Do It for Yourself 

Written by Ananya Panchal. Graphic by Ananya Panchal.

In 2022, I watched 100 movies in the summer. Why? Because I had the time. Bored and restless, I needed a purpose for my long summer days. I had developed a budding interest in watching movies as a hobby during quarantine, and I decided I wanted to take it to the next level. I watched every genre, from romances like “Pride and Prejudice” to old thrillers like “Dial M for Murder” to indie dramas like “Little Miss Sunshine.” I was positively obsessed with cinema, and it became a big part of my personality. 

Cut to three years later – it’s 2025, and I haven’t been able to watch a movie in months, and it’s particularly watching movies alone that’s become a problem. I can sit down to watch a movie with a group of friends or at the cinema as a social outing. But watching it alone now feels like a waste of time. I now view this hobby as a pastime that needs to be earned, when it used to be an activity that I greatly valued and placed importance on. 

Watching movies isn’t really seen as a skillful hobby. Cinema is the common man’s art – you don’t really have to do much to enjoy it. It’s something we all consume, and it stopped making sense to me why I was investing so much time into caring about cinema when it didn’t really add up in my equation for my future (as a graphic design major).

But it was something that brought me so much joy. I took movie watching very seriously. It informed many aspects of my life and my growth – the way I see the world, the art I value. It offered me a sense of escapism and fantasy that added a lot of value to my life. 

But it’s not just about escapism. Believe it or not, there’s a lot that watching a diverse range of movies can do for you. It’s made me way more media literate and allowed me to think more critically of anything I consume. It’s allowed me to retain a long attention span in a world that values short-form content. And being able to connect to other stories through film has genuinely made me a more empathetic person. The world is small, and watching culturally varied movies highlights that, despite our differences, the human experience is really the same everywhere. 

It’s quite special that an art form can convey all of these things whilst also being so accessible. 

So watching movies has nothing to do with my prospective career as a graphic designer, and I don’t even think most people consider it a hobby. It’s something I started out of boredom and an abundance of time – but it’s something that I now want to consciously make time for. I’m not doing it because it adds to my resume, I’m doing it cause I ought to do things that make me happy. 

And at the end of the day, my go-to ice-breaker question will always be “What’s your favourite movie?”