from the early 1400s until the 19th century the word hobby was mostly a
descriptor for a pony or small horse but in the wake of the Industrial Revolution
the diminutive word had taken on a new life as a term used to describe a
recreational activity performed outside of your normal work hours and today
whether it's running marathons baking instagram-worthy cakes or collecting
rare weird stuff it seems like everybody has a productive hobby and they're
getting so productive that leisure time is quickly leaking back into our
productive hours in the forms of side hustles hobby competitions on the gig
economy but why and when did we develop noncompensatory skills outside of our
usual nine-to-five aka things we do for fun but not for money but we still work
actively at getting better at and did you know that the origin of the hobby as
a practice stems from the 19th century rise of middle-class culture and efforts
by this burgeoning conservative middle class to keep people productive and away
from more decadent and frivolous off-the-clock pursuits so let's just
skip over the tiny horse part of hobbies history and get right into the way we
use it today industrialization across europe and the US in the 18th and 19th
centuries brought work largely out of the home or the local sphere and into
larger cities and factories as a result labor became something that was
commodified by hours spent at work which were increasingly sold by poor and
working-class laborers to wealthy business owners but although the
emergence of more industrial labor brought a sharper divide between work
life and home life than say agriculture did where folks often lived on the farms
where they worked work and leisure weren't as sharply separated as you
think in his book hobbyist leisure and the culture of work in America historian
Stephen M Gelber notes that in the early days hobbies in the u.s. developed as a
category of socially valued leisure activity in the 19th century because
they bridged the world of work and home according to Gelber hobbies brought the
values of maximized productivity from the external workplace into the home for
women and allowed men who worked outside of the home to create a businesslike
space he also notes that while hobbies offered relief from the old grindstone
they also occupied a space tied to productive leisure so instead of coming
home to kick off your shoes and eat a bunch of snacks before taking a nap you
are expected to put your hands to use in some fun but also constructive way
Gelber states that for the middle-class worker this created a process of
disguised affirmation where you still feel rewarded and happy for not working
/ taking it easy but you're also unconsciously mirroring the kind of
productivity you experience and are rewarded for at work
so you learn to play an instrument or Whittle or knit although if I learned to
whittle I would have zero fingers left but you don't just bang away aimlessly
at the keys or hack into a piece of wood earn it endless ribbons of material with
no aim in sight you started off shaky but over time you build strength behind
the skill pushing yourself to play harder music make bigger wood projects
or make three sets of baby clothing for your best friend before she gives birth
and all of a sudden you have a workplace level skill that you do for fun but
don't get paid for hobbies but hobbies popularity in the 19th century was also
divided by class and gender Gelber notes that both working-class and middle-class
men could be encouraged to have hobbies because their lives were equally
structured outside of the home by the workweek however for the emerging group
of middle-class women in the United States in the 19th century hobbies were
a distinctive pastime that was separate from the kind of work they were expected
to do in the home and a sign of crafting so instead of sewing in the home to
repair your family's worn-out items or threadbare stockings
perhaps a middle-class woman can now take time to do things like complicated
needlework which is pretty but not always attached to a practical use and
while both men and women who develop hobbies are often interested in
perfecting their craft trades and collections it only remains a hobby if
you are uninterested in profiting from it as your main source of income so you
may be able to make world-class wooden canoes but you can't think of selling
them as your primary livelihood because then it becomes a job so essentially
you're Ron Swanson and hobbies could also continue to enforce the ideologies
of the workplace on off-the-clock workers because unconsciously enforces a
stricter code of conduct than if all those nineteenth-century folks were left
to their own devices and vices so instead of sleeping all day eating a
bunch of food getting drunk or gambling you can figure out how to stuff a ship
into a bottle which would honestly drive me to drink because I'm pretty impatient
but hobbies can also show a sign of conspicuous leisure especially if it's
something you share with others for example women abolitionists in the late
1820s and 1830s organized fancy fairs where they could make display and sell
their handicrafts for charity and by the 1880s middle-class women had returned to
the traditions established by fancy fairs to display intricate needlework by
decayed gentlewomen or upper-class ladies without money with the less fancy
and more humble work still going to charity donations or fund raising
bazaars so when did we make the shift from hobby to hustle because whether you
know someone selling their handiwork on Etsy or entering their pastime into a
competition with a cash prize it seems like the hobbies of the past are
becoming even less about leisure every day well that brings our timeline
lurching forward into the early 20th century in 1908 a New England mill
implemented a weekend in order to accommodate Jewish workers who observe
the Sabbath on Saturdays while the workers often made up their hours on
Sundays this sometimes offended the Christian majority who considered Sunday
their holy day as a result the mill gave the workers both days off and other
factories and mills began to follow suit and thus the institutionalized weekend
was born the part of the calendar not the singer now when the Great Depression
sent in by 1929 and continued through the 1930s the weekend suddenly became a
solution for employers who are looking to shorten the workweek to save money in
the face of economic disaster and suddenly all of those handicrafts and
hobbies that you learn for fun became a bit more essential so people's
recreational pursuits like intense baking building sewing crafting pickling
vegetables started making ends meet between uncertain paychecks in that way
the hobby actually served as ample preparation for economic downturns
because they already functioned as pseudo work and in the mid 20th century
hobbies actually turned into big business for stores that catered to
hobbyists think train building kits specialty albums to store all of your
rare baseball cards in and magazines full of sewing patterns so the
connection between structure leisure and the workplace grew even
stronger since some folks made their livings selling hobbies and the
persistent idea of hobbies as a form of self sustenance continued even after the
Depression and into the 1950s and 1960s but after the latter half of the 20th
century hobbies took on a slight bite to become more competitive eliminating the
illusion of leisure almost all together now we all probably see a million posts
from our friends who used to be casual joggers but now regularly compete in
half marathons or a person who you've a glean ooh like to bake who now has tens
of thousands of social media followers admiring their artful geometric pies I
mean even people who started off vlogging for fun on YouTube are quickly
finding ways to cash in on their formerly recreational pursuits think
about ninja who's been recently making headlines for revealing that he makes
five hundred thousand dollars a month from playing fortnight and streaming it
on twitch and YouTube and according to an article in The Guardian by Richard
Godwin this desire to turn hobby into hustle could stem from a couple of
impulses the first is that were often presented with the fabled hobbies of the
super wealthy and successful people we aim to emulate so if we hear that a
notable CEO runs eight marathons a year and made a billion dollars we
automatically connect this no days off attitude with her thirst for success the
second is a desire to find meaning and purpose in our lives through increased
human perfectionism so it's not just okay to make kind of miss shape and ugly
cookies that taste great and everyone in your family enjoys suddenly you're ugly
butter face cookies are out and you're watching two hours of YouTube tutorials
trying to figure out how to do a mirror glaze on a four-year-old's birthday cake
and the last reason is that we now have the tools and technology to quantify our
progress in various hobbies which brings out the iron person in all of us so your
SmartWatch can track the number of steps you take how many squats you took and
your resting heart rate you can make blogs and videos about your progress in
a video game or keep a public Instagram tracking your evolution as a jean jacket
bedazzler and the ability to track makes the progress you make feel more concrete
and satisfying especially since you can compare it with others so the 21st
three hobby is marked by technology tracking progress and innate competition
as people look to improve and also to find meaning in their lives outside of
their nine-to-five so what do you think anything to add - how hobbies have
always been tied to work have any links or social media handles to site tracking
the progress of your own personal passion that you want to share with your
fellow edge knots and me drop all of that info down below so I can creep
around on your cool pages and if you like origin of everything be sure to
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time