Do Hobbies Suck? A Study Hall Debate

A battle has been raging inside Study Hall HQ for weeks, threatening to tear this organization apart: Are hobbies good?

Against Hobbies

By Allegra Hobbs

My therapist once asked me what I enjoy doing and I stared out the window for several long moments before I finally said, “Showering.” Nothing else came to mind. My favorite activities aren’t so much activities as they are ways of doing nothing disguised as doing something. Doing things is an extreme measure, to be undertaken out of necessity – you must do things, at some point, but if you don’t have to, why would you? Whenever my friends want to do an activity I think, can’t we just sit around and drink coffee and talk? What’s more pleasurable than that?

My misanthropic attitude toward activity is, depending on who you ask, either aligned by chance with the spirit of quarantine or totally counter to it. We’ve been confined to our homes for the foreseeable future, sentenced to a prolonged period of relative inactivity while we wait out the pandemic. For people who love doing nothing, this is an opportunity to do more of it than ever. For people who love activities, it’s an opportunity to seek out new ones with the ferocity of a caged animal. Learn to bake bread! Take up knitting! Need a quarantine hobby? Here’s what celebs are doing at home.

Here’s what I’ve been doing with my spare time in quarantine: pleasantly melting my brain with a re-watch of early-aughts teen soap The O.C.; answering boring questions posed by those quiz filters on Instagram; FaceTiming my friends with a reckless disregard for schedule or time zone; staring out the window and thinking about going outside; going outside, experiencing a rush of adrenaline that evolves block-by-block into panic, then turning around and going home; showering multiple times per day, for luxurious stretches of time.

I am an anti-hobbyist. Cooking doesn’t appeal to me — I can do it, but I see it more as a necessary step on the way to eating. I don’t want to learn a new skill, to go from not knowing how to do something to gradually, through practice and repetition, mastering it. What happens next? I’m good at a new thing? What’s the end game? To be the best at it? Not interested.

Of course I understand that people take up hobbies for the purpose of pure enjoyment, or for the satisfaction of having accomplished something. I just seem to be missing the part of my brain that would allow me to feel satisfaction at having learned to knit or whittle or grow a sourdough starter. To a certain extent, this is probably because I’m a little lazy, but since I’m locked in a Brooklyn apartment with my thoughts and copious time to interrogate them I know there’s more to it than that.

Two things are true — that we will die, and that not every moment before death can possibly be crammed with meaning. I am personally of the belief that enthusiastic hobbyists are in denial of the latter. There is a sense that we must make the most of our downtime because all time is finite; that it is more enriching, more meaningful to make something with your hands than to lie motionless. The spectre of “wasted time” haunts the hobbyist, who keeps it at bay with a flurry of action, projects undertaken and skills mastered. If time is a precious, finite resource, could anything be worse than wasting it?

But the mania to “make every moment count” has a dark, shadowy twin, which is the compulsion to keep the mind preoccupied so we don’t have to think about death at all, or feel the full weight of life as it happens to us. I know this compulsion well. Much of my life has been spent in pursuit of ways to switch my brain off, but I find more relief dunking my head in the welcome vacuity of a Great British Bake Off binge than in picking up an instrument.

Any time I try a hobby, I find myself more acutely aware of my mortality — I’m going to die, so why pour hours, days, weeks into pulling yarn together to make a pattern (I don’t know how to knit)? The spectre of wasted time does haunt me, but I can’t seem to convince myself that something like knitting is a worthy time-filler. And if it is ultimately no more worthwhile than binge-watching a show that makes my brain feel smooth and empty, why make the time-filling more arduous than it has to be? Will I be a better person for having learned how to knit? More fulfilled? More enlightened? More in touch with my humanity? I begin to agonize over whether the thing I’m doing has a purpose; when I conclude that it doesn’t, I resort back to intentional purposelessness.

I’ve always been this way, to a point. I’ve never been competitive, and I’ve always hated games because I could never get over the mental hurdle that victory is utterly meaningless. I’ve always felt that I should either throw myself headfirst into meaningful pursuits — I want relatively high stakes and a euphoric payoff — or let myself sink into the ground. Anything in between fills me with anxiety and existential dread. As a result, my quarantine consists of sling-shotting between bursts of productive creativity and marathon stretches of lying in bed.

In Praise of Hobbies

By Erin Schwartz

I am currently halfway through a DIY project to make makeup brushes out of human hair. The human hair is my own, an orange ponytail cinched in an elastic band that was cut off a few months ago by a barber before a buzz cut; I kept it, planning to do something with it when I had the time. Two weekends ago, I got bored, bleached it, washed it, spritzed it with oil, and laid it out on a kitchen towel to dry. I took apart a cheap makeup brush and melted out the glue holding the acrylic bristles in place with a kitchen torch. Once the hair dried, I separated out the healthiest sections and sorted them by length; the bad, damaged hair became felt.

The towel with its neat skeins of hair is sitting on my kitchen table — I still haven’t had the time or desire to figure out how to pack as much hair as possible into the eight-millimeter-wide ferrule, then shave it down to eyeshadow-brush dimensions. (I am the only person living in my apartment right now and recognize that, under other circumstances, this would make me the worst roommate ever.) It is up there with the stupidest things I have ever done. The hair is in horrible shape and will almost certainly make a worse makeup brush than the one I started with; the process is labor-intensive and time-consuming. Still, I’ll probably finish it because the project has taken on the heady, thrilling momentum of a hobby.

I am obsessed with hobbies. Currently, mine include jigsaw puzzles, shopping, dyeing my hair, making flavored sodas, Survivor spinoffs, cooking, working on my YouTube playlists, and skincare. Abandoned hobbies include watching esports tournaments, knitting, yoga, crosswords, nail art, Sacred Harp shape-note singing, investing in cryptocurrency, running a meme page about the American author Henry James, and rollerblading. I hope to take up several of these hobbies again someday, but I’m comfortable leaving them alone until then, like a jar of dried beans in the back of a pantry or a dress I’ve grown sick of after wearing too often.

The recent boom of quarantine hobby content can create the sense that one’s hobbies are meant to produce something useful or beautiful, develop mastery in a field, or create a sense of spiritual fulfillment. Perhaps a better person could do that, but I define a hobby as anything you do with perverse zeal that you can drop as soon as it stops being fun. Hobbies are about mindset rather than output; it’s probably possible to make sleeping or wearing socks into a hobby. If you’re pursuing it obsessively, it doesn’t matter if the final product is a total mess.

Here is the ideal scenario: your friends have gently informed you that they don’t give a shit about your hobby and you are free to pursue it either alone or with a small- to medium-sized group of people on the internet, people you will never meet and to whom most of your personality is irrelevant. Being a complete person to everyone you know is exhausting; just being a complete person to yourself is exhausting. Hobbies give you an excuse to tune out the important things and focus instead on something dumb, esoteric, and pleasurably limited. They reveal expansive yet totally inessential spaces inside yourself, the basketball courts and bowling alleys of your mind palace.

This quality makes hobbies a fantastic hedge against what essayist Tim Kreider termed “the mortifying ordeal of being known,” like medieval spike pits ringed around the self, if you could somehow fill spike pits with shitposts and half-ironic fandom. They are intricate, external defenses against being wholly apprehended by another person. Part of the pleasure of a hobby is developing proficiency — it’s thrilling to feel something that was frustrating a few months ago become second nature — but the real joy of hobbies is building them up and then dropping them, without guilt, remorse, or the need for explanation.

The encroachment of capitalism into private life has made it difficult to treat anything as truly, deeply inconsequential, even the things you do only for yourself. Hobbies can provide an alternative. If you really want to, you can do something beautiful and useful, like baking a sourdough loaf to share with your friends and family. Or you can come up with the most idiotic use of the crafting supplies in your apartment and spend twelve hours making cursed objects that you will, God willing, never use again. It’s the same thing: we need things that truly don’t matter in order to stay sane.

A rebuttal from Erin Schwartz

I respect Ms. Hobbs’ sentiments towards hobbies, but I feel the need to correct the record on one point: the hobbyist does not fear death. I love death. I look into the face of death and I say, “Bring it on.” I just can’t sit still because I have a bad brain.

A rebuttal from Allegra Hobbs

I am delighted Ms. Schwartz derives a sense of fulfillment from making her own hair into makeup brushes. Hypothetically, it might be nice to devote myself to something time-consuming but ultimately trivial. Unfortunately, I’m incapable of enjoying such an exercise because I have a bad brain.

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