Hobbies once defined human progress – today they feel like rare luxuries. Photo / 123RF
Work, streaming, scrolling and side-hustling are keeping us from activities that bring joy and meaning to our days.
It’s a first date. The drink in your hand is mostly ice. You’ve talked about your jobs, your days, your dogs. The conversation lulls, and you can feel the question coming. “So,” the person across the table asks, “what do you do for fun?”
The answer should be easy. We are supposed to be living in the golden age of hobbies. Great thinkers of the 20th century believed that innovations in technology would make work so efficient that leisure would eclipse labour. In 1930, economist John Maynard Keynes predicted 15-hour workweeks by 2030. This would leave people the opportunity to “cultivate into a fuller perfection, the art of life itself”.
This would include hobbies, activities that Benjamin Hunnicutt, an emeritus professor of Leisure Studies at the University of Iowa, calls “pursuits that are their own reward”. The opportunity to pursue joyful and meaningful activities was once “sort of the definition of human progress,” Hunnicutt said.
But the golden age that Keynes predicted has not come to pass. Though productivity has grown dramatically since Keynes’ time, the most recent American Time Use Survey found that full-time employees still work eight hours a day, the same workday that the National Labor Union demanded in 1866. Workers enjoy just under four hours of leisure time, and the bulk of that brief window is spent watching TV.
The odds are stacked against hobbies. “Work has been supercharged with meaning and purpose and identity, a charge that it never had, at least for the majority of people,” Hunnicutt said. The seamlessness of streaming and the narcotic effects of scrolling make every other activity feel effortful. To pay the bills, huge swathes of Americans take on “side hustles” during hours that earlier generations might have spent building model trains or singing in a choir.
These cultural conditions mean that hobbies can feel like a kind of class signifier for those who have the time and resources to cultivate them – Instagram influencers do Pilates and pottery, while the rest of us try to decide if meal prep counts as personal enrichment. For many, hobbies can seem like another chore, an opportunity to fail at well-roundedness. Dating apps are designed such that romantic hopefuls must showcase their hobbies with the gaudy desperation of college applicants.
All of this obscures the delight and exhilaration of having hobbies. “Hobbies are something that you invest your time and energy into without that expectation of financial return,” said Jasmine Cho, author of the 2024 book Get A Hobby. Cho defines “hobby” expansively: “any sort of activity that grounds you in joy, can help you cope with sorrow, and can help you escape from life’s burdens”. (Cho’s hobbies include journaling, doodling, boxing, taekwondo, Legos, Gundam models and puzzles.) “It’s just a practice of flow and getting lost, or even hyper-focused,” she said. “That, in and of itself, is the reward.”
Among older people, having hobbies is linked to lower rates of depression. A study during the pandemic found that people who started gardening, crafting or woodworking for just a half-hour a day reported greater life satisfaction; those who spent more time on screens were more likely to be depressed. Essentially, researchers confirmed the wisdom of your parents when confiscating your Gameboy – you should go outside and play.
A great hobby takes simple ingredients – a skein of yarn, a piece of lumber, a group of friendly strangers – and alchemises them into something that makes day-to-day life better. But the relentless push towards self-optimisation, the pressure to monetise every passion, and the pull of consumerism can tarnish the joy of hobbies.
The 20th century thinkers who predicted increased leisure time warned that “we’re going to have to be careful with this new freedom,” Hunnicutt said. “We’re liable to have it stolen from us by the powerful and rich among us who will want to continue us in bondage and slavery for their profit, and will turn to selling us worthless things.”
The word “hobby” was once pejorative. It comes from hobby horse – a child’s toy that takes its rider nowhere. In the early 1800s, the word hobby indicated “some trifling, harmless, half-silly, half-useless propensity”. But within a few decades, columnists had switched to arguing that “everyone should have a hobby,” as long as the hobby could “carry the rider over the route of mental improvements to the development of his reasoning and analytical powers, and thus promote the growth of the attributes which distinguish him from the brutal and ally him to the divine”.
Where does this leave a person who watches The White Lotus every week? That counts as a hobby, Cho rules, as long as it is intentional, not mindless. Surfing channels or scrolling social media is not a hobby. And if you monetise your hobby, it’s not a hobby any more. “Once it flips into something that generates income, it becomes work,” she said.
Content creators on social media – often in the business of converting joy into gruelling comparison – sometimes insist that adults should have an exhaustive slate of hobbies. You should have one for your mind, another for your body, another for your spirit! “Even having one hobby might be a massive privilege for someone if they just don’t have time to do anything else but survive their day-to-day,” said Cho. Reading a library book or doodling are both great hobbies, she said. “Whatever you have immediate access to is a good first step.” That doesn’t need to include a $2000 at-home kiln.
The pressure to have an interesting hobby persists though, especially among daters. The question “So, what do you do for fun?” can feel like a test they can only fail. During the pandemic Josh Weintraub, a Gen-X-er in Brooklyn, dated a woman who was learning a language, and she encouraged him to do the same. Weintraub, who works as an actuary, didn’t have an ear for languages, but he decided to pursue a hobby of his own: trumpet. He signed up for lessons online from the Brooklyn Music School. The first piece he ever tried to learn was by Beethoven, and the result was a strange source of wonder. “It wasn’t completely out of reach!” he recalled. “I wasn’t good by any stretch of the imagination, but it was recognisable.”
For more than three years, Weintraub practised in between Zoom calls during the workday and at night. Then he learned that romantic influence on hobbies goes both ways: He started dating a woman who hated jazz music. He stopped playing. Even after the breakup, he hasn’t picked the instrument back up. “Inertia is a big thing,” he said. Also, trumpet was tricky: “If I had this to do over,” he said, “I would have probably tried the saxophone.” He is planning to get back on the hobby horse soon, though. And in the meantime, his dating app features a picture of him playing trumpet.
Even as a culture of constant work encroaches on the little leisure time we have, it’s a good time to be a hobbyist. Adults are coming together to jump double dutch, crush roller derby competitions and play an astonishing amount of pickleball. We badly want to be involved: The majority of respondents to the most recent Gallup poll on the subject ranked hobbies and recreation activities as “extremely or very important,” a much larger group than two decades before.
Cho said she notices hobbies trending in two directions. There are people doing more and more online – playing around with AI, editing videos for TikTok, finding the sublime in building spreadsheets. “But I think there has been a saturation of tech and digital based engagement,” she said. “I think there will be greater trends toward going offline and reconnecting with things that you do physically with your hands.”
Most nights, after a long day of officer training at Arizona’s Fort Huachuca army base, Matthew Perry drove straight to Sierra Vista Community Theater. Rehearsals were typically Monday through Thursday, from 6 to 9pm. Over the course of one year, he performed a bit part in A Christmas Carol, starred in the drama Proof, and painted and built set pieces.
Before stepping foot in the community theatre, Perry, 28, had never performed in a play. But “I fell in love with it immediately,” he said. “It wasn’t easy, but it was 100% a labour of love.”
Perry wasn’t the only person from his base backstage. There were also hospital employees, high school students, fast food workers and corporate types. “Once you go to perform, everyone is an equal on that stage,” he said.
Brittany Rothe, a 34-year-old mother of three who works in medical device sales in Lake Forest, Illinois, has decided to make hobbies a priority. On Tuesdays at 9pm, after work is done and her children are asleep, she meets friends at a tumbling gym for an evening of gymnastics practice. Rothe noticed that as soon as the structure of school sports evaporated, adults started acting like the only age-appropriate way to work out was a solitary stint on a treadmill. Instead, Rothe and her friends challenge each other to execute 100 standing tucks. When not airborne, they chat. “It brings me energy and joy,” she said.
Rothe, who was a cheerleader in high school and college, is now working on a full-twisting layout, a skill that she was not able to master at the height of her cheer career. “I feel stronger, actually,” she said. “Without pressure, I’ve just been able to do it for fun and not be afraid to fail.”
The discipline required to learn a skill is why Janeva Gaddist, 31, picked up ballet. She danced as a child but always avoided ballet because it seemed “slow and boring”. She started in the “absolute beginner” adult ballet classes. In two and a half years, she worked her way up to beginner, occasionally tiptoeing, literally, into an “advanced beginner” class.
Her improvements are small but noticeable – the way she points her toes, her arm movements. “That’s why I love the discipline of ballet, because there’s so much to improve on, there’s so much to do, there’s this never-ending pursuit of perfection,” she said. “You feel like, ‘Oh my goodness, I’ve reached this mountain!’ And then you look over and you’re like, ‘Oh wait, there’s something else to conquer.‘”
We do not live, yet, in a golden age of hobbies. But in handsprings, opening nights, blasts of Beethoven and tremulous plies, hobbyists, as Hunnicutt puts it, embrace “the freedom to become totally human”.
“Don’t be scared,” Rothe advises adults who want to tumble. “Just try it out.
Figuring out your personal “basics” will save you money and effort down the road.