“The best hobbies are the ones that take us furthest from our primary occupation.” ― Dr Richard Vogel in Dexter
“If you are losing your leisure, look out! It may be you are losing your soul.” ― Virginia Woolf
When the coronavirus hit, many of us had a rare chance to answer one simple yet important question: who am I and what do I do when I can’t leave my home? Of course, people who are essential workers, parents, or other carers, did not have much free time at all, but many of us felt discombobulated with the amount of unstructured time we had after our usual routines - the morning yoga classes, the happy hours, concerts, museums and house parties disappeared.
For many, this new time presented a daunting opportunity to discover (or rediscover) the joy of hobbies. Hobbies exist to fill our leisure time with purpose, fulfilment and happiness. For the luckier people, these months have certainly been a productive time to cultivate new talents, from growing plants to making bread and even starting a newsletter.
To be clear, we are talking about hobbies that are “an activity done regularly in one's leisure time for pleasure” - not a small horse or pony (but here’s a cute compilation if watching hobby’s are your hobby).
Hobbies can help you structure your time better. Hobbies help you explore and better understand aspects of who you are, your strengths, your weaknesses, your processes, and where you find joy. Hobbies help alleviate stress, keep your brain sharp by learning new skills but most importantly, help you recover from tough days and work through emotional issues.
A third of British people spend less than 42 minutes a day doing something they enjoy. Source: City Lit, August 2019
According to the OECD Better Life Index, a full-time worker “devotes 63% of the day on average, or 15 hours, to personal care (eating, sleeping, etc.) and leisure (socialising with friends and family, hobbies, games, computer and television use, etc.)” It seems like a fair amount, but when you consider that most of us spend 7-8 hours sleeping and maybe an hour for every meal a day, it leaves us with approximately just 4-5 hours of leisure for everything else. In lockdown, those leisure hours increased, and many of us were keen to use those hours to find meaning in this new paradigm.
So what did we actually do in lockdown?
A quick look at the U.S. shows us activities that probably resonate with many of us. Compiled through a survey by Nerdbear, the most popular hobbies in the U.S. since lockdown are watching TV/movies, reading and working out, while the least popular were learning a language, learning an instrument and writing. They also found that 1 in 2 people were reading to pass the time, and 1 in 3 said that they were doing arts and crafts or playing board games. In addition, a third of people were talking to their friends and family more, prompting people to think about social distancing more like physical distancing. Oh, and interest in apocalypse movies spiked by over 6.5 times.
But it’s not just all fun and board games. We did our own analysis to see how hobbies versus boredom fluctuated since lockdowns across the world. Looking at Google Search trends for the period of March 15 - April 15 (when most countries instituted some kind of shelter-in-place order), it was interesting to see how boredom peaked during the beginning of lockdowns but quickly plummeted again, while hobbies steadily rose, showing how relatively little time it took for us to adapt and even enjoy this new time.
Diving deeper into what people were doing during lockdowns also reveals interesting differences by country. We chose five hobbies (plants, painting, gaming, exercise and baking) that had a rise in search interest from March 15 - April 15 in countries that went through lockdown. These five hobbies don’t necessarily reveal any underlying cultural or social values, but do give an interesting glimpse into how popular certain hobbies are in a given country. For example, countries like Ireland and South Africa had a more distributed split among hobbies, whereas things like like gaming dominated searches in Turkey and Germany. The overall rise of gaming during lockdown worldwide has been phenomenal, with many reporting it as a helpful form of escapism that helped them cope with long stretches of time indoors.
35% of Americans said they’d likely spend most of their time watching TV or movies if they had to self-quarantine. Source: YouGov, March 2020
But which hobbies make us most happy? When analysed against data from The World Happiness Report 2020, of the top 15 most hobby-driven countries, a third of those came from the top 10 happiest countries in the world (Finland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland). So what hobbies do these countries do that contribute to their happiness? According to Statista, the top hobbies in Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland are cooking, reading and playing music. Perhaps the formula for a happy life is the Scandi trio of hobbies.
This perhaps gives us clues as to how important hobbies can be for our wellbeing. Studies have shown that“people who engage in hobbies enjoy better moods, feel more interested, and have less stress and lower heart rates—even hours after the recreation time.” With so much discourse around the importance of self-care, it seems interesting that hobbies have been left out of the equation.
But how much hobbying is too much?
There’s a much deeper history behind hobbies. The rise of hobbies as a productive and process-oriented social phenomena - for example, learning to knit and using your free time to become better at knitting - is intimately tied with capitalism and the industrial revolution.
Today, we’ve gotten to a point where hobbies are often pushed to their extreme. With the relatively recent invention of the “dream job”, hobbies are also often pushed to generate income. We’ve coined this the hobby-hustle complex, a dangerous slip from hobbies as an activity that brings pleasure and wellbeing, into capitalistic pursuits of human perfection.
This de-leisuring of leisure time has created an increasingly performative environment that has been fuelled by social media. “Lost here is the gentle pursuit of a modest competence, the doing of something just because you enjoy it, not because you are good at it,” says Tim Wu in a New York Times piece. We seem to have lost the habit of just spending time doing something we love, content with our own mediocrity. It’s no surprise that corona lockdowns threw us for a loop.
39% of adults in the UK felt pressure to be doing something productive with their spare time during lockdown. Source: YouGov, May 2020
One of the benefits of lockdowns is that it re-centered hobbies as activities which provide meaning and fulfilment to leisure time. It might also have provided us the leisure time which we’ve been so badly deprived of. Hobbies have also served their function of connecting people with each other and thanks to the internet, few of us were *truly* isolated during lockdown. Because hobbies can also be social, it is perhaps why, in a (hopefully) once-in-a-lifetime situation of a pandemic, many of us turned to activities that we could share with others. From collecting sourdough starters to using Netflix party and Zoom quizzes, our lockdown hobbies not only helped us connect better with ourselves, but with others too.
If living longer is your thing, you might consider taking up gardening.
Still, history has shown us how hobbies and economic hardship are intimately tied. Hobbies first turned into hustles during the Great Depression, when economic hardship left people looking for some supplemental income. Now that we are mostly out of quarantine, potentially facing second waves and unpredictable economic downturn, it’s unclear how long our lockdown hobbies will remain hobbies, or whether they might turn into corona-recession-hustles.
So…what now?
However, if you don’t think you have any hobbies, don’t fret. Because hobbies aren’t really about having a special string to your bow. Back in 2008, researcher Stuart Brown explored how the most interesting part of hobbies is that they allow people - particularly adults - to play. According to Brown, there are several types of play, but whether body play, object play, social play, spectator play, ritual play or imaginative play, most modern-day adults suffer from “severe play deprivation”. He says that play helps people better solve problems and can help us get into a flow state, but most importantly, is about doing something for its own sake. “The opposite of play is not work, its depression...if its purpose is more important than the act of doing it, it’s probably not play,” says Brown.
But the most interesting thing about play? It can help make us more adaptable and resilient to new and different situations. Perhaps, in a pandemic, the most productive hobby you can do, is not a hobby at all. It’s play.
Disclaimer: these are original stories created by us for this newsletter and are not published anywhere else. If you would like to use any of the data we’ve analysed please reference us and this newsletter (and let us know). If you would like to republish this story for your newspaper, magazine or blog, please get in touch on sarasabrinadata@gmail.com.
Projects we’re loving:
History, explained. This video by the Origin of Everything takes you on a whirlwind tour of the haunting history of hobbies.
Up and down. We loved this piece by The New York Times, which uses only arrows to show the 54 Ways Coronavirus Has Changed Our World.
Mental strain. Another visual guide, this time by The Guardian, putting into words and images just how hard coronavirus hit us.
Post-corona graphs. Julia Janks mockup of what every graph will look like from now on. Click through for some comic relief.
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