It might help you too idk.
For pretty much all my life I thought hobbies had to be creative or at least produce something. E.g. guitar, drawing, photography, creative writing, playing sports, etc.
I think this is the case for many people, we believe that a hobby has to produce something at the end of the process, or teach you something, to count as a hobby.
I also thought that you had to spend a lot of time doing something to count as a hobby, or that you had to be an expert in it. And that you could only have one.
It was while playing a video game that I realized hobbies were something completely different, and the devs didn’t even intend for it lol.
Hobbies are basically anything you like to spend time on. Keeping up with world news, spending time with friends, discovering new things (music, cool places around town).
It can even be more abstract: organizing information (if you like to collect things), becoming more efficient (less time spent on one task), solving math problems… even daydreaming might be a hobby.
I think a hobby is more accurately defined as something you do during your leisure time somewhat regularly. It doesn’t need to be your whole thing, it doesn’t need to be something you intend to become great at, and it doesn’t need to be something that you’ve done since childhood and will do until you die. It might not even be something you particularly enjoy doing over something else (e.g. daydreaming - I imagine most people do it naturally and don’t really think about it).
I grow chili pepper plants for example in a single pot and I’m starting to consider it a hobby. This hobby is not gardening; it’s taking care of my one chili plant. It’s one of my many hobbies, I’m not going to scale it up (well, maybe just a little bit) or become a gardener, and that’s fine!
Anyway, you might find this useful.
Hobbies were invented to sell hobby supplies, its called doing stuff you want to
Very nice, I had similar impressions because of this too. I think it’s kinda a bit of bourgeois ideology in each of us, because we try to convince ourselves to be “more productive” even in our leisure time
I think you’re right… it’s the same thinking that leads to thinking hobbies should become “side hustles” once you get reasonably good at something.
And sure, if you like making cute dingbats and selling them to people, go for it. We could all use a little extra cash anyway. But at the same time, don’t think it any less valid to spend time absolutely not participating in commerce. If your hobby is sitting on a park bench and watching squirrels run around, you’re not less than the dingbat seller.
If stamp collecting is a hobby, everything is a hobby.
I like this perspective of yours. I may as well expand the range of activities of mine I call hobbies.
I very much agree with this. Hobbies are the way we self actualize. It’s developing our own interests in a self-directed fashion. It’s a fundamentally different activity from doing something out of need.
In my view, a core goal of a communist society should be to minimize work that needs to be done by humans, and maximize the ability of people to pursue self-directed development. And this has to go even further than just providing people with free time. Imagine people having access to collectively owned industrial machinery, computing resources, and so on.
This is kinda how hobby is understood in Poland: anything that you like to do in your free time that isn’t your source of income (or at least major income). That “being productive” thing is fairly recent here and obviously to a surprising lot of people came with capitalism and is percieved as part of the hustle culture. Of course USA cultural invasion is beating it into Poles too, but just free time enjoyers are still very common.
There’s also that, but I’m also using the word productive here to mean to produce an output, e.g. a text, a song, a pottery…
Taking a walk is also a hobby! Sometimes we don’t realize that the things we do are hobbies, and don’t consider them to be anything, but anything you do somewhat regularly during leisure time is one of your hobbies!
Taking a walk is also a hobby!
Yes i meant thing like that too, as i said “free time enjoyers”. And funnily enough taking a walks is commonly recognized as quite fun and legit hobby in Poland, though less and less as we get crushed with work and general crunch more and more.
Honestly, I feel like I have no hobbies, even video games. I feel like everything I do is for the purpose of me escaping Autistic burnout. I play video games to lessen the burnout. I garden to reduce expensive food costs. I learn programming for the sake of escaping my ludicrous job. I build computers in order to work on servers and applications to build a portfolio for work. I spend time with my spouse to, once again, reduce burnout. I participate in PSL to hopefully help push for revolution in the future. I practice guitar to ease my burnout and to build a skill that would allow me to creatively support PSL by playing music in rallies.
I yearn to learn an esoteric language, build Linux From Scratch, design a PCB, practice soldering, learn a CAD scripting language like OpenSCAD for 3D-printing, play board games with friends, go hiking and biking, learn another spoken language, read fiction, finish my drawings and paintings, or anything else just to have fun with no long-term goal in mind. I’m so tired.
I have definitely been plagued by the “hobby must be productive” mentality. For example, in the context of a video game, framing it around what I’m “accomplishing” within the game, since the game itself is not producing anything. Or in the context of language learning, viewing it as something that needs to show results for it to be worth doing.
I think it ties into a sort of perfectionism for me. But anyway, I agree with you that a hobby does not need to “qualify” as a hobby, for lack of a better word. It can just be a thing that you do. Now as for applying that to my own mind in practice, that’s a whole other question. 😅
Hobbies are whatever you do because you wanna, not because you haveta. To think that hobbies need to somehow be “productive” I usually attribute to a capitalist/liberal/Protestant mindset. This reminds me of R. H. Tawney’s Religion And The Rise Of Capitalism, though I haven’t read it so I can’t say for sure that it’s relevant.
