from them. Being a 3/5 profile, I’m constantly experimenting with new things. As I began to think about what I would want to do day in and day out that would both fulfill me and pay my bills, I found a commonality between the two. My hobbies are a manifestation of my flow states.

There were clues as far back as childhood when I would look around at my classmates and analyze what each of their “things” was, be it soccer, baseball, dance, or piano. Thinking all of these might become my thing, I too dabbled in many of them. It wasn’t that I wanted to be normal or fit in, rather I wondered if something was wrong with me because I wasn’t good at any one thing like everyone else was. But, I wanted a thing, I wanted desperately to find my thing, and I struggled with the same journey up until a few years ago when I finally realized I had had a thing all along. 

One of my favorite things to do as a kid was to turn on my family’s clunky, gray, 1990s desktop computer and open up a clean Microsoft Word document. Once set up, I would pull a puffy, white VHS tape from my family’s library of movies, bring it back to the desk, and prop it up against something with the backside facing me. I would transcribe what was written on the back of the VHS tape, word for word. Once I started transcribing, I got lost in it. It wouldn’t matter if the neighborhood kids were ringing the doorbell asking if I could play, or if my favorite dinner was ready for demolition, or if ice cream was promised, I would have kept along with my task to uncover and report the fate of Ariel uninterrupted. 

Looking around at my peers, I assumed no one else had hobbies like this, or at least they didn’t talk about them. So, I didn’t know it was a hobby. It was just something I did when I felt inspired to do it, and I lost myself in it. I could not stop.

This is how I would define a flow state.

Embracing Diverse Hobbies: A Journey of Self-Discovery

Unfortunately, I didn’t fully name or comprehend my flow state until I was in my late 30s after I had read Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life by Francesc Miralles and Hector Garcia to whom I am very grateful.

Soon after reading, everything started to make sense.

In childhood, I was re-typing things that had already been written. This allowed me to unconsciously connect with other writers by gaining awareness of the letters and words they chose for their back-of-VHS blurbs. I began to understand the structure of short form writing, in which these writers had to convey the summary of a movie with limited space. I learned unconsciously that it was someone’s job to create those blurbs—perhaps another soul with an alternative Ikigai. It’s so fitting that in adulthood I would start my career as an advertising copywriter, writing tweets, taglines, and Facebook posts for brands with limited character counts.

Let’s not forget: this retyping occurred on a digital device—a computer, where I was connecting my inherent human creativity with modern technology. I didn’t have to write the words by hand (which, by the way, writing by hand is not my flow state), and instead, I was typing them. I found so much joy in every element of this: the sound of the keys, using my hands, specifically to convey a message, using all the parts of my brain to get words from a physical object that represented some writer’s creative work, and my family’s film library, onto the screen. In having to read and then relay each word by spelling it out, I contemplated their purposefulness and meaning.

In high school, we were given a gigantic poetry textbook, The Norton Introduction to Poetry (I believe it was the ninth edition). We were asked to pick out our favorite poem and interpret it line by line. Teenagers were expected to extrapolate meaning from poems written decades, or even centuries before their time. Except, it was high school, so of course a certain level of standardization was expected to get a good grade. It likely didn’t matter what we thought the poem meant, but what the traditional interpretation of it might have been. I didn’t know that then, and I took what little life experience I had and applied it to this masterful art form. Once I started, I couldn’t stop. I became so addicted to the assignment that before I knew it, it was past my bed time, and I had interpreted 18 poems. 

When I handed my assignment to the teacher, she called me to meet with her after the class ended. I assumed she’d want to talk about the accuracy of my interpretations. Instead, she accused me of plagiarism. She didn’t seem to understand why a high school student thought this task was so interesting. I had rediscovered my flow state but did not know it. 

One teacher accusing me of plagiarism was one of the worst memories I have from school, and I think it would come to represent all the obstacles I would face trying to normalize my flow state in a society where “flows” that are celebrated are ones that are most popular or generate revenue most easily. 

If it were possible to research the name of the person who wrote the blurb on the back of the VHS tape, I would have done it, and I would have discovered a new layer to my flow state because, in college, my favorite place to be was the library. It wasn’t because I was an avid reader, I was not. It was because the library was a place where I could uncover things that I hadn't yet known about. Not just uncover, but dive into, lose myself in knowledge that could be applied to what I was working on, or what I was interested in. 

Back in the ‘90s, I was offered, likely by Clippy, the choice to change the font, the font size, and the colors of my Microsoft Word document, to even add images if I wanted to. In the early aughts, when I was in college, I took a summer course for extra credit that was rooted in the play between words and images on the internet. I learned that my flow state—I still hadn’t known it was called that—wasn’t just limited to text or books. We learned about how to make websites and all the interesting ways you could pair images with text online. My final project senior year was research-based. It was about the science of reading—how people’s brains connect words with meaning and allow us to be able to understand the story the writer intended or to be able to create our meaning from the words they presented to us. I didn’t stop at handing in a multi-page paper. I designed those pages into a magazine with different articles about different facets of this science. I also created a blog to document my senior-year internship experience. 

Blurring the Lines: Hobbies vs. Business Ventures

It makes sense then, that a dream of mine had always been to work at a magazine. So, early on in my Conditioned Career Lab Era, I got a job at NYLON, and while I was able to achieve that lusted-after balance of combining income with a flow state, the flow eventually became blocked by other people’s agendas. My soul had sent me whispers of this in my previous jobs, too, “Don’t forget who you were transcribing the backs of VHS tapes for.” During that era, I believe my soul tried to reconnect with my flow state, but I was still living under a sense of conditioning, basing my life off of other people’s expectations, and couldn’t fully get there. Throughout this time I started many blogs, random websites from scratch, and social media accounts to feed the craving (1. come up with an idea 2. choose a visual identity for that idea, 3. document the idea with words and images 4. share), without actually knowing that I was craving anything. I guess I was trusting my Manifestor creative urges, which I didn’t yet have the language for.

Connecting with Creativity: Flow States in Action

Over the last few years, I finally entered what I believe is my Higher Purpose Era. Part of this era included a stint with archiving. I think it’s why I love Notion so much—a tool my grandfather, another causal archivist, which I was once self-proclaimed, would have loved. For many months I dedicated myself to going to estate sales and uncovering new things, objects, and ideas. I would document them in a blog, and usually researching each of them would lead me to learning about something else, and this journey would continue until I realized I was in a flow state and had to literally stop to feed myself. I call it the endless hyperlink highway (Does anyone remember StumbleUpon?!). My bookmarks tab is terrifying. I’ve learned that going through and re-organizing all of my bookmarks and trying to clean them up is not part of my flow state. They just live there, in forever rows of text and links. 

It’s taken me a lot of self-exploration and trial and error and experimentation (in addition to everything you read, I also received an MA in Publications Design, made zines, and even worked at a comic book store), but it appears I’ve finally found my flow state again, and this time I’m aware of it. I’m engaging with it right now. I could never have found a job that would allow me to write a 3,000-word newsletter about my alternative flow state, deliver it when I wanted, and title it what I wanted. And even if I had, my writing would be for the success of their publication, and not my own. 

Overcoming Obstacles: Navigating Societal Expectation

As a Manifestor, it took me many years to realize that I couldn’t work in creative jobs if the creativity was on behalf of someone else. This newsletter stands as an exact example of deconditioning and living in a way that is aligned with my true self. I can practice and enjoy my flow state—combine words and images in Canva, manage my website, and write this newsletter—without it being tied to anyone else’s agenda. 

Being in the flow state for me feels like I am on my way to accomplishing something. It feels like I’m in a state of creation, with so much momentum that it cannot be stopped by anything but completion. And only I am the one who can define when it is finished. Before sitting down to write this newsletter, I pulled The Ace of Wands tarot card, which can represent figuring out how to creatively manifest something. I’m hoping that by shining a light on my flow state, I can do what those anonymous VHS tape writers did for me: creatively manifest something that inspires or ignites someone. 

I can’t forget that those writers had limitations, and in a way, I’ve had to give myself limitations, too. Or, rather, a scope. I realized that STARRYUU could be my lab, where I could engage in my flow state as a regular practice, while creating something aligned with what I believe is my inner purpose.

Conclusion: Sharing the Journey of Self-Discovery

This brings me back to self-exploration tools like Human Design. Can you see how everything is interconnected? Just as it is in Human Design, with your unconscious, conscious, activated gates, and your defined energy centers, etc., all working together to create the blueprint of who you are, so, too, my flow state and my hobbies are in unison, manifesting as all of the content I’m creating for STARRYUU. Maybe it’s similar for you, too? (PS, there are so many things in my Human Design chart that support this multifaceted flow state).

I know it’s the same with Astrology. You’re not just your sun sign. I can’t help but yet again reference my favorite podcast, The Astrology Podcast, and its host, Chris Brennan:

I even find myself in my flow state when listening to this podcast. Any reference that is made to any other medium, book, podcast, show, or person, I must look up immediately, learn more about, and bookmark (I guess only to document what I learned since I never seem to revisit them anyway). 

For those of you who watch my ASMR videos on YouTube. Everything above this section is what I had forgotten to record typing. Below, you’ll find an addendum to my post featuring everything I did manage to record.

STARRYUU is a space for experimenting with individuation. We democratize information around various self-exploration modalities via our virtual community space and accessible tools and resources—including your birth chart! We hope that this tool may be a helpful resource along your individuation process.