The Joy of Hobbies

The Annexation of Joy

I often ask people about their hobbies. Some have them, some do not. It is striking that more people that engage online seem to have hobbies than those that ‘live’ in offices. There are only a handful of people I know with real hobbies. Such as a bank CEO who collects coins, a financial institution CFO that is active in triathlons, a VP who dances tango every 3 or 4 days for 20 years, these are the exception, not the rule.

Yesterday I went for a 24km (15 miles) hike/run through the countryside with my friend. We started off in a drizzle of rain and ended up as drowned rats. There were no phones, no screens, but the joy of togetherness, conversation en route, and the satisfaction of completing the trip was an immense reward. My friend’s brother, a medical professor and doctor, called our excursions an ‘infectious disease!’

There are moments, sudden, unwelcome, when it seems as though a quiet annexation is underway, that hobbies, once the last redoubt of purposeless joy, are quietly being colonized by the twin empires of technology and commerce.

The Quiet Annexation of Leisure

Once, the hobbyist was a peculiar figure: the amateur botanist cataloguing dried flowers in a leather notebook, the basement tinkerer assembling radios from salvaged parts, the model airplane builder covered in adhesive. The reward was personal, often private. It was a messy affair, a stubborn commitment to unproductive excellence.

As a boy, the scent of balsa wood and the sticky haze of Bostik glue were my companions through long, uneventful afternoons. Afternoons that taught patience, failure, and the miraculous stubbornness of things that refused to go as planned.

Today, those stubborn afternoons seem almost quaint. Technology, with its glib promises of democratization and limitless creativity, has rewritten the terms of engagement.

A teenager in Malmo can now summon symphonies from a laptop, craft worlds with the flick of a stylus, produce “art” unblemished by physical struggle. Yes, the barriers are lower. Yes, the accessibility is unprecedented. But what is often missing, what slips, unnoticed, through the cracks of infinite “undo” and frictionless editing, is the hard-won intimacy between maker and material.

Lost Intimacy

The potter, hands buried in clay, learns the language of gravity and resistance, of patience in the face of inevitable collapse. The digital modeler, in contrast, masters a different fluency: the taming of abstraction, the cold logic of code. Both are valid. Yet they speak to fundamentally different experiences of creation. When friction disappears, do we also lose a certain kind of joy?

And there is another, more insidious transformation: the way technology compels us to watch ourselves. We now track our hobbies with the fervor of accountants auditing their own work. Steps counted, words written, hours practiced, each hobby reduced to a data set, a performance. What was once personal becomes performative; the act itself is overshadowed by its documentation, its online validation. As if reading Proust were less important than sharing the news of having read Proust.

Datafied leisure leads, almost inevitably, to commodified leisure.

The “creator economy” tells us that every doodle, every loaf of bread, every macrame wall hanging is a marketable asset waiting to be unleashed.

A woman I know once found profound solace in knitting, intricate shawls spun from delicate merino, each stitch a meditation against the chaos of the world. “I knit because it holds me together,” she once joked, half-serious. Encouraged by friends, she opened an online shop. At first, it was exhilarating: strangers praising her work, modest sales trickling in. But soon, the rhythm shifted. Deadlines replaced reverie. Metrics replaced meaning. Her hands still moved, but they moved differently, as if laboring under a silent, invisible overseer.

Tyranny of Metrics

Our culture now exalts the “side hustle” as if leisure, too, must be yoked to the engine of productivity. The old, innocent hobbies, whittling, birdwatching, baking bread without a brand strategy, card or stamp collecting, weaving and pottery, now seem faintly disreputable, guilty pleasures for those not properly optimizing their downtime. It is as if leisure itself is becoming a moral failure.

And looming behind this is the slow, heartbreaking death of traditional crafts. Blacksmiths, weavers, woodcarvers, their fingers know things that our screens will never teach us.

I have spent many tender, infuriating afternoons in crumbling workshops and cluttered studios: the lingering smell of scorched oak, the walls lined with rusting tools whose names I never learned, the silence punctuated only by the rasp of a file on iron. The loss is palpable. These crafts are not merely quaint anachronisms; they are alternate epistemologies, different ways of engaging with a stubborn, recalcitrant world. Their extinction is not just cultural; it is intellectual and moral.

This shift did not appear overnight. It is the culmination of decades where the gospel of efficiency and self-optimization seeped into every corner of life, from the Reagan-Thatcher revolutions through the rise of Silicon Valley's “disruption” ethos. Leisure was rebranded as “personal development,” hobbies as “potential revenue streams.”

The smartphone, that totem of modern life, accelerated the process beyond what even the most breathless futurists of the 1990s could have imagined. Suddenly, every idle hour could be captured, analyzed, and monetized. Post-pandemic, the final psychological barriers fell. In a world where remote work blurred the distinction between labor and living room, it seemed only natural that leisure, too, should be rendered productive.

Glorious Interests

What, then, are we to do? We cannot turn back the clock. The tools of the digital age are potent and often beautiful. But we must remember to carve out, with deliberate stubbornness, spaces of unoptimized, uncommodified joy.

To make things that do not need to be shared or sold. To pursue activities so gloriously useless that they defy metrics. To rediscover, in short, the endangered pleasure of being bad at something and loving it anyway.

Otherwise, we risk perfecting our hobbies into oblivion. We risk becoming efficient producers of empty experience, connoisseurs of a hollowed-out leisure that no longer nourishes but only performs. We risk, ultimately, forgetting how to be human.

Stay curious

Colin

Image via Unsplash