The Great Hobby Bust: Why we abandoned our lockdown hobby pastimes
Sewing a quilt to cocoon inside, baking rye dough for the first time, or even the walking dead of recreational activities: stamp collecting — Australia’s lockdown orders were in many ways a boom time for the underappreciated hobby.
For the first six weeks of lockdown, my Instagram feed was overflowing with hand-made focaccias and newly adopted house plants. Whether it be the flour shortages that swept the nation, or a 14,493% increase in mats for jigsaw puzzles on the Australian Amazon, there seemed to be ample evidence of a hobby renaissance. When I asked one of my friends about new hobbies, she said she’d committed herself to ballet. “I’m going to become fluent in the art of motion!” She joked. “I’ve got nothing better to do.”
Yet five months later, when I ask friends about their recreational flings, they almost all come up empty-handed.
The COVID-19 lockdowns were an opportunity to build healthier, more balanced versions of ourselves. That didn’t turn out to be the case.
That isn’t to say we should all rush to master Español or HTML. But having a hobby that we can turn to, a craft that we can tinker away with, can make us more well-rounded people. There’s ample evidence that past-times have mental and physical benefits, like raising moods, reducing stress and depression. That’s not even mentioning the social elements that come with hobbies, as like-minded communities form to help one another improve.
And maybe most importantly, hobbies offer time that is distinctly ‘ours’, where there’s no boss or deadlines or quality expectations. These activities are fun for the sake of fun.
So the question is: why didn’t millennials get glued to these new recreations?
Some of the blame can be put at the feet of the virus that brought people to their new interests in the first place. Dreary news of the continuing pandemic, isolation laws and boredom were a recipe for exhaustion. Add in never ending notifications on our phones and viola, the perfect recipe for ‘Doomscrolling’: skimming site after site endlessly to catch-up on the next twisted tale of this terrible timeline. Not exactly the right mind-set when starting a new hobby.
But the real reason started long before the pandemic, with the rise of Hustle Culture. Hustle culture, borne out of the Global Financial Crisis of the late 2000s and the Millenial desire to do something with their lives, mixes passion and profit, and advocates that one should always be working towards their goals.
It’s not uncommon for many young people to always be working in some way, always lining up another gig, updating their Etsy store, posting another photo until they’ve found a way into the career they want. All activities get ground down into a simple equation: do they help me get the job I want, or not? Can I turn this into a career?
Millennials are into this mindset — turning your joy into a job that can be monetized — but can often suck all the life out of a hobby. Burnout has become the buzzword for a generation exhausted without an outlet like hobbies for them to recharge. Just look at the dozens of YouTube creators and Twitch streamers saying as much.
And for most hobbies, the math doesn’t work. This is especially true once you realised how expensive hobbies can be once all the different bits and bobs are counted. Getting into sewing for example means purchasing needles, threads, tape measures and scissors, maybe even a sewing machine, which can range in price from $120 for the most basic machine to over $1000. Then there’s the cost of materials: fabric is sold at $10-$100 by the meter, and with an average dress needing 2–4 metres, the cost escalates.
When one of my friends said they’d done some painting over isolation, they added the stint was brief. “[Painting] costs too much money,” they explained. “I’m not that great at it, so why am I still doing it?”
The nature of a hobby means that you’re probably not an expert at your hobby, but you do it anyway, because it brings you joy to create or learn something new. This is the key distinction between a hobby and a career. Hustle culture, and the mindset it encourages — that all our downtime must be productive in some way — kills off any chance young people will truly embrace hobbies en masse.
There are many factors at play here, but the most important change needed is for young people to embrace a different mindset around their recreational time. This is your time, the time spent to enjoy yourself. Life isn’t much without hobbies, without time to recharge and languish the splendour of the day. So mess around and find something you like. No doubt you won’t be good at it, especially not at first. But after all, it’s not your job.
Originally published at https://www.lanewaydispatch.com on August 31, 2020.
