I have never had a real grownup hobby, unless you count reading, feeding the backyard birds, and occasionally emptying the dishwasher.
But when I was a child, we were expected to have proper hobbies. This was before television, video games, and smartphones made them redundant. It was considered unhealthy, bordering on abnormal, to just sit around reading or go for bike rides. Obediently, I did the usual things: collected stamps (incredibly boring), built mechanical models (not much better), played football (very painful), collected car numbers (even more boring than stamps), and learned conjuring tricks (the only hobby that was even faintly interesting, because of the psychology involved).
Eventually I aged out of hobbies, as almost everyone does, but now I find I miss them. A hobby is something we don’t have to do, that doesn’t have to be done at all, and that we’re not paid for. The rich and powerful were the first to adopt hobbies, like hunting for sport or playing cards, but by the twentieth century, almost everybody wanted one. A vast hobby industry grew up to fill the void.
There’s something admirable about hobbies. The world would be a duller place without people who obsess over old train timetables, baseball scores, or Civil War memorabilia. Hobbies fill a kind of void or black hole in our personal universe when there’s absolutely nothing to do that we really want to do. This feeling is at its worst in our teenage years and then again in old age. In between, there’s usually plenty to do. Work and family fill the empty space.
A true hobby takes us into a world where the only thing that matters is our own special interest, our passion, be it ballooning, beachcombing, bassoon playing. Hobbyists swear that this is when they really come alive, and I can’t argue with that.
Many hobbyists create miniaturized worlds that are better organized and more manageable than the real ones. Hobby shops are full of little houses, cars, boats, furniture, and even tiny animals. You can construct your own small utopia out of these models, a solid world with more substance than a computer graphic.
You don’t see many hobby shops these days. I fear that most of the old-fashioned hobbies, that involved doing or building things or making collections, have given way to what I call electronic self-admiration. Staring at phone screens seems to be a hobby in itself, along with grinning and capering about on YouTube so that other people can admire you grinning and capering about on YouTube. Never was a device so aptly named. But, if it fills that black hole in your life, why not?
Quentin Crisp, who uttered almost as many bons mots as Oscar Wilde, declared that: “Hobbies are instead of life.” But hobbies are so important to so many people that it’s hard to believe that they are nothing more than activities to fill the emptiness. They are so obviously about the life we really want – a creative and successful life where we are in charge and where things work for us. So what if the activities that we dismissively call ‘hobbies,’ that allow us to be more creative and more free, are what life should be about, and all the other stuff is a complete waste of time?
