A hobby was not always something to aspire to. Up until around the 1880s, the word was used to refer to any sort of preoccupation, which could be positive but could also be an obsessive fixation, as in “riding a hobby horse.” The word evolved, and a hobby came to be understood as a wholesome, enriching form of leisure and the most virtuous way for a person to spend their free time.
The moralization of hobbies followed a major shift in how Americans spend their days. During the Industrial Revolution, the nascent labor movement advocated for reduced work hours, eventually leading to the eight-hour workday and the five-day workweek. Some people saw the resulting increase in leisure time—and the saloons, theaters, and amusement parks that popped up to fill it—as a threat. The thinking was that leisure “led to both delinquent activity and deviant ideas,” Gelber writes. The solution to the moral depravity of cotton candy and Ferris wheels: hobbies.
In scholarly circles, the hobby is defined by oxymorons: “productive leisure,” as Gelber calls it, or “serious leisure,” a term coined by Robert Stebbins, a professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Calgary. Under Stebbins’s serious-leisure framework, entertainment and socializing are too passive to be considered hobbies and would be classified as “casual leisure.” Serious leisure, on the other hand, requires effort based on special “knowledge, training, or skill,” and people often try to make progress and get better at it over time.
Of course, many hobbyists enjoy this effort. Serious leisure is enriching; it brings a different kind of satisfaction than either relaxation or paid work. Research shows that leisure activities, including hobbies, are linked to better physical and mental well-being.
They also help us build a sense of self outside of paid work. People tend to consider their hobbies to be a big part of their identity—you’re not just someone who runs, you’re a runner. But “we don’t get much identificational mileage out of telling people that we just dig the TV and we watch it all the time, or that we go to the pub every night and have a pint,” Stebbins told me. “It’s not distinctive. Everybody does it, and in the end, you haven’t much to show for it.” I asked Stebbins if he thinks serious leisure is a requisite ingredient for a meaningful life, and he said yes.
But the way American culture glorifies and promotes hobbies also serves to reinforce the notion that idleness is wrong—what Gelber in his book calls “the folk wisdom of capitalism.” Gelber believes that hobbies reinforce the values of achievement, productivity, progress, and hard work, even as they provide a break from people’s actual jobs. “If capitalism is culturally hegemonic then productive leisure is surely one of the instruments of its continuing domination,” he writes.