Responding to the this and the ensuing discussion… And yet, people in some of the poorest places around do things like play music and sports, just because they love to do it. Isn’t that what “amateur” means, literally?
Also, somebody mentioned the quadracopter… I worked at a hobby shop in the late 1990s, and I heard so many customers talk about hiding purchases from their spouses. It started to rub me the wrong way before long.
You’re right in a way, but there are still ways and means. Quite a few crafts exist as a solution to frugal finances (cooking, make-do-and-mend, upcycling, etc) - and time - the biggest thief of time (IMO) is not work, it’s TV.
Well, of course–obviously. My point is that they don’t have a special word for it–a word that indexes something beyond what those particular activities entail by themselves, and which displays certain socio-cultural perspectives. In many places people don’t “have hobbies.” Instead, they just do those various things (when and if they can). I know this from first-hand experience in refugee resettlement, when this exact word–hobby–came up once. It turned out that the word hobby (no matter how it got interpreted) was effectively meaningless for Somali refugees.
In the poorest parts of the world, hobbies tend to have a direct link to either making money (sewing, making snack foods, decorating items, etc.) or to gaining social prestige (cooking for large gatherings, dancing in traditional dance groups, etc.) Most extremely poor adults don’t have much time for sports, though kids certainly do. Music, in my experience, tends to be the realm of certain families who are compensated for their work, but often not directly, though singing is pretty common everywhere.
But some things seem to be universal. In rural Cameroon, sometimes people would take up the idea of becoming a “traditional man” and dress up in a loincloth and go off into the bush to hunt with bows and arrows…just for kicks. This was seen as an amusing and eccentric thing to take up. It’s the African village equivalent of SCA.
One thing that I have noticed that might take away from traditional hobbies is the presence of streaming video. Instead of figuring for themselves how something is built, experimenting or reading a magazine and then attempting to construct something, almost ANYTHING that you want to do has a YouTube video for it. You just have watch it repeatedly and Voila! whatever hobby that you enjoy is done for you.
No need for ingenuity.
No guessing.
Almost impossible to screw up.
Some examples:
Amateur rocketry
Steam engine construction.
Model shipbuilding.
Glass blowing
Basket weaving.
Somebody has already done it and all you have to do is copy them.
Seems to take a lot of the fun out of hobbling.
I’m not sure how that is different from researching in books. When I learned to play piano, I found streaming videos on how to play my favorite songs. I’d spend hours learning each song by playing the videos over and over. I still had to put in the time to practice, to build muscle memory, and to learn the chord shapes and chord progressions. Now, I can write my own songs.
My belief is that hobbies, especially ones that involve creativity and social interaction will be the dot com boom of this century.
If I could throw in some things about your wife.
I would bet that growing up poor your wife learned how to raise a vegetable garden, cook from scratch, and sew. The people in those areas do those things not out of love for them, but as a necessary part of life. The concept of gardening, sewing, and cooking from scratch now as a “fun” pastime would seem crazy now.
Similar I read once where a US soldier in Iraq went into a local Iraqi bicycle shop. He discussed mountain biking and the Iraqi couldnt understand it. To him, bicycles were purely for work or transportation. On occasion some people did race them but the idea one would ride a bicycle for purely “fun” and spend lots of time and money just to take a bicycle out on a mountain trail just didnt make sense.
It would be the same to ask a poor fisherman from a developing country to go out on a weekend to do a “catch and release” day of fishing.
Oh I disagree. Often you get the basics from a video then take it somewhere else.
Take for example the “Redneck Rocket Launcher” (Google it). About 10 years ago this redneck made up this cool video of how to launch 1,000 bottle rockets at once. Well actually it was poorly edited and filmed but still workable. It became an instant hit. Along with the line “It will be killer bad baby”. Now many people have copied the basic design but improved it. Yet they still end with the “killer bad baby” line.
I think alot of hobbies are sitting in closets waiting for the person to retire and take them up again.
On model trains. Heck models of most any sort.
Why is it almost no women are into model trains? I have seen so often a model train layout and surrounding it are all these boys. Dozens of them all races and ethnic groups just staring at them. An occasional girl will come up, look, and then walk away.
The funniest was at the “Thomas the Tank Engine” festival where about 20 boys were all playing with the trains with but one girl in the group. BUT on the other side of the room was a kids coloring area and thats where all the little girls were- sitting quietly coloring.
Same thing, go to a model railroader convention and the occasional female you see will either be just selling things. In my cousins group the only thing the women want to do maybe is paint the backdrops.
Same with plastic models. Has anyone known any female getting excited about putting together a 200 piece model of an aircraft carrier?
I’ve wondered about this for years. As even sven pointed out early in the thread, hobbies seem largely the province of males. Women seem to have much less interest in them. Not saying none, just considerably less interest.
I’ve been camping/Rv-ing for about 40 years, and in that time I’ve seen exactly one woman bring a trailer into a campground. (part of a group of ladies who were camping together)
I’ve been boating for the same 40 years and have seen women on a boat (with no men) only a couple of times. I’ve only seen one woman launch a boat by herself. I know there are more than this, but it’s so rare as to be memorable.
I’ve been a flight instructor for 30 years and I’ve never instructed a woman who was learning to fly (like Broomstick) just for fun. Several who’d chosen it as a career, but never once encountered a “hobbyist” lady pilot.
This gender difference is glaring even in my own family. If memory serves, since becoming parents we’ve had 4 boats, 2 airplanes, 4 RVs, 2 go-carts, and uncountable RC planes/trains/etc. No matter how much I’ve offered, *none *of the distaff side of the family shows the slightest interest in learning or using any of these. Even with a licensed instructor in the house, neither wife nor daughter wanted flying lessons. Ditto with the boats, 4 wheelers, etc. They go with us on outings and really have fun, but wouldn’t be there without the guys.
Maybe (again referring to even sven’s posts) my question should have been “Where are all the lady hobbyists?” Maybe the decline is largely due to men having a smaller role in the family finances, but I would have thought with additional say-so and earning power, women would be getting more into hobbies. And also, it may be that I’m not looking at the right hobbies. They’re just evolving to something different.
Thanks to everyone for your responses… this is really interesting.
I think you guys are just seeing it through a filter of “these are the hobbies I am into. I am male. The hobbies I do are mostly male-oriented. Therefore, women have no hobbies.”
Its as if I concluded that, since I don’t see any guys into knitting, guys must not be into hobbies.
Wait, what kind of hobbies do you mean? Certain hobbies are nearly exclusively done by women - knitting, hand and machine sewing, crocheting, cross-stitch and embroidery, quilting, jewelry-making, that kind of thing. Many women draw, paint, cook, bake, sing. I used to make soap and other homemade beauty products like scrubs and lotions, and some people make herbal tinctures/oils.
I agree that certain hobbies seem gender-split based on traditional gender roles and division of labor. I learned knitting from a female teacher in grade school who only taught the girls. But via books and websites, I taught myself origami, homebrewing, calligraphy, cross-stitch, soap and lotion-making. I learned model rocketry (including all the gluing and painting and assembly one could want with their Estes kit) from one of my grade school teachers back in the early 80s, and I loved it.
Arguments aside that “Brewer” was a woman’s surname historically, homebrewing is a very guy-centered hobby. Probably because beer is dude-centered, too, and the West Coast IPAs that seemed more like “how bitter can you go” dick-measuring contests don’t help that image. But times are changing. I’ve been brewing for several years, and am encountering more and more fellow women who love beer and are interested in homebrewing.
Edit: Ninja’d by Septima!
And baking. I’m rubbish at all sorts of cooking but some of my colleagues go to enormous lengths to create spectacular cakes. I am truly in awe of their baking and decorating efforts.
I don’t know. As I said, my wife also grew up in poor rural Latin America and, despite the fact that people sewed and cooked and farmed to stay alive and warm, she still enjoys cooking, baking and crocheting as hobbies. She’s not much of a gardener but she likes it when I plant a garden so she has stuff to cook with. Many hobbies spring up out of taking a necessity to another level of quality, adding artistic touches or transferring the skills to something new.
She’s funny when it comes to the idea of camping (“Only you gringos would want to go back into the forest”) and about lost her mind when my Martha Stewart devotee sister invited us apple picking at an orchard (“Wait, we’re going to pay someone else so we can do migrant farm work?”). Luckily, that last one was privately to me and not to my sister 
As to Beowulf’s comments about virtual hobbies being “sad”, I think I see his point. Maybe it’s an age-thing. To me, age 52, a “hobby” is defined by something “solid”. Woodworking, model cars, model trains, model airplanes, archery, etc. There are tangible (literally, not metaphorically: touchable) results.
Despite the amount of work involved, doing a hobby on computers seems…lazy? Like the stereotype of the kids in front of the TV all day - get up and go DO something! I admit, it’s a perception thing. It’s like some parody science fiction of the ‘brave new world’ - everyone does traditional hobbies on computers. Everyone shows off their virtual trains, their virtual quilts, their virtual model rockets, and only the readers (or the time-transplanted reader analog) see how “odd” it really is.
I’m not condemning virtual railroading. I like model trains, but the cost and room required keeps me from having a layout. I have experimented with virtual trains, but I don’t want to spend the money on THAT either (and the time-it would eat into my model car time:)). Also, virtual trains is to me a different hobby. Running virtual trains is one thing (it’s like virtual airplane flying; each involves skill), but having a virtual train collection seems like looking at pictures.
I can see how I could be coming across as condescending, but I am not meaning to. I am just giving my perspective. Like, I also collect vintage arcade games (Star Wars, Battle Zone, etc). Now, they can be emulated to run on a desktop, but playing the games that way doesn’t (in the words of Scotty) feel right. I think you need the “feel”, the heft, of the original cabinet and controls.
It’s obviously nostalgia-I’m trying to recreate my lost youth!
[pout] I’m going to go play with my (Duncan Butterfly) yo-yo now!
Another thought - imagine what “virtual quilting” could be like. One way could be that you have a program that emulates a sewing machine. There is a foot pedal input, and a touch pad interface. The quilter uses the touch pad to “guide” the material past the virtual needle, activating the virtual machine with the foot pedal. This is like flying model airplanes on the computer-it still requires skill, you can make mistakes - crash the plane, make wavy stitch lines - but they can be corrected easier.
But, another way could be you just select patterns and use a photoshop-like program to arrange them. The skill set is different. In the first, the skills are manual (can you hold the “material” straight?), in the second, they are artistic (can you make a pleasing pattern?).
Maybe we are living in the ‘transition period’. Quilts used to be made because people needed blankets. Now, most quits made are purely decorative. Maybe the end result is all that matters? Having a sewing machine emulator is the equivalent of a virtual buggy whip, something that isn’t needed any more? Maybe in the future all anyone will care about is the result, and will laugh at us ‘primitives’ that waste time making errors when they can get a perfect result every time?
Now I found something our wives have in common! My wife also pokes fun at camping as a hobby. When she talked about how her family didn’t really have the time or money to go on vacations or do fun stuff, I had suggested camping. Its a very economical way to spend a vacation- you can get a lot of equipment secondhand/at yard sales, the cost of the actual camp site is cheap, you could do it once a year for a weekend so it doesn’t take a ton of time, etc.
With camping, she said that the idea of sleeping out in the woods didn’t appeal to many people in her culture. I joked with her that maybe white people are so rich and privleged they gotta go back to doing ‘poor people’ things for fun . To her credit, she went with me on a camping trip with my family and really enjoyed it. But even her family now, comfortably middle class, wouldn’t be keen on going. While they can afford it, they rarely go on vacations, and if they do travel its back to Mexico to visit relatives every other year. The house they stay in has dirt floors, no hot water, nobody has cars so you have to walk everywhere (apparently bicycles are scarce too?) they have open-air kitchens and cook every day, etc. Its probably a decent analogue to camping, but in their case its more of a ‘making due’ thing than, “How about this year we rent a tiny house in an isolated valley of Central Mexico! It’ll be so quaint!”
Someone mentioned our perception of hobbies also, and I see their point too. My wife and I were discussing it (I find the thread very interesting. I like knowing why certain groups are more keen to doing activity A vs other groups prefer activity B). It says a lot about different cultures, and how cultures value time differently. I pointed out to my wife that if you never have ‘time’ to spend on yourself, its easy to look at hobbies that require a LOT of time and think, "That looks fun, but I’d never have time to pursue it. Even if maybe it was totally feasible to find a way to work it into your life, seeing someone spending a hundred hours a week at it will make it look like its a huge commitment.
It seems that for some cultures, the freedom to sit and do nothing is preferred. People who spend their leisure time just sitting on the front porch. Sure they could be making something, or playing some sport, or collecting some object, but for them having the freedom to just relax is their fun.
For other cultures and groups, they can get really hypercompetitive when it comes to hobbies. Their enjoyment seems to be derived from how dedicated they are at it. This is common with hobbies that are heavily equipment and social based- you are interacting with other people in the hobby, and maybe the quality of the equipment plays a big factor. Someone that wants to progress in the hobby further or gain social status will have to spend more time and money.
Like even sven mentioned, for some cultures hobbies are intertwined with making money or social standing. The incentive to pursue the hobby is from the fact that it is a practical benefit to your life. I don’t know if this would even fall under ‘hobby’. Wouldn’t it just be a ‘job’? If you were good enough at playing the lute to play in the town square to busk for money/play for events and it was as lucrative as pig farming, isn’t that just a job you like doing more than pig farming? I guess at some point there’s a grey area between “Hobby that makes decent money” and “Job I really enjoy working at”.