Having said that, I saved some money and took two years off to pursue all of my life-interests (mine, in fact, are quite similar to yours) but when it came down to it, I surfed the web, played games, did a small amount of programming and just doddled around all day for the majority of my time off. Then I went back to work.
To me it comes down to one thing: purpose. If you have no specific purpose, you just get caught-up in day-to-day living. The main thing I learned in my two years off is that I can accomplish 99% of what I want to do with my life whether I have a job or not.
