On the Importance of Hobbies

If you want to be abetter person, find something to do outside of work

By Alex Preston, on Quartz, 12/06/2016

Extracts:

“As a child, I watched birds. While other boys threw themselves into communal sports or sealed lifelong friendships at sleepovers, I spent my weekends alone on the quaggy, wind-barracked reaches of South Coast estuaries, or dragging my long-suffering family around the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust in Arundel. I pursued birdwatching with the bloody single-mindedness that only a child can muster, and my life, and the lives of those around me, were shaped by my obsession.

Now, attempting to find a way to live as a thirty-something, no longer willing or able to indulge in the hedonistic follies of my twenties, birdwatching has again filled a hole in my existence. Whereas once I identified myself by what I did – my job – now I’m defined by a pursuit that is willfully unproductive.

I spend hours sitting in bird hides these days. Often I am alone; sometimes there are other birdwatchers there with whom to share brief, sublime moments of connection as a bird drifts into view, is identified, noted, and departs; once my daughter came with me, but was bored after 10 minutes, and I had to take her home. Then, alone again, I sat and watched as the hours crept by, until the day grew dark and I could go home. For me, birdwatching has provided the answer to a conundrum that haunts modern life: how to fill our days.

Our hobbies tell a great deal about us and our world: about how we choose to present our lives to others; about the burdensome, expectation-freighted nature of free time; about our slippery relationship with the exigencies of productivity in late-capitalist society. Hobbies are a corner of our existence over which we have the impression of control, a sphere in which we feel we can achieve a kind of mastery usually denied to us in our wider personal and professional lives. In All the Names, José Saramago says that hobbyists act out of “metaphysical angst, perhaps because they cannot bear the idea of chaos being the one ruler of the universe, which is why, using their limited powers and with no divine help, they attempt to impose some order on the world.” (...)

Aldo Leopold, in “A Sand County Almanac”, put it beautifully, and it’s a quote I shall take with me, along with the wellington boots, the binoculars and the Collins’ Guide, each time I go birdwatching:

“Becoming serious is a grievous fault in hobbyists. It is an axiom that no hobby should either seek or need rational justification. To wish to do it is reason enough. To find reasons why it is useful or beneficial converts it at once from an avocation into an industry – lowers it at once to the ignominious category of an ‘exercise’ undertaken for health, power, or profit. Lifting dumbbells is not a hobby. It is a confession of subservience, not an assertion of liberty.”