“So, what do you do for fun?” How many times have we heard this question, asked or been asked this question, in the past few months? As the year started up, so too did the process of meeting new people — the unending chain of, “Hi, I’m [ ]”, “I’m from [ ]”, I’m majoring in [ ]”. But the question of hobbies signifies something a little bit deeper. In contrast to a name or home-state, hobbies supposedly represent what someone really cares about, and what they’ve truly chosen for themselves.
It seems like most everyone tried out new hobbies during the pandemic to fill up their time, and many left them behind once “real life” started back up again. But as someone with a creative streak and an overconfidence in trying new things, I’ve stuck onto my various useless activities, and I fashion myself into a bit of a hobby veteran.
All this experience leads me to intuit a theory I’d like to explore — a hypothesis, if you will, about creative hobbies. Specifically, hobbies that produce physical, tangible work at the end: knitting, crocheting, hand-sewing, felting, baking, cooking, gardening, oil painting, jewelry making, flower-arranging, flower-drying, ink-making... At least, these are what I’ve tried, so it’s the data set I’m working with.
My theory is that all of these vastly different hobbies boil down into two categories: exact sciences and more-or-less improvisations. The classic example is the baking-cooking split, which are more or less the first two hobbies I ever acquired. Baking is an exact science, full of the dangers of overproofing, water baths and stiff egg white peaks. Almost every ingredient is precisely proportioned to chemically function together. One can’t help but think of those poor contestants on The Great British Bake Off crumbling (pun intended) under the pressure of Mary Berry’s intricate recipes. Cooking, on the other hand, is a kind of anything-goes process. Forgot the salt? It’s probably okay to add it in a few steps later. No matter what some very vocal people say, so long as you have the ingredients and a working stove, it’s pretty impossible to truly mess up fried rice or pasta. Cooking is simply the more forgiving art.
Perhaps the difference is like carving vs. sculpting, which are, admittedly, two hobbies I’ve never picked up. Carving requires the most careful hand, the most delicate chiseling. One wrong move, and you’ve cleaved the nose right off the bust. Sculpting is malleable, fluid. Simply compare ancient marble figures to Alberto Giacometti’s bronzes thinned into shape with the visual imprints of fingers, and you’ll see exactly what the baking-cooking split is.
How do the other hobbies sort out? Knitting, crocheting, sewing belong to the baking camp. Anyone who disagrees has never “frogged” dozens of rows of stitches in order to fix some structural mistake. On the other hand, gardening, oil-painting and felting sort in with cooking. Perhaps you do wood or soap whittling (baking) or scrapbooking (cooking). Everything falls in line. Knowing which kind of hobby you tend to lean toward might help you decide new ones to try.
But there are natural limits to my theory. Like the critical point in a phase diagram, there’s a point where the distinctions between the two dissolve. There is just as much high-stakes perfectionism in high-end cooking as there is flexibility in home-baked bread. A degree of spontaneity nevertheless exists in my so-called exact sciences and a degree of procedural integrity in my so-called improvisations.
Now that I’ve thoroughly tested my hypothesis, it seems that hobbies aren’t as binary as I first posited. A little disappointing, but any good student living post-1970s French theory knows that binaries were meant to be deconstructed, anyway. Although loose categorization might help you determine your next new hobby, nothing hinders you from the ability to do and find fulfillment in both sides — I, after all, started this whole theory on my enjoyment of both baking and cooking.
There is something to be said, however, in the measure of how far hobbies go. I used the example of high-end cooking before, but it’s reasonably arguable that those engaging with high-end cooking are professional chefs, not hobbyists. What does it mean for something to be a hobby at all?
Etymologically, “hobby” originated in reference to a small horse, a breed of pony. Not the best for riding into battle, but probably fine enough to play around with. Similarly, we often say we do such and such hobby “for fun” — in a sense belittling it to a simple, amateur-ish thing. There’s an underlying notion that if you were really invested, it would be your job.
But while we disavow hobbies as lesser than work in one breath, we seem to treat them just like work in the next. Frankfurt School theorist Theodor Adorno famously wrote in his essay “Free Time” that hobbies are “parodies of the same productivity which society…incessantly calls for” so that “free time is nothing more than a shadowy continuation of labour.” Depressing stuff.
Yet admittedly, I often find myself applying the same kind of productive, “grindset” habits to the activities I’m supposed to be doing for personal enjoyment. Should hobbies reflect our work habits, or should they be an expression of “true” leisure? What would it even look like if they were the latter? If our leisure time, time that is supposed to be truly free, is constrained by our working hours, is it really leisure? Is it the case, as Adorno wrote, that “organized freedom is compulsory?”
There exist semi-answers we can derive from Adorno himself. He admits to “have no hobby” but only because he “[takes] them all, without exception, very seriously.” Hobbies are for enjoyment, yes, so the idea of taking them “seriously” might seem contradictory, but it needn’t be. To take a hobby seriously doesn’t mean to treat it like work. It more likely means the opposite: embracing it for what it is in and of itself, as an object of your passions rather than a shallow object of dilettantism or a reflection of work and to set your heart upon it fully and sincerely — baking, cooking or anything else.
Estelle Chen is a freshman from Columbia, Md., studying Philosophy and English.
