The Premature Death Of Hobbies
Glued with both eyes to screens, the world forgot about having hobbies…
As I was writing another draft about being an adult fan of LEGO, it hit me that I’m trying to discuss hobbies in a world that doesn’t quite appreciate them as much as it used to. I must admit, I am quite taken aback by the realisation that one device — the smartphone — has rapidly taken over our lives to the point that hobbies are far less common than they used to be. While certainly dependent on which generation we’re referring to, the number of people who identify as hobbyists is rapidly shrinking, and that worries me to no end.
I date. I date a lot. Often comically poorly, but I do what I can. As one of my friends used to say — “Bless him, at least he’s trying”. But as a person who likes to understand people and human nature, good or bad dates, I still get to learn a lot about my interlocutors — we’re talking women in their 30s — one of them being, that they typically don’t have hobbies. More often than not, the response is somewhere along the lines of:
Yeah, I guess the usual... Read sometimes, Netflix, go out with friends. I like listening to music too, going to gigs. How about you?
You beautiful soul, none of those are hobbies, I’m thinking to myself, but have no heart to say it out loud. But it’s not just my dates. I look around me. Many of my mates, some younger, my age or older even, will have the exact same response. You see, reading sometimes is something that only people who don’t really read, say. Someone who has reading as a hobby — like I did in my teenage years — will jump at the opportunity to elaborate on the various authors and books they have discovered in the past week or month alone. Heck, they’ll likely have one of those books with them, just in case the company is shite (yes, I have seen people read in a pub with their mates/colleagues around them).
Netflix also isn’t a hobby. Watching TV was never a hobby. There is a different idiom for that. It’s called the couch potato. While we love potatoes here in Ireland, and have a very potato-heavy history too, being identified as a couch potato, is anything but flattering.
The problem with listening to music and going to gigs is that most people actually don’t do it at a hobby level. A hobby requires a certain level of investment. There is a considerable difference between just randomly putting on some music from Spotify or Apple Music, going to a few concerts a year, and being actively involved in having a music library of your own, seeking out obscure bands and hopping on a plane to an even more obscure destination to see them live. Casually doing something, while valuable in itself, does not constitute a hobby.
The digital world exacerbated an already existing issue — people not knowing what to do with their spare time, how to discover themselves.
We like to blame everything and everyone else, but in reality, it is our choice to drop our asses in front of the 60” TV after work, it is of our own free will that we’re poking at shiny pixels in the form of Wordle or Candy Crush, and it is us who lose out on the benefits of having an actual hobby. The eternal excuse that we’ve no time for hobbies is often just that. A very unimaginative excuse. We live in a world where many of us are privileged enough to have the circumstances that allow us the luxury of asking ourselves what else we could be interested and invested in other than our jobs and relationships? Yet, we do what?
We have created a swiping, scrolling, oogling, poking culture. Our hobbies have been reduced to a single finger. The irony of it all? We’re showing the single — middle — finger to ourselves.
Society has become so unimaginative that taking the time to discover itself is now on the verge of becoming an oddity. In fact — and I’ll get into this more in a future article — one might even get considered a bit weird for brewing beer at home, playing with LEGO or collecting old records. As the wife of one of my friends put it, “well, at least he doesn’t go chasing after other women”. Yes, I guess on balance, it’s easier to accept the smell of hops in the bathroom or plastic bricks on the shelves, than infidelity. It’s somehow the “lesser bad”. Hobbies are the things we tolerate rather than celebrate.
It’s so easy to forget there’s an entire world of interesting activities out there when one’s world is reduced to a 6” screen buzzing and flashing all day long. It’s impossible to find the serenity of self-discovery when we’re so obsessed with everyone else’s life. We fool ourselves into thinking we have hobbies while we’re watching others live out theirs on YouTube, thinking “oooh, I’d like to do that too, that looks fun” only to never do it. Watching other people having hobbies is not a hobby. It’s bordering on voyeurism. Also, (technically) not a hobby. 😄
The braver ones will start a million things, never to finish any of them, having lost interest after a single failed attempt or zero likes (apart from their friends and family) on social media. If I had a penny for every failed attempt at people becoming hobby photographers, I’d have literal truckloads of pennies. If only I had a way of cashing in on other people’s failed attempts at… anything. 😈
Few will put the necessary effort into turning their interests into hobbies. Hobbies are an investment in yourself, in your emotional, mental and maybe even physical wellbeing, and thus takes dedication and sustained interest. The digital world (for the most part) does not encourage it that much. A lot of it is all about instant gratification, the dopamine rush. Don’t get me wrong, legit digital hobbies there are plenty to choose from. From writing to various forms of art, gaming, music and the likes, they’re all valid and often lead to a secondary career or an entire pivot, but let’s be honest, on average, digital or not, just how many people invest in hobbies versus aimlessly staring and poking at screens?
People need hobbies. People need to explore who they are, what makes them tick. Get a hobby today!
And stick to it for a change…
Attila Vago — Software Engineer improving the world one line of code at a time. Cool nerd since forever, writer of codes and blogs. Web accessibility advocate, LEGO fan, vinyl record collector. Loves craft beer! Read my Hello story here! Subscribe for more stories about LEGO, tech, coding and accessibility! For my less regular readers, I also write about random bits and writing.
