It seems that most of the traditional “Hobbies” I grew up around are disappearing. Googling around a bit, many of the articles about hobbies are reporting on their decline. Stamp collecting appears to have dropped 90% since 1950; Golf seems to have reached a point where they’re discussing increasing hole size to pizza pan levels to attract newcomers; And Model Railroading seems to be suffering a similar fate.
Last year I started a thread asking about the decline in boat traffic on local lakes (to the point that most lakeside businesses had shuttered), but at the time I wasn’t aware it was part of a larger drop in most traditional pastimes. I’m curious what you Dopers think are some of the reasons for this. I understand the economy has a large role in it, especially for high dollar pursuits (boating, flying, etc.). But I’m surprised at the apparent decline in more frugal activities.
Canvassing a few friends/wife/co-workers, I get two main theories:
Loans and Phones. Lots of disposable income is now tied up in electronics/networks, and most people are carrying quite a bit of debt. No money, and the entertainment of Netflix/Youtube has supplanted the old hobbies.
Leisure time has been eaten away by sand-in-the-gears stuff like kid’s activities (leagues, rather than pickup games), along with lengthier commute times.
So, what is your take on this? What do you think will happen to the “recreational landscape” in the coming decades?
I think most specific hobbies have a limited shelf-life. People still have hobbies, just not the same ones. It shifts. At one point, cars were a hobbyists toy, they aren’t any more.
Boardgaming is flowering as never before, and is even shifting quite seamlessly to electronic formats.
Knitting and other fibercraft is explosively popular, even among kids and some men. Handspinning and dying is increasingly “trendy”, attracting the hobbyist gearheads who set up urban workshops and go to conventions.
Geocashing was a thing for a while (still is?), and I think there will be new trends of tech-gear reliant athletic hobbies as smartphones become increasingly combinable with outdoor and wilderness activities.
Cosplay is huge, as are other DIY costume hobbies (steampunk laptop, anyone?)
All the hobbies you mentioned have a pretty male slant. I think wifey is a little less willing to hold down the fort while daddy hits the links, especially if she’s had a long work week herself.
I agree that new hobbies are thriving. Blogging is huge. Crafting is undergoing a revival. Gourmet cooking and home brewing are huge. Biking is popular. Working out is now routine. Electronics tinkering is hip again.
I’m a railway nut. Big train fan. It’s HUGE here in Australia, relatively speaking. From rail photography to heritage railway volunteering, to preservation generally, to modelling. The only place that would beat us is possibly the spiritual home of the train spotter, the UK. However, for whatever reason, while this all exists in the United States, it seems disproportionately small, especially given the population. Google a rail topic, and you’ll get a slew of Australian and UK hits, and a few American ones only.
No idea why, or even if this translates to other hobbies.
I wonder whether this decline might owe a good deal, to the reason why I (born 1948, a quite keen philatelist for about the first twenty years of my life) abandoned the hobby. For me, it came to involve sheer stamp-issuing “overkill” on the part of the majority of countries on earth. As of the late 1950s, it was largely a matter of: most countries had their standard “definitive” = “bread-and-butter” run of – relatively unspectacular – stamps, with a wide range of values: they issued fancier stamps, largely to commemorate particular occasions, just now and again. In that era, it was just a relatively few nations which ran riot issuing a huge variety of pictorial stamps, with the purpose of alluring philatelists and making money by doing so.
From about the 1960s, more and more countries got on that bandwagon: issuing lots and lots of fancy stamps, sometimes commemorating something, sometimes on random themes – the whole idea being, to milk the philatelic cow. This seems to have increased exponentially, nearly worldwide from then to now. This whole trend sickened me of the hobby, quite early on – it all got to feel phony and a charade, rather than being “a hobby about something with a serious non-hobby purpose of its own”, if that makes any sense. Some collectors have long opted for specialising on particular countries or themes, but that never appealed to me: I wanted to collect either the whole world, or none of it; and ended up taking the latter option.
Speaking as a keen railfan and lifelong UK inhabitant – your perception may be more accurate than mine, but I was a bit surprised at the suggestion of relatively few American devotees of the hobby. I’ve always had the impression, from various sources, that there are many, many railfans in the USA – also (proportionately, allowing for the smaller population) in Canada. There are for sure plenty of preserved volunteer-operated rail outfits in North America…
Certainly, railway enthusiasm is a pursuit more, and less, engaged in respectively in different parts of the world: to give another instance, it has long been big in Germany.
It seems to me the whole notion of “collecting” has gone a bit by the wayside, in favor of different hobbies that are more productive and creative. Crafts, cooking, brewing, maker type stuff, all involve using your human ingenuity.
Collecting stamps/coins/baseball cards doesn’t take any skill – just a book to tell you what’s valuable, the right amount of cash, and a bit of luck. That seems pretty boring to me. Train sets would be an exception – that can be extremely creative – but I think there the problem is that setting up a good track takes more space than most people have to give over to a hobby nowadays.
ETA: the US is a big country. Just because there’s X number of railfans in the US, doesn’t mean its generally popular.
About 38 million Americans knit or crochet, and that’s still a bit of a niche hobby.
My cousin was never interested in fishing before she married her 2nd husband. He got her started and now she enjoys it. She’s not just paying lip service to it.
Some hobbies changed as technology did. There seem to be no slot cars now, but there are RC cars. And some evolved; stamp and coin collecting seem to be thought of as investments and not hobbies now. Ham radio seems to have lessened because it’s easier to get online to talk to people on the other side of the Earth.
And with online commerce, the “thrill of the find” that makes collecting fun doesn’t really happen. Spending a weekend digging around the local shops for just the right piece can be fun, and when you do finally find that missing piece in your collection, it’s a really good feeling. Collecting stamps used to involve all kinds of complicated setups between stamp collectors in various countries, and getting your hands on something really rare was an accomplishment. And while hobbies have always had guides, it used to be that most of the knowledge resided in the heads of the hobbiests.
But today, you can just go online and find anything. It doesn’t take a lot of knowledge or persistance, and what you have in your collection is primarily a function of how much money you feel like dumping in to it.
I’ve mentioned these as a couple of reasons General Aviation has been declining. Textron/Cessna’s business model seems to be geared toward short-term profits instead of building a customer base. Flying has never been ‘cheap’, but it used to be affordable. Now there are phones and computers and Netflix and myriad other things that are easier and cheaper.
I have virtually no leisure time. My office is 110 miles away from home, and I still have to go to it twice a week. On telecommuting days I tend to work at least nine hours with only time out to make a sandwich and to attend to physiological imperatives. Evenings and weekends are taken up by other responsibilities. There’s just no time for hobbies anymore. My best friend’s short film was an official selection at a film festival. I was supposed to direct it, but didn’t have the time. Here I am with enough film cameras, grip gear, and lighting to make any indie filmmaker jealous, and I don’t have time to use it! And reading? I’m trying to read the last Song Of Ice And Fire book, but haven’t picked it up in almost two weeks. And then there are those boxes of old Estes rockets and Guillow’s airplanes and plastic models that have been waiting for decades to be built. And as for the ‘loans’ bit, I have a mortgage and credit card debt. My house is old and needs maintenance and prettifying. Cars need to be maintained. And so on.
I always wanted to take up model railroading as a hobby. No money for it, no time, and certainly no space. As far as my hobbies go, some things are harder to find now. Cox no longer makes model airplane engines, and the ones that exist are ‘collectibles’. Now, I could build my Midwest ‘Sniffer’ with an electric motor, but where’s the fun in that? It’s designed to run out of fuel and then come down with the help of a tilting stabiliser that stalls it. An electric motor would last too long. Oh, I could (and would) put radio control in it since r/c is small enough nowadays; but I still want the Cox .020 Pee Wee in it. Rockets? Lots of trees up here in Rainland, unlike the wide-open desert where I lived as a teen. Filmmaking? Sure I can shoot on digital, but film is more fun. And it’s harder to get it processed now.
‘Collecting’ does involve discipline(s) and constraints, and analytical thought: things like blogging or cooking are not the same since one can do whatever the hell one wants. Plus the results don’t matter to the rest of the world.
However the decline in collections of older items may have something to do with increasing scarcity. Population has exploded, so there’s less to go around if say, one concentrates on 19th century stamps or coins; those in possession may be pleased with what they have, and uninterested in selling; the amounts of all older things are diminishing yearly, through natural causes and the eternal propensity of ignorant old biddies — and dirty little modernists — to chuck out old stuff they see no value in, mostly because it’s of the past.
Some collecting which involved animal parts has thankfully declined, such as taxidermy or birds-eggs, because people don’t want animal bits lying about.
Electronic tinkering, with transistors and capacitors, is still possible, but a kid may not see the point when he can just go and buy a finely made product from Apple or whomever…
Some hobbies have adapted a bit. Model rocketry used to involve hours of building from kits, waiting for the glue to dry, painting, and then maybe you could launch your rocket.
Nowadays, the Estes company sells hordes of pre-made rocket kits where the rockets are ready to fly. Maybe put a piece or two together but no glue and no paint. Most of these kits will be launched a few times by Dads with their kids to see if they have any long-term interest or just for a family fun afternoon.
You can still but the old tubes and paints, but Estes sure seems to see where their bread is buttered.
If you think blogging doesn’t matter to the rest of the world…well, you may have missed the last decade.
And, uh, while some old things are disappearing, new things are getting old. For example, my Grandmother’s old furniture is now worth fortunes as “mid-century modern” vintage pieces.
As a blogger I am sad to inform you that no-one particularly cares what you say, nor how often you say it. The world’s indifference mirrors it’s indifference to the individual lives of the untold millions
Blogs are important for two reasons: they provide elusive hope of AdSense earnings to those who permit advertising, and hope is [del]always[/del] [del]often[/del] sometimes a good thing; and they hinder the depraved, growing, corporatization of the Internet. I would rather read a 100 GeoCities sites of the most inane content than a single article devoted to selling me crap I will not want.
I would be delighted to burn it as modernist minimalist ***. Art for Art’s sake.
This is a big worry among railway enthusiasts in the UK at the present time, concerning the photographic collections of railfans of my (“baby-boomer”) generation, and yet more so, those a bit older – now, in the natural order of things, doing a lot of dying. With those who have made no provision for passing their pictures on into safe hands (that including many railfans – the hobby tending to appeal to loners who do their own stuff and don’t bother much about any of the rest of mankind) – there’s a likelihood that many envisagedly priceless picture-collections, will just be thrown out into “skips and landfill” by uninterested relatives / heirs, after the picture-taker’s death.
Not a big worry for me – I’m rather a heretic among railway enthusiasts, in never having been much into the photographic side of the hobby – I’m a beyond-crap photographer: and feeling that it tends to create over-the-top tunnel vision in many, and that very much on the Western world’s railway scene circa 1945 – 2014, has been photographed to death and beyond (pictures thus taken, guaranteed to survive); but admittedly, there must be, as above, much interesting (to those whom such stuff, interests) material that is currently at risk.
I was at a friend’s house and he showed me his radio-controlled quadracopter. I was impressed. It has a video camera and he can watch a feed from the camera on his iPhone live as he’s flying. I thought it must have cost a couple hundred bucks.
Then his wife came home. He quickly landed the thing and hid it away. Turns out she doesn’t know about it and it cost $1400.00!
Speaking of adapting hobbies, there’s a popular computer “game” called Train Simulator. People laugh at the the fact that Train Simulator has over $3,000 worth of extras you can buy for it such as different engines, cars, rail lines, etc but the idea isn’t to own all of them. Rather it’s sort of a digital version of the basement model railroad hobby that doesn’t require a thousand trips to the ever-decreasing number of hobby shops and the wrath of your spouse as you take over the garage and laundry room.
Showing the combined hobbies of computer and trains, there’s also a TON of free content created by train enthusiasts who model new historic engines and trains and provide them to other players.