Hobby Ideas: Does Everyone Have One Except You?

For the time-poor, it’s time to drop the guilt of having a passion purely for yourself, as the benefits can be boundless, argues the heretofore hobbyless Lucy Slight.

I’m out to dinner with two girlfriends and tell them I’m writing a story about hobbies. “I have a hobby,” says one. “It’s shopping.”

“Shopping is not a hobby,” the other responds, but my friend is emphatic — it is. “I research, I plan, and then I go to the store and look at it in real life. I go to op shops too and I might just buy one little thing, but I love it. It’s my hobby.”

As soon as she mentions op shops, it makes her love of shopping seem more legitimate as a hobby. But if hitting the mall brings joy too, why dismiss it? The debate rages on. We talk about hobbies for a good half an hour while we finish our wine. We’ve been sitting at a restaurant in Grey Lynn catching up over dinner and drinks for the past two hours. “THIS is my hobby,” says my other friend.

We decide that the rules around what is considered a hobby need to be expanded for our modern world. Hobbies are something that you do in your own time, for your own mental health and pleasure, without anyone else relying on the success of that hobby to feel good, apart from you. So why the hell not make catching up with girlfriends, or shopping your hobby?

The idea for this story came to me after a discussion with another friend about how her husband was off on his third weekend in a row of golf/fishing/surfing with his mates while she stayed at home with their 4-year-old.

We texted each other at length about the disparity between the ability that men have to just up and leave the house for hours on end to do what makes them happy while women feel the need to fill their ‘downtime’ with things that also serve to benefit the home somehow. Or is it just us who feel this inequity? Two hobbyless women with toddlers trying to find excuses that we don’t have enough time for hobbies.

I post a question box on Instagram asking for women to reply and let me know what their hobbies are. I get more than 200 individual responses, which range from ‘overthinking,’ ‘snacks,’ ‘sleeping,’ ‘doom scrolling,’ and ‘doubting myself,’ to ‘crochet,’ ‘ocean swimming,’ ‘painting,’ ‘visible mending and embroidery,’ and ‘roller skating.’

I feel a swell of pride for my fellow women, the ones with hobbies. There are so many activities that I could look to adopt — pottery, knitting, art classes, gardening… The hardest part, actually, is getting started, forming the habit, and letting go of the guilt around having a passion purely for myself, that may in fact, get me out of the house for something that doesn’t benefit my family.

Marnie Hillier started knitting as a hobby after her best friend took it up to give her something to do while her kids fell asleep, instead of playing on her phone. This sparked something in Marnie (“Who doesn’t want to get among something that will get them off their phone?”), and after spending a fortune on expensive Italian yarn and immersing herself in YouTube, she finished her first knitting project.

“The moment that I finished [it] I absolutely knew that I needed to share this incredible hobby with as many people as possible,” she tells me. “I had made a bright lilac beanie in one afternoon and the pure joy, sense of satisfaction and confidence I felt blew my mind.”

Marnie took her passion one step further and launched her own business, Joy Make Club, which sells knitting kits for beginners to be able to create pieces for themselves — not for others, not out of necessity, but purely for the love of it — which are fun and funky.

“So many of us have been brought up having our sense of self-worth tied to our productivity; heaven forbid we ‘waste’ our time doing something just for the fun of it,” the mother of four explains.

“I had a mother and her daughter come into our store last month and the woman said how much she’d love to learn to knit but ‘as if she’d have the time’. I joked that if only us mums felt as confident to book a weekend for knitting as some dads do to head off on a golfing or fishing trip. She looked me dead in the eye and said, ‘We’re here for the weekend because my husband is on a fishing charter’.”

While I assume knitting doesn’t have a social side to it — and therefore is an activity that still serves to keep women at home — Marnie disagrees.

“I think that one of the awesome things about knitting is that it can be the perfect solo hobby but also has an innate social compatibility. Many of the older generation of knitters I’ve become friends with locally meet up regularly to knit together and this is something we’re seeing more of with the new generation of knitters too.”

Krissy Derrick, co-founder of Modeletto, sells handmade pottery and ceramics, and has created a range of at-home air-dry clay kits for beginners. She hosts events and pottery club nights where groups of people (mostly women) come together to make pottery, making it more of a social endeavour too.

She began selling her pieces online, then launched Modeletto alongside her mother who is a painter and potter and has been doing crafts as a hobby since she was a teenager.

“It was important to her in her busy life to have something for herself and feel proud that she created it,” says Krissy. “Now owning our own kiln and being able to fire other potters’ beautiful work as well is so rewarding.

“Joining a pottery club, and regularly attending a wellness studio space has been one of the most amazing things for me,” she adds. “I’ve met so many amazing people and the best thing about it is if you’re feeling lonely or bored, you don’t have to organise to meet up with people; you just know when you go there, you’ll see your friends and you get to chat and enjoy the things you both love at the same time. Mum says the same about her experiences with painting and pottery clubs.”

It must be said here that I was interested in speaking to Marnie and Krissy because I admire that they are both passionate about encouraging women to take up hobbies, hence turning their own into businesses to enable them to pay it forward. By no means is it necessary to turn your hobby into a side hustle, and nor should we be putting pressure on ourselves to make an income from what we choose to do in our leisure time. Besides, many hobbies are not ones that can be monetised, anyway.

To make an activity a hobby, all it needs to be is something meaningful and enjoyable to you, and something you engage in regularly for the pleasure of it. It can be anything from spending time alone in nature, to eating with friends, creating art, learning a language, playing sport, foraging — the list is endless. Research shows that any way in which we voluntarily engage in a pleasurable activity has positive effects on our mental health.

According to Utah State University, around 75 per cent of participants in one study experienced lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol after making art. A study undertaken in New Zealand found that engaging in creative activities can lead to an improved sense of wellbeing that may have long-lasting effects, with participants documenting an improved sense of wellbeing, higher mood levels and a sense of flourishing after time spent being creative. Research also shows that adults who participate in team sports are less likely to experience symptoms of depression, anxiety or stress.

So with that being said, now all we need to do is let go of the guilt and make the time. Oh, and find the hobby.

While canvassing Instagram to get a sense of what hobbies my female followers were into, I had more than a handful of replies along the lines of “I don’t have one, but I want one — please share the answers!”

So for all my hobbyless huns out there, here is a list of ideas to get the cogs turning, straight from the hobbyists’ mouths: Paint by numbers, building lego, beekeeping, cross stitching, hiking, floral arranging, sewing, adventure racing, drinking prosecco and watching trash TV, writing children’s stories, needle felting, upcycling, crosswords, puzzles, surfing, making desserts, dance classes, composing music, riding dirt bikes, sailing, photography, candle making, learning the drums, gardening, thrifting, horse riding, sketching, jewellery making, golf, book club, paddle boarding, cake decorating, making bath bombs, journaling.

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