This. A hobby involves activity, not passivity. It involves practicing a skill or exercising a faculty of creativity.
If the the thing you do is basically about the passive uptake of information - such as reading, watching movies, or listening to music - I’m hard-pressed to call it a hobby. (but if you write books, compose music, or make movies for fun, those are hobbies).
If the central feature of what you do involves athletic exertion - such as running, biking, hiking - I think it’s better to call it a sport.
It’s said that every classification system has edge cases where it runs into problems, and mine is no exception. What if someone enjoys playing bridge? Or birdwatching? I feel like playing bridge isn’t a hobby, but birdwatching is. But what are the features of these activities that lead me to feel that way? And if playing bridge isn’t a hobby, then what is it?
I think TV-watching could be a hobby if it was intense enough and social enough. Like, if you hosted a Meetup event focused around watching a particular show and then led the discussion afterwards, that strikes me as a “hobby” level of interest. But in such a case, the hobby would be more specific than “watching TV”. It would be more like “leading a discussion group focused on a specific TV show”.
I really don’t see how hobbies and pastimes are different from each other and why they even need to be distinguished. When someone asks me if I have any hobbies, I always assume they are asking what I do for fun in my spare time. I probably wouldn’t mention TV-watching in a broad sense, but I might mention my tendency to binge-watch documentaries and bad science fiction movies on Amazon Prime. To me, it is all in how you talk about a thing.
I’d put myself in this category. I spend quite a bit of time doing things like obtaining (legally) ALL of the top 100 songs for every year between 1960 and 1990, or collecting DVDs that are “off-catalog.” I spend much more time obtaining, maintaining, and cataloging than I do actually listening. Along the way, I pick up a variety of memorabilia (e.g., 8-track versions of albums, original demo acetates from certain groups, publicity photos of obscure groups, etc.). I’m not a DJ and virtually nobody I know has any idea I do this. It’s strictly for my own enjoyment.
Maybe putting various activities into different classes is your hobby?
I gotta admit I don’t see the utility in all this splitting. Yes, people go jogging for exercise, but they can also be honing a skill or a mastering a goal (beating a certain time or running a certain distance), the same as any knitter or model builder . And why wouldn’t playing bridge not be a hobby? I mean, yeah, playing the occasional pick-up game wouldn’t qualify, but surely it is safe to say that if someone goes to bridge club every other night, they are engaged in a serious hobby.
But I think computer gaming is an obvious hobby. So to me it is logical to
include all gaming, including sports and cards, under the hobby umbrella.
Heck, I run a hobby business…its a hobby business because I don’t really need to do it - I’m not doing it for the financial benefit (though its turned into something that gives me a good deal of income every year). I suppose its technically not a hobby at this point, but I still refer to it as a hobby business. And I’m a hobby investor as well (though I do that for the financial benefit). I don’t invest professionally, and I do it with my leisure time.
Of course, I’m functionally retired - except for that hobby business. Its all leisure time - well except when I need to get out the vaccuum. I don’t clean my house as a hobby.
I also knit, read, bake and travel - more traditional “hobbies”
I want to rule out ordinary TV watching as a hobby since it requires no skill, ability, nor effort.
To me, a hobby means something that not everyone can trivially do right off the bat.
E.g., breathing isn’t a hobby.
Note I mentioned “ordinary TV watching.” I guess it’s possible to put in some non-ordinary effort into TV watching. E.g., you are creating the comprehensive guide to errors in CSI:Miami. You watch the show carefully. Rewinding when you see something odd. Note when a pen magically jumps from a hand to a pocket. Log the time and error, etc.
I can tell you from personal experience that such errors jump out at me but are at times difficult for others to see even when pointed out to them.
So it’s not something all do well, if at all.
Another thing about hobbies is that is an vague idea of “productivity” to it. This may be concrete like producing a replica sword on a home made forge, or abstract like now knowing what the element ratios should be in such a sword (and memorizing a ton of similar data).
I take guitar lessons as a hobby. I’m never going to play gigs or even learn a lot of songs by heart. I do it to keep my hands limber and my brain from freezing up.
I also do some woodworking as a hobby.
I used to do photography as a hobby. I guess it sorta kinda still is, but I’m not into the after-shoot fixing so much any longer.
I disagree. I feel reading is an activity while watching or listening is not. Children have to be taught to read; seeing and hearing are just biological functions. A television show is broadcast, a movie is played, and a concert is performed regardless of whether or not you’re there. But if you stop reading a book, it doesn’t read itself.
I agree with this. I make small amounts of money from some of my hobbies, but not enough to meaningfully figure into my finances, and that’s not why I do the hobbies.
You can’t watch most movies properly until you learn to understand the spoken language. The book was written whether or not you’re there; you just didn’t get around to reading it immediately. If you stop playing the tape, it doesn’t play itself.
In both cases you are passively consuming a product that somebody else produced. The major difference between the two is that it’s not really possible to inattentively read a book - but that’s not what your complaint is about, and in any case you can certainly get as involved in a movie as you can in a book.
One of my hobbies is watching cartoons, both american and japanese. I have extensive, ever-growing collections of each, and non-trivial amounts of money have been expended on each, filling many shelves with them. Watching them is an activity unto itself; I do not watch TV as a background to other activities*. However, I don’t take notes while watching the shows, and don’t consider studying trivia to be necessary or important to my enjoyment of the shows or the value of the activity.
Certainly nothing is produced by my collecting and watching cartoons (except an insufficiency of shelf space), and no skill is required to watch them (give or take a learned awareness of the symbols and tropes specific to each medium). However I still consider it self-evident that collecting/watching cartoons is a hobby of mine (and in fact I would consider the american and japanese shows to comprise two separate hobbies). Less because I’ve spent gobs of money on it, and more because it’s something I specifically do for the sake of engaging in the activity itself. I certainly don’t consider it a mere pastime - if it was a pastime, would I feel like I have an obligation to do more of it than I have time for? I’ve got five different movie and TV serieses pulling at my attention and feel bad that I can’t get to them all at once, especially will all the other hobbies I have going on too.
Though I do listen to commentaries while building/dismantling legos, since the activities don’t compete for any given sense or part of my attention.
I wouldn’t consider “I’m just going to keep the TV playing in the background while I’m vacuuming the living room” to be a hobby.
But if I was talking to someone who claimed “TV-watching” as a hobby and I realized they were a walking compendium of all TV knowledge, then I would feel like they weren’t just your average TV-watcher. Thus they would fit the definition of a “hobbyist” in my mind.
To me, it’s not the passivity/activeness that matters. It’s the level of passion and focus involved.
I wouldn’t consider reading to be passive at all. When I’m bone-tired, I never have a problem turning on the TV and totally vegging out. But I have to have a store of energy to read for pleasure. Also, some reading really is challenging (I’m imagining a physics textbook written in ancient Greek). But getting through such challenging text can be fun and rewarding nonetheless.
Reading is also not passive because it requires going out and finding material. Most avid readers are particular about what they read; I don’t know anyone who engrosses themselves in whatever rando book falls into their lap.
My opinion:
Earlier I mentioned collecting coins.
Keeping a piggy bank is nothing.
Checking dates on coins and putting “old” coins in a jar is a pasttime.
Having books on coins, organizing coins, knowing when lincoln pennies started, when wheat pennies ended, when they had steel pennies, knowing what D, S and VDB on coins mean, and so forth makes it a hobby.
Going to conventions, spending hours in a coin shop is a “serious hobby”.
Owning a coin store is a profession.
You could take about anything and be in any of these catagories. Riding bikes would be a hobby if you know bikes, bike parts, etc.
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Does social stigma associated with an activity prevent it from being labeled as a hobby, even if it meets any other criteria one might come up with? It seems there is some of that in the discussion of books vs. TV. Books are considered more elevated somehow?
Someone can be a beer hobbyist, or a wine hobbyist, or even mixology hobbyist. What about a weed hobbyist, in today’s world I’m sure there are those who would claim the moniker. Would we accept the hobbyist label for someone who likes to experiment with harder drugs.
There’s stuff I do without financial reward or necessity. I don’t label any of them as hobbies versus something else like a passtime. I don’t particularly care about having a label for distinction between the various stuff I do.
One activity that I never see claimed as a hobby is the thing all of us here do:
Message boarding.
It meets all the criteria of a hobby that I can think of. It’s active. It’s interactive. It takes some amount of skill in written communication. To engage a topic and put to text your thoughts about it in a way that invites commentary from others is more than just mindless entertainment. I’ve spent untold hours reading and posting in online fora since the late 1990’s. The things I’ve learned about the world and my own mind from doing this are immeasurable.
But if someone asked me what my hobbies are, I would never think to say “participating in message boards”. I think it comes from feeling like it’s not as “real” as other pursuits. But it is as real as anything else. If instead of going online and posting to the SDMB, I attended a weekly (or daily) meetup event where people discussed and debated various topics like we do here, my mind would be more apt to call that a hobby.
If somebody asks, there are a couple of things I claim as hobbies. But I don’t really think of them as hobbies. But I would be more likely to think of some of them as hobbies, based on the fact that (1) I devote time & money to them and (2) I hope to get better at them. So I’m not going to get better at watching television, and I’m not going to get better at reading novels. I’m not going to get better at taking long walks with my dog. I might get better at tennis, and I might get better at tap dancing. If I don’t, no big deal. I’m not gonna get kicked out of the dance class or busted back to beginning tap; I’m not gonna get booted from the tennis club. I could also throw in the guitar. I have a hell of a lot of room to get better at that, as I only know two chords and one of them is E minor (and the other one isn’t). I know you need to learn at least four chords, but not just any four chords. Dang!
I don’t think I’m going to get better at message boarding, either.
Anyway, that’s my criteria, devote time + money, hope to get better.
I also spend time + money doing DIY home projects but that couldn’t be a hobby, 'cause I hate it, and only do it because I’m better at it than anyone I could afford to pay, or…I have to fix it up to a certain level before inviting an actual professional in to do the job right.
Fake edit: But, if I’m watching tennis on television, does that work into my hobby? Because I do miraculously get a lot better right after I’ve watched a few matches. So do my opponents, unfortunately.
And if playing bridge isn’t a hobby, then what is it?