I like to talk, and, sometimes, when I find that I’m droning on and on, I rein myself in by calculating an interestingness ratio. The I-ratio, as I think of it, relates the interest a listener has in what he’s hearing to the interest the speaker has in what he’s talking about. In the best-case scenario, the ratio is one: listener and speaker are equally interested in what’s being said. But it can rise above one, if, for example, you unwittingly let slip some piece of gossip you don’t recognize as fascinating. And it can fall below one, when you’re being boring. If the I-ratio keeps dropping, then you’re basically talking to yourself.

I suspect that no subject has a lower I-ratio than hobbies. So as not to offend, I won’t catalogue times that people have bored me while describing theirs. What I can say is that, over the years, I’ve bored many others—especially my wife—with talk of cameras, computers, kayaks, wetsuits, spin bikes, weight lifting, e-ink tablets, science-fiction novels, Lee Child’s “Jack Reacher” series, home-brewing setups, tiny synthesizers, electric scooters, watches, Japanese outerwear, and other hobbies too embarrassing to mention. To my shame, I’ve even recounted stories about exchanges I’ve had with other hobby enthusiasts in online forums.

The low I-ratio of hobby talk reflects the nature of hobbies. Although many have outward-facing aspects, a hobby is ultimately a form of self-cultivation, pursued for reasons of personal satisfaction. Our society values publicity and productivity: perhaps that’s one reason that hobbies seem like they’re in decline. On YouTube, creators worry that “no one has hobbies anymore,” and lament “the grindification of hobbies”; from their point of view, we’re too distracted by our phones or side hustles to watercolor. In The Atlantic, Tyler Austin Harper writes that “hobby inflation” has raised the cost of “golf, skiing, indoor climbing, mountain biking, photography, knitting, tabletop games, and theatergoing,” among other hobbies. (Harper cites a number of causes, including tariffs and surge pricing; we might add income inequality, and the internet’s tendency to get everyone interested in the same things at the same times.) Moreover, in an era defined by maximalism and monetization, it’s harder to be an amateur. If we’re good at something, we want to go all-in, and even to make money from it. We appear to be disconnecting from the mode of life in which we do things in moderation, just because we enjoy them.

Everyone’s busy—aren’t we busy, partly, with hobbies? What counts as a hobby, anyway? “All my hobbies are passive,” a poster on the website Ask MetaFilter complained recently. These included reading, scrolling, watching videos, texting friends, petting the cat, and going “into random research deep-dives.” Evidently, something was missing; it would be nice to have traditional hobbies, to “do things like tend plants, crochet, knit, cook, paint, etc.” And yet it was surprisingly difficult to get into the swing of these activities, which never felt interesting or natural. “I just don’t understand what is stopping me from being the kind of person with useful, wholesome, soul-nourishing hobbies,” the poster wrote.

The French postmodernist philosopher Jean Baudrillard might have had an answer. He argued that we all live inside an unreal consumerist fantasy, in which even our passions are prepackaged for us by marketers. By this logic, capitalism tells us that creative, self-sufficient, self-improving people have hobbies, and then gives us a limited menu of options. We make our selections, only to find ourselves unenthusiastic about the quaint, socially sanctioned forms of thumb-twiddling into which others apparently direct their precious life force. If this is true, then it’s almost as though hobbies are for the weak-minded. On the other hand, maybe the hobbyists are right, and hobbies really are “soul-nourishing.” Perhaps they’re different, in some meaningful way, from the non-hobby activities that take up our time. In which case, we might ask, Why?

In the classic children’s book “Ox-Cart Man,” set in the early nineteenth century, a New England family grows potatoes, turnips, apples, and cabbages; knits mittens and weaves shawls; taps maples, boils down the sap, and boxes up the resulting sugar; and makes candles. Afterward, the father takes everything they’ve produced and sells it at a market. The family doesn’t have “hobbies,” that we know of. A reasonable rule of thumb is that, if you have to do it to survive, it’s not a hobby. Hobbies require a certain level of material sufficiency; they unfold during leisure time, which itself requires a concept of leisure, which in turn contrasts with the patterns of work that we associate with industrialized life. Many hobbies, moreover, are made possible by the affordable consumer goods industrialization creates; they involve shopping.

It might seem that an industrialized consumer society like ours should be a hobby utopia. But hobbies can be cool, niche, or specialized, and the materials for them are often sought after for non-hobby purposes, all of which can drive up the cost. In the nineteen-forties, fifties, and sixties, for instance, elaborate balsa-wood models of airplanes could cost less than a dollar. But in the following decades, manufacturers began incorporating balsa wood into the composite materials used in boats, surfboards, and other objects that had to be light and strong; demand for it rose further in the twenty-tens, with the spread of giant wind turbines, whose blades are sometimes constructed from synthetic fibre with a balsa-wood core. Today, most models are made of plastic, and wooden ones are luxurious. More broadly, of course, all physical models have become expensive to make, relative to the endless virtual constructions one can build in games like Minecraft.

Changes in the economy can lead hobbies on winding paths. In the early nineteenth century, candles were hard to produce, and demand for them was high; candle-making, accordingly, was a business, not a hobby. But just a few decades later, factories made candles cheap and ubiquitous. Another hobby rule of thumb is that, once something has become commodified, producing it yourself becomes fun: that’s why, today, you can be a hobbyist who pickles her own cucumbers, develops her own film, or builds her own furniture. And yet, ironically, the increase in the value of handmade goods can turn hobbies back into businesses. Today, the family in “Ox-Cart Man” could sell their wares on Etsy. Or they might start an artisanal-candle company, as Jan Levinson tries to do in “The Office”—a misadventure that nicely illustrates how “grindification” can make what’s enjoyable arduous. In a 2009 [article](https://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/17/fashion/17etsy.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all%5D(https://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/17/fashion/17etsy.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all) for the Times, Alex Williams described a thirtysomething hobby knitter who, having quit her job at a copy center, managed to earn a six-figure income selling scarves on Etsy. “Jealous?” Williams asks, ironically. “How could you not be? Her hobby is her job.”

Because so many hobbies are work-like, or work-adjacent, a paradox of hobby life is that, as you proceed in a hobby, it might threaten to become a kind of job. A committed hobbyist who wants to resist this pressure must strive to be proficient but not professional, creative but not productive, ambitious without being anxious; he must know when to say, “Enough.” A retired neighbor of mine maintains a beautifully landscaped yard, and works on a glamorous, well-functioning vintage sports car; he looks cool zooming around the neighborhood, and his yard is so vibrant that, from time to time, other neighbors wonder if they can hire his landscapers. If his car runs well, shouldn’t he restore more cars? If he maintains his yard to a professional standard, is he somehow doing the job of a professional landscaper? A hobby involves some aversion to professionalization—a recognition that although living the dream is great, so is dreaming. “I think ima retire from music, let it be my hobby,” the musician Grimes [suggested](https://youtube.com/shorts/AChu28zjM9c?si=aRD248F_mXmLCBRo%5D(https://youtube.com/shorts/AChu28zjM9c?si=aRD248F_mXmLCBRo), a few years ago. She hasn’t released an album since.

Suppose that you like going to breweries on the weekends, where you sample craft beers, about which you are extremely knowledgeable. Is going to breweries your hobby? Maybe you enjoy travelling, and spend months each year planning and going on trips; or you work out, or cook elaborate family dinners, or watch baseball religiously. Lots of people are Swifties, or foodies. Are all of these activities hobbies?

There are varieties of leisure experience, and it’s useful to make even fuzzy distinctions. Going to breweries might best be considered a pastime, like watching baseball; cooking could be a passion; frequent travelling, a life style. Perhaps being a foodie isn’t so much a hobby as an identity: it might be like being a fan (and foodies are often fans—of chefs, restaurants, and food celebrities). A very serious reader I know told me that, for him, reading wasn’t a hobby but a “pursuit.”

To a degree, it matters how you do what you do. Certain kinds of video-gaming might be a hobby; others could be more like an escape. I go to the gym every weekday, but I wouldn’t say that’s a hobby; I think of it as an investment, because I’m in my mid-forties, have very young kids, and want to be fit enough to chase after my possible future grandchildren. I listen to a lot of music, but I’d consider music an interest, or maybe just a source of happiness. Photography, on the other hand, is—for me—a traditional hobby. I read publications, acquire skills, buy and sell equipment, set goals, and mull various photographic problems and dilemmas in a not-quite-professional way that’s also not exactly amateurish.

Sometimes a hobby can mutate into an activity motivated by un-hobby-like impulses. Collecting—of trading cards, art works, dishware, Labubus—is a hobby for many. Yet, in “A Noble Madness: The Dark Side of Collecting from Antiquity to Now,” the historian James Delbourgo posits that Freud “triggered an intellectual revolution,” after which “the act of collecting was always about something else, and never entirely about the thing collected.” (Freud saw a collector as someone who projects “surplus libido onto the inanimate object.”) The pursuit of a hobby can sometimes tip over into obsession or addiction; possibly, from the beginning, it was a form of compensation, avoidance, fantasy, or ego inflation. There are a lot of big boats that rarely see water.

From all this, we might get the idea that a hobby ought to be about itself, providing satisfaction simply and directly, in the doing, rather than serving as a roundabout route to some other destination. Taking a harder line, we might even say that a hobby shouldn’t have, as its primary aim, making people happy, or bringing them together. Being a good person isn’t a hobby; neither is hanging out. Hobbies should be captivating on their own.

From this perspective, one sign of a “real” hobby might be overproduction. There’s a crochet club that meets at my local library, and its members crochet so much that, at the circulation desk, there’s a whole basket of random crocheted items that anyone can take. (My son uses a crocheted pencil as a bookmark.) Clearly, the members of the crochet circle really like to crochet. Similarly, hobby bakers enjoy baking so much that they produce treats not just for their families, but for their co-workers; hobby journalers sometimes find themselves maintaining multiple journals, all slightly different, forming a complex journal system. This mixture of constraint and excess is part of what makes hobbies fun. In many ways, they’re defined negatively, by the directions in which hobbyists don’t want to go. But this clears the ground for the unstinting expression of enthusiasm.

Is there a meta sense in which having hobbies is itself a hobby? “For those of us who have ‘hobbies and interests,’ a lot of times we have lots of them,” the writer Michael Johnston observed, in 2012. Johnston writes mainly about photography, but in the past he’s worked at Model Railroader magazine; he plays pool, enjoys high-end audio equipment, and so on. Having spent decades in this man-hobby vortex, he offers a six-step program for managing and refining one’s hobbies. First, list them all; then, prioritize the list. “Over a period of weeks or months or even years,” occasionally reprioritize it, and eventually identify “the persistent top three.” Consider committing more to those hobbies, and less to the rest—and, finally, clarify for yourself what it is that you enjoy most in the hobbies you love most. “A person whose interest is fishing might really like tying flies; a person whose interest is gardening might really most enjoy the colors of flowers,” Johnston writes. “I think you’re going to be happiest if you realize where the locus of your interest really lies, and indulge that, and let the other notions go. If you really love flowers for their colors, maybe you can get into an area of horticulture where that’s a central issue, like hybridizing tulips.”

Johnston finds that hobbyists are often bossed around by “common received ideas” about how their hobbies should work. This is natural enough. When you start out, you follow the playbook; you buy the right gear and set the requisite goals, and take for granted certain notions about your future hobby trajectory. The playbook really matters; ideally, it should be short and sweet, leaving you room to come to your own conclusions. So perhaps the internet has made hobbies too complicated through a surfeit of knowledge and advice. When I first picked up photography, in high school, I used my grandfather’s old camera and took pictures of my friends; in college, in a photography class, I photographed flowers and railroad tracks. I didn’t know what I was doing, but I had lots of fun. Years later, when I took up the hobby for the second time, I watched endless YouTube videos, many made by professional photographers, haunted online forums, and spent way too much money outfitting myself with the equipment others said was necessary. I filled my head with received rules and goals. Complexification, rather than grindification, was my enemy, and it took me years to find my way back to the simplicity I’d lost.

An important step for me came during a drawing workshop I attended. It was led by a British sculptor and painter. She told us that we’d be doing a series of drawings, which we wouldn’t show to anyone else in our group of about two dozen people. First, we drew a chair, which she pointed to, onstage. Then we drew a self-portrait, from memory. Then we sketched an outline of our heads, and filled its interior with whatever we were thinking about. The exercise continued through many more steps, for about an hour. I wondered where it was all going, until it abruptly ended. “Remember that you can do this,” she told us. “You’re allowed to just draw. You can spend an hour just drawing.” It was, to me, a startling assertion, and I’ve never forgotten it. Ever since, I’ve sometimes made drawings, for no reason, without showing them to anyone. Often, I’ve followed her simple playbook.

Last week, I helped at my son’s after-school chess class, setting up boards, resetting them, and generally assisting the teacher in her efforts to direct a group of second graders. She cheerfully marshalled them into game-playing pairs, silent except for announcements of adjustment, check, checkmate. Watching them play, I thought of what the future held. Some of them would become “chess kids”; others might just remember that chess was something they could do. Hopefully, as grownups, they’d all feel that they were allowed to play. The drama in hobby life stems, in part, from how you have to give yourself permission to do what you want, while deciding what it is that you want, and also figuring out when you want to stop. In a world that often pushes you around—telling you how much you’ll work, and when you’ll rest, and what you’ll seek to achieve—hobbies ask you to discern and respond thoughtfully to your own evolving preferences. Hobbies give you chances to manage and know yourself. Which is another way of saying that they give you freedom. ♦