Hello and welcome to ACFM, the home of the weird left. My name's Kia Milburn and I'm joined as usual by my very dear friend, Nadia Idle. Hello. And my other very dear friend, Jeremy Gilbert. Hello. And today we're discussing hobbies. So friends, why are we discussing hobbies today? I know, I think this is a fantastic topic and it follows on directly from boredom because it tells us about time. And I think that's always really interesting when we're talking about progressive politics and society and how we want to live, how people use...
what they consider to be leisure time. And I'm specifically interested in whether capitalism starts to collapse or like what are the social and political forces that start to collapse and blur the space between work and leisure and what that does to our understandings of hobbies. I also happen to think that this is probably going to be one of the most gendered topic episodes we've done because I think the topic of hobbies and free time is something that automatically becomes one where you have to look at the position of women over history. And that's all really interesting stuff. Yeah, I mean, hobbies are very much on my mind at the moment. You know, I think we're going to be discussing whether podcasting is a hobby. We'll talk about that, I think. At the moment, I'm keeping an eye on two football matches. I've been played as we record. Aston Villa are playing West Ham and Tottenham are playing Nottingham Forest. Those are three teams who are below Leeds United. What do you need, United? Is that a hobby? That's something I've got to get my head around. I've got to squeeze this podcasting because I'm playing a tabletop role-playing game over Zoom later on. So we are recording on a Sunday, a traditional day of hobbies. So, you know, it's very much on my mind, I think. There's also a lot to talk about, I think, about hobbies because it's about leisure.
Something between work and consumption, et cetera. Not quite either of those. Somewhere in between, perhaps. Whenever we talk about leisure, we always have to think about what are the utopian aspects of this and what are the bits which are colonized by capitalism, et cetera, or the logic of capitalism. So much to get into, dear listeners. A classic ACFM topic, and we'll get into it straight after these.
Very important idents. So we always do this on a main topic. We want to mention our ACFM newsletter every month. I'm sure we'll produce something very interesting about hobbies. There's plenty that we'd like to talk about there. If you want to sign up to that, go to novara.media forward slash ACFM newsletter. And then there's the opposite, of course, for those whose hobby is listening to music. Is that a hobby? We'll get into that in a moment. Just search for ACFM on Spotify or whatever your music app is. As we're talking about apps and the algorithms which now structure our hobbies so much, please leave us a five-star review on whatever platform you listen to. And of course, this is not complete hobby, this podcast.
we do there's money involved in it and if you'd like to support us you can support our hosts on navara media for as little as a pound a month just go to navara.media forward slash support seamlessly weaving in our topic and our idents our parish notices let's get back to the to the topic let's have a classic british rock song about hobby let's have the who pinball wizard Where do we want to start with this? Probably a bit of definitional work, isn't it? What is a hobby? Yeah, why not? Let's start with a definition. We like to define terms so that we can think, okay, this is what we're probably talking about. So there's one kind of semi-official definition of a hobby, which can be thought of as a self-directed, non-compulsory activity done in leisure time for...
pleasure, interest, or self-development. And I loved this definition because I think it already conjures up all sorts of questions and we can definitely problematize it for all sorts of reasons. But I like the idea that we start off with thinking about it being self-directed. So in theory, nobody's supposed to be telling you to do this, right? It's something that you're doing yourself. It's non-compulsory activity. I would agree with that so far, I think. And I want to see what you guys think about this.
Now, this bit about it being done in leisure time, we're going to discuss what is leisure time and can a hobby, you know, and all these problems about where hobbies sit in our day, which I think we're going to talk about. This is the bit that I'm interested in. And it's for pleasure, it's for interest. And then I love the last bit, which somebody must have updated for this definition of for self-development, which, and I wonder whether the idea even, you know, existed, especially using that phraseology earlier in time. So that's quite a complex kind of definition, but it's definitely something that we think, you know, you think you're doing in your own time.
for some kind of pleasure. Would you guys agree with that? I think that's a bit loose, that definition. I think that could include lots of things I'm not sure you would fit into. into the phrase hobby, because let's just think about a few things, like reading books or something like that. I'm not sure if that is a hobby, is it? It could be a hobby, I suppose, but certainly self-directed, non-compulsory activity done in leisure time for pleasure, interest, or self-development. But just reading a book just sounds a bit too casual for that, don't you think? Well, I think it is a really useful definition, but it doesn't quite capture the sense of a certain degree of intensity and regularity that most people think of when they use the word hobby. I think that's why the notion of self-development, I think, is so important in that definition, actually, although I sort of agree it doesn't quite capture.
something, because there are hobbies which don't seem to be particularly about developing the South, they're about developing some kind of expertise. I mean, maybe that is always developing the South. I think around the books question, Kia, it will depend on whether the general populace is engaged in this activity or not. So there will definitely, I think, be places in the world where, you know, there's a very low literacy. And some people read where reading can be seen as a hobby because you've gone to kind of, you've gone out of your way to do this thing that a lot of people around you don't necessarily do. Well, I mean, that's reading in the UK in 2026, isn't it? I don't think to that extent. I mean, you see people reading, right? When you're in the UK, people around you in public are reading in a way that is a lot more common than, for example, knitting. So I'd say knitting is probably, there's probably less people knitting than there are reading, but in the same way that there are book clubs, there are also knitting clubs. The minute you talk about reading, I'm already thinking, yeah, the people who go to book groups and they're into like...
book talk and you know they blog about their books or subscribe about their book reading that's a hobby whereas just casually reading fiction isn't necessarily but it's also true that well that's changed that's partly because of our age and our kind of class location wherein it's basically considered not even really it's sort of something you have to do you have you have to read fiction you have to read like published fiction of some kind occasionally because it's historically considered bad for your brain and just not really you're not part of the sort of educated classes if you don't do that it definitely is the case like for a lot of younger people now even like people at university reading for pleasure is so denormalized that they would see it as like one of their hobbies So those definitions can change. They do depend on kind of expectations of what's normal and also what's necessary, I think. Yeah. One of the aspects where we can get to is thinking about where the term hobby comes from. It traces back to hobby horse. And a hobby horse was like a wooden sort of horse. But before that, it's an actual little horse and it's a pony. It's a middle English. Hobby is a kind of pony. Right. Okay. Then the hobby horse refers to the toy.
Yeah, so it's trying to simulate riding for children, basically, which I think does contain a certain link to unseriousness or childishness, even perhaps in hobbies. It's often a form of play, which is always looked down on. If you mentioned a hobby horse now, people would associate that with somebody who's got a personal obsession with something, basically. Oh, don't worry about that. That's just that person's hobby horse. He's always going on about rent levels or something like that. It's not something we should take seriously. It's just their obsession. I think in terms of the broader ways of understanding this, focusing on hobbies is always going to be part of the sociology and history of leisure. It's tied to the idea of leisure.
Yes, you're right. There's loads of kind of research on kind of leisure and the position of leisure and how that's changed and stuff. And I think a little bit of that helps us. So I think there's this idea of casual leisure versus serious leisure, right? Which is interesting. It gives us another frame to think about some of these activities.
casual leisure is this idea about activities that are low efforts right and they in terms of you know what we would in the 21st century call like dopamine hits or like more immediately pleasurable is stuff like watching tv you know scrolling even you know like going for for a walk or whatever but then serious leisure is kind of juxtaposed with that as something that involves more structure and usually you're building some kind of skill right and this is the space and we'll get onto this where we can start to think about these hobbies or these activities starting to kind of affect people's own self-view. And so you can think about them as, you know, identity forming, right? So these are things like, if you're very competent at playing a musical instrument, or, you know, perhaps you're a serious bird watcher, like a twitcher or whatever, or in terms of crafting, if you like make things, which, you know, potentially, you know, you can sell. And we're going to talk about this going pro in a bit. And that got me thinking about, does this say something about the difference between a hobby and a passion? And I don't, I haven't really got an answer for this. So I'd be interested to see what you guys think, because I was trying to think about it. And it's like, well, okay, there's some things that are my hobbies that I'm passionate about, but there's a lot of stuff that I'm passionate about that are not hobbies.
And I'm not sure that they all kind of map onto identity forming. And I wonder whether the identity forming is more about kind of group culture. And that's obviously something we'll come on to about whether there is, you know, as an interest group, those groups of people who practice this thing has a kind of, you know, obsessive or, you know, more structured way of going about things in a way that perhaps people who go to read books and, you know, go to book clubs might be incredibly dedicated, but they don't define themselves by their book clubism or whatever, you know. Yeah, well, I was trying to think about like my hobbies. Watching Leeds United is something I do.
I would put that as a passion sort of thing. It does, yeah. In terms of masochistic compulsion. Yeah, I tell you what, I watched a match yesterday. It was so bad. Leeds Brentford was absolutely awful. But you see, it was still a passion because I almost went hoarse screaming and shouting at how crap Leeds were at the officials. It would be more something like a passion. But it has other things of a hobby, as in friends will be messaging me now about the matches that are going on. Something you discuss. Is it something that you build skill around? I don't know.
I mean, people do discuss tactics and these sorts of things, but you know, it's not like those sort of tinkering hobbies where you get better and better at doing a certain thing. Yeah. It's like whether you get better and better at shouting at the telly when needs are playing really badly. Do you know what I mean? Like, it's an interesting question. I think, I think football is a really interesting one because definitely the community and collectivity and kind of shared, what would you call, I don't want to say opinions, but you know, the commentary on the thing.
on the thing is a big part of it. But then by the same argument, you can say that film is as well. And, you know, we can start talking about some of these, about what we think is and what isn't. I mean, I was thinking about dancing. Like I'm really into, you know, partner dancing, whether it's tango or salsa and whatever. And I consider that a hobby. It's a very central part of my life. I love all kinds of dancing, including, you know, like raving and whatever. But for me, if you go back to this idea of like, there's some kind of structure, there's skill building. It's like a thing that you do. It's like playing an instrument, you know, whatever. It involves a certain kit, which we'll get to. That makes it for me a hobby, whereas I don't consider, for example, cooking a hobby. You know, with dancing, I think,
If you just said, I like going out dancing, I said, I don't know if that's a hobby, but because you're saying I like specific types of dancing, like salsa, et cetera, that seems to me to more fit a hobby. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, definitely. It's structured and there's classes and you're progressing along and you're not allowed to be at level four if you haven't started at level one, right? When you do partner dancing and there are specific shoes and there's a code and all of this stuff and there's a culture.
within it. It just happens to be because I like doing things with people. And if anything, people is my area of interest, like relationships, human beings, whatever. So I like things that involve other people rather than doing them by myself. And I think that's what it has in common with football. The difference is, I think football and film have more in common because there's a thing that you're watching, you're not the expert, right? The expertise is kind of away from you, but there's a culture in relating to that thing. I think this idea of skill building is obviously really important, how people think about hobbies. And I think there's a kind of implicit...
understanding that some of these activities have a pretty low ceiling in terms of how much real skill you can really build. I mean, this is the sort of cliche about football culture. I mean, obviously you can learn an awful lot about tactics and about team politics and stuff, but there's a very widespread cultural suspicion that there's quite a low ceiling to how much of that you can really learn that will really make any difference to your appreciation of it. There's a kind of suspicion that football fans circulate a lot of discourse on that stuff that's really empty. Whereas with dancing, obviously, you know, there isn't really a ceiling to the kind of skill development. I thought birdwatching is like an interesting example.
because bird watchers do have quite a culture and there's quite a lot of circulation of esoteric knowledge and there is a sense that there's very high levels of attainment possible just if you manage to see a really rare bird. But it feels like that's a bit different from football. But I would say with football, actually thinking about it, it seems a bit of a grey area and it seems like Keir's level of football fandom isn't really a hobby. I have had friends who don't only do what Keir does but they also go to all their clubs away matches and they go to all the England away matches and they're in the England Supporters Club and at that point it's clearly a hobby in some sense. in that clear sense, it's clearly something more. And I guess it's a bit, it's like with film, there's going to be a level at which, if you're watching loads and loads of films and you're writing about them and you're in a letterbox or something, loads, and you've got a sub-stack about your films, at some point that is going to become a hobby. I was thinking about that because I do those things, Jim. I was thinking, oh yeah, I definitely watch films. Is that just an interest of mine or is that a hobby? And there's a thin line between that. And I think in some ways it is that line between an interest is something that is more passive and a hobby is more active in some sort of way. And so I was thinking about...
I've been on Letterboxd the last couple of years and it's definitely structured my film watching and it makes me structured writing about films and thinking about films in a more structured way. That's definitely true. But before Letterboxd, so Letterboxd is a platform in which you basically list films you've watched and list films you want to watch, etc. Before Letterboxd, I'd have books about films where I would tick off trying to work through classic films. Do you know what I mean? At the minute, I'm trying to work through the top 250 films on Letterboxd, which are these really classic, highly rated films. It's easy to watch films which take...
which take very little engagement. You know what I mean? You could watch a film while you're flicking around on social media or something like that. But whereas if I'm watching a proper film, as I would put it, I'm trying to think about it, et cetera, it demands more focus. But there's a very thin line between interest and hobby, I'm saying. Go on, sorry, Nadia. That behavior that you've outlined, it was just like screaming like hobby to me. Like the behavior of like, I'm going to outline these top 250 films and I'm working through them, like even your language and stuff. Yeah, it's a bit like collecting, I suppose. Yeah.
there's that stuff around you know the culture around like geekery and what it is to geek out on something and obviously there's a 21st century like version of that i reject that term and maybe it's because it doesn't appeal to me so i don't like to think i don't use that terminology for myself but i can't help thinking that the way you were talking now i just thought oh my god kia really geeks out on films you know that's not like oh i like going to the cinema because i like going to the cinema but for me watching films is a social thing i don't i it fits within my social life i would never like even consider going through the top 250 films. Having said that, though, I do go, ah, who's new in the female dark noir literary fiction of Japan and South Korea? I want to read those books, right? But not to the extent of like I think you do with film, but I do that with modern contemporary female literature, especially Asian literature. First of all, there is a social aspect to my film watching. I like to talk at people about the films I've just watched. Fair, fair. I was a little joke, actually. I said at rather than with. No, but it is about at, right? Because I get that. I think you're right. Obviously, you're joking, but it's also partly that, is that the thing that lights me up is talking about...
literature like once we start what if it's like novels if it's like contemporary female fiction i get i just it wakes me up because i'm talking about the thing that i'm passionate about like either that or like tango or salsa or like something that those are the things that light me up when i talk about them and those i would say are my hobbies film is a good one to think about like the different sort of valorizations put around an interest in something because geekdom is like that's one thing where you're really really into like one film perhaps do you know i mean and you'd like to cosplay and all that sort of stuff i brought you into a few films etc Whereas I'm a cinephile, you see, and cinephile is a much more respected pastime. Understood. I wanted to say something about geekery because I was thinking just before we started about the concept of geek, the geek and geek culture. I was thinking you can make a pretty precise definition of geek culture, and that is people treating genre fiction as a hobby, basically. That's basically what it is. I think the distinction between being a cinephile and being someone who just watches films quite a lot, I think that is a distinction.
We should play part-time punks by TV personalities, not as commonly thought the TV personalities, but just TV personalities. Released as a single in 1980, it was actually written about 1978, which is sort of important because the whole song is about the moment where punk sort of blows up, basically. And it's about trying to make a distinction between real punks, for which punk is a way of life, and then these plastic punks who treat punk as a hobby in some sort of way. Some of the lyrics go like this. They play their records very loud, they progo in the bedroom, in front of the mirror, but only when their mum goes out, they're part-time punks, you see. It is, yeah. And like, you know, punk really valorises amateurishness.
music playing if you listen to it it embraces the amateur level of punk rock basically even though it dismisses the hobbyist punks out there Obviously a lot of this has to do, in terms of these definitions, it does also have to do with it not being something you're doing for work. For one thing, if you're like a cultural studies academic, then notoriously the line between stuff you're into, like your hobbies, like stuff you're passionate about, stuff you're a fan of, and the stuff that's the object of your scholarship, like teaching, is blurry. I mean, historically I was always quite wary. I thought it was a real problem with the way in which that whole discipline developed in the 90s, actually when I was doing my PhD, that far too many people were just writing about stuff they were fans of.
Far too many people just ended up writing books about how cool their hobby was. That's a problem with the existing academic work on role-playing games, for example, to be honest. Far too much of it is still just written by people who love role-playing games. That's basically why they're writing about it. They're not really writing about it because they've got any kind of detached, sort of critical perspective on it that they want to develop. What about DJing? Yeah, it was like my main hobby from...
When I started organising nights and parties, which was only in my early 30s, before that I was just a casualty, I just went out clubbing. I used to hold a lot of house parties and I knew loads of music. I'd written a book with Ewan Pearson and I was teaching students about it as an academic topic. For one thing, I would say there's a sense of vocation about my relationship to dance culture and putting on parties and stuff. has always made it seem like a bit different from actually like a pure hobby or a proper hobby since i ended up doing it because of a very particular set of personal historical circumstances like i got to know david mancuso like very late in his life and it seemed like something that had to be done there's a sort of compulsion about it i mean not compulsion in a psychological sense more a sense that yeah it was a kind of historical opportunity to do it to start organizing these parties of a kind that we had never existed in london or the uk before which i thought would be really meaningful to people it has ended up being really meaningful to people For quite a long time, I just described it. When people tried to get me to explain my relationship to it as a practice, I would say, people say to me, is it a job or is it a hobby? I often just say, well, it's a self-financing hobby. We make enough money from it to keep going, to buy my records, to have all the music equipment. I'm not contributing to my pension out of it. It absolutely doesn't feel like a hobby now. Now it feels like a job. It feels like part of my job.
It's like one of my jobs. My jobs, the things I sort of do that they have to be sort of self-financing or they have to be, or they don't feel like they're being done purely for, or mainly for leisure reasons. It's academic work and teaching and podcasting. Again, it's not like I would do it. It's like I would do it if I wasn't being paid at all. And it's also true that if I didn't get paid at all, I couldn't do it. I wouldn't have time. And I sort of hate that. It's humiliating. I'd ask people for money to support it. But also I think it's really important. I think it's really important politically and culturally. And so in all that sense, it's not a hobby. Again, I mean, the podcasting thing, this podcast is a bit like my relationship to...
They're putting on dance parties, actually. I do really love doing it. And it's far less exhausting than putting on dance parties, I have to say. It's far less tiring, costly, in terms of personal resources. But it's also, I feel like we have to do it. We can't not do this. The world needs it, yeah.
that's also that's different from playing games and like getting into i mean you know kira and i sort of decided you know we sort of decided sort of together like about five years ago yeah let's get back into let's get back into playing role playing games like we did routine little kids and didn't or you know early teens didn't know each other but in my case it was like jay my partner like really actively encouraged it and it was partly because it was the depth of the pandemic and she thought i really needed a social activity but it was also because she thought she could see that like DJing and organizing parties had long, long since lost any sort of hobby-like quality for me. It was a huge amount of work and a lot of emotional investment and something I had to do. And she thought I needed something. She thought I needed a hobby, basically. She thought I needed something in my life that was just leisure, for the sake of leisure. And it was also something to do with my friends. It was something that you can do with friends who don't live nearby you. You can do it on Zoom and stuff.
And those are all important functions of hobbies. Of course, that is partly a gendered thing we can sort of come back to. It's something I think I've been really conscious of since I was a teenager. I mean, there are all kinds of exceptions to this, but tendentially, boys and men, they like to have a project with their friends rather than just hanging out talking about stuff. They often like to have a shared project, whether it's being in a band or following a sports team or playing a role-playing game. And tendentially, girls and women don't tend to do that as much. And I think that's for all kinds of socially normative reasons. I don't think that's for any essential biological reason.
it is a thing in our culture for a lot of people that you know you have something you like to have a thing to do with your mates and that is an important part of what makes something a hobby is that you're basically doing it for the sake of something to do with your mates the story of the DJing and the dance music thing is definitely for me it is sort of instructive because that did start off as the thing I was doing with my mates it was the thing I was doing with my mate Tim Lawrence and then it was the thing I was doing with my mate Cyril and Cedric and it became something like much bigger and more important than that and it's still really really important that it's something I'm doing with my friends like I would stop tomorrow if it wasn't like the thing I was doing with my friends But at some point, it becomes the thing you are doing with your friends, which is very public, which kind of defines you in a lot of people's eyes socially in the wider world. And again, that's also, I wonder if that's something about hobbies as well. Hobbies often, they have their own kind of culture. Like somebody can be quite famous within the space of their own hobby. But at the point where the thing starts to define you in other people's eyes outside of that context, maybe it stops being a hobby then as well.
Yeah, there's so much that you've said there, Jeremy, that's really interesting to pick apart. I mean, I think there's really something that we can interrogate and look at in terms of this idea of the project, about whether, especially as political people, if we think about whether political activism or various parts of it, or this podcast or whatever, can be or were once a hobby and are no longer, or they develop. But I think the intervention of the idea of a project is a really interesting one there, because I'm not sure, I think it can be both. You can have a project that is entirely professional from the beginning, which has some kind of pursuit or end or long-term desire, and that's the same. for, you know, from a hobby side of things. You said something else, which I wanted to talk about, which was this idea that doing it with friends. And I think that's also different for different people and fulfills different functions. And I agree with you in that it's gendered. And I would say that I think the socialized, I mean, one of the socialized reasons for that is because men are socialized, as I understand it, like not to be able to, you know, talk openly about, you know, their inner workings or troubles with other men, but will still benefit from the solidarity of the company, right, while pursuing something else. Whereas with women...
will typically find it easier to sit around and, you know, chat about that stuff and don't necessarily need the friendships for that. I mean, that's definitely true for me. I mean, I have friends in some of my hobbies, but I don't, in fact, there are hobbies that I like not having my friends there because I like being more anonymous and I like doing the thing without necessarily having that being tied to friendships. Because I would then say there are other things which I consider, and I know other people will not define it that way, but things that I consider spiritual, which I don't define as hobbies. And I know that people will disagree with me and that's fine. But like things like, you know, fitness, exercise.
taking care of one's body. And that involves like food, my relationship to food and cooking for me is spiritual. My relationship to the land and growing is spiritual. Meditation is spiritual. It's about my existence on this earth as, you know, part of nature. And, you know, for me that those are not considered hobbies. We also have, you know, we have to talk about like drug taking. That is a hobby for some people. I don't know. What do you guys think? Well, let's not, let's just hold off on drug taking a minute. So put that, put your gummies away for five minutes, please.
Because I've got this idea that we fold our hobbies into our general way of being in the world. Do you know what I mean? I definitely have this tendency to take hobbies or my hobbyist activities and form them into some sort of political activity. My football fandom, it's really Leeds United fandom, to be honest, and the football fandom is just a spillover effect of that, basically. Me and my friend Tom Williams set up this.
pro-revolution soccer podcast where we specifically try to do left-wing commentary around football spectatorship more than anything else, like, you know, that sort of thing. I've now handed that over to Tom and Juliet Jakes and a range of new people who basically are much better suited to it than me. But, like, that's one sort of thing. And then, like, game playing, you know, with my friends Will and Gaz, you know, we set this Red Plenty game where we, like, design and run political strategy games, you know what I mean? And that's definitely crossed the line into, you know, we get commissions for it so we earn money from it, not very much. But it's still a similar thing, you know, turning your hobby into...
into like a political activity in some sort of way. I sort of do see that as like enfolding these sort of hobbies, which are not quite work and not quite leisure. That's the way I make them meaningful, perhaps, is I fold them into that general sort of like... political sort of way of being. Does that make any sense? Yeah, it does. It does. But I think the key thing there with what you're saying, Kia, is because I think there's a political or social change aspect to it. So I probably would do the same if those are the kind of arenas in which I would consider like pursuit or whatever, whether we call them hobbies or not specifically. Whereas that's not the case with kind of my hobbies. I try and keep my hobbies as far away as possible from my political activity or whatever, because I like being anonymous from my political identity in those spaces. I like the fact that it's not, for example, why I love dancing so much is it's a way of relating to other human beings without...
speaking and so that for me is really kind of important part of why i enjoy that and obviously being on your feet and being social i think i'm probably more like here in this respect though i think i think it doesn't stop it being a hobby for me if it gets sort of politicized but it's not to say everything should either i think there are some zones of human activity which you you don't have to think of yourself as engaged in political struggle over all the time it's a bit like the tabletop role-playing games which is definitely the thing that's most like a hobby for me most clearly a hobby for me do you know i mean even though it bleeds over into red plenty games etc but i really enjoy playing games which are just which have no politics in them But, you know, Jem is running this game at the minute and I know Nami's game. It really is bleeding into my everyday life. We don't have to go into it, but basically, you know, Boris Johnson's in it. We're in an actual world and we're trying to stop river pollution and it's a magical world, but like it does really bleed over into everyday life, basically. That thing of like, we want to separate, like these hobbies should be sort of something which takes our mind off things. I suppose like watching Leeds United is that for me. Like that is my brain off time. Do you know what I mean? Where I get taken out of my head by my hobby. Do you know what I mean? Other hobbies, I want to get back into my, I want to bring them into my head.
Exactly. And I think we're starting to form an idea here, which I think will be different for different people in terms of what they need from that activity. So I think you're right. I think that's a really good way of putting it, is that there are some hobbies which take you out of your head and there are some hobbies which make you, you know, are like you on steroids. And I think we probably need a little bit of both, but whether they necessarily need to come through hobbies or not, I'm not entirely sure. And of course, what we have another aspect of this, I mean...
Jeremy mentioned this when he talked about his experience. And I think, you know, the friendship thing is important. And, you know, I said it was different for me about whether these are things that you do with other people or not, or whether these things that you do by yourself. And I think there's a lot of things that I do by myself, but I'd say the majority of my kind of hobbies I do with other people. I would really love to start playing a card game or a game like chess or backgammon or something with other people. There are kind of board games, I suppose, that I love playing, but I've not ever been able to find a group of people who would do it regularly. You know, I would definitely do it regularly if it involved people around the table eating snacks. That's my kind of environment.
A great song about someone having a hobby that the singer isn't clearly in favour of is The Fall's song about CB Radio, Citizens Band Radio. That's a whole type of hobby which we haven't really talked about on this show, but which obviously in some ways anticipates the whole world of the internet that we now live in. Like it's people wanting to be able to have instant communication with people they don't really know. A fascinating historical moment, the popularity of CB Radio. The Fall, I'm into CB.
I thought what you were saying about spirituality was kind of interesting in audio, actually, because I have, and this also relates to drug taking, because it's definitely the case for me, like in the 90s, like, you know, psychedelics, I mean, acid really was basically like a hobby for me and a close group of friends. I mean, whether you would say it was a hobby or a kind of a spiritual practice, it would depend on how seriously you wanted to take it. But we were quite resistant to any sort of new age imposition of excessive seriousness on it. And we would sometimes say it's a hobby, yeah, this is our hobby. And then I started saying, you know, I went from there to sort of learning about meditation and yoga and stuff. And I would often say, yeah.
I always like this phrase from some of the psychogenic literature in the 60s, the phrase experimental mysticism. And I would say all this stuff, all this experimentation with psychophysical technologies of ecstasy and mysticism and spirituality is basically my hobby. It's not really connected to my academic work. I don't really see it as necessarily political. It's a hobby. But I completely understand why other people wouldn't see it that way. I mean, in a way, that might be inaccurate. It's also the thing about sort of...
for me organizing dance parties like in many ways like the closest analogy to my feelings about why I do it and like what I and other people get out of it it's more so of course I'm religious or spiritual than anything else like I do it because I know it has a kind of meaning to a lot of people involved in it that they wouldn't be able to get access to if I wasn't part of a group who kept doing it you definitely can see that as sort of political but I think there's also a degree because there's a kind of squeamishness about the language of spirituality you know secular leftist tradition but doesn't really like to acknowledge the truth of it which is a lot of the time it is so of course I religious because for me that's not a negative it's not like a negative term religious or quasi-religious a lot of social and cultural activities that people engage in you know they they take on about the level of significance religion has actually had for most people historically which is not actually like the centerpiece of their lives it's a thing they mostly do like once or twice a week it's a thing they might think about once or twice a day most of the time but nonetheless it's a hugely important part of their lives i think if you actually look at actual anthropological and historical data you know most people have not actually related to their religion in like a full-time religious specialist like a priest or even a kind of zealot
within the lay community most people's actual relationships their religion i think it doesn't really look that different from how loads of people do relate to like the hobbies or pastimes that they're really passionate about So I think that's interesting to think about. I don't have any massive conclusion to draw from it. I suppose it's just that the line is blurry and it's okay. I suppose what I'm saying to me, it's not necessarily trivialising to say. Even religion might be sort of a hobby for a lot of people. No, I think you're completely right. I mean, as you were speaking, it made me think about, okay, well, I've got about 30 houseplants, which are really important to me. And between them and between the bird feeders and watching the birds, as I am doing now, and my particular relationship to particular birds and the fox and the two crows and currently the magpies and then the stuff that I'm growing up front.
That sounds to me like your description of a religion, where it's not completely my identity, but it's also quite intrinsically part of me. And it involves some rituals, which I do every day and every week, but it's not all-encompassing. It's just quite central to who I am without being overwhelming. It's that hobby, though, looking after your houseplants. It's got ritual elements, something like that. Yeah, it's ritualistic, but it's also about the religion. It's a spiritual thing, because these things are alive.
So it's spiritual in that sense for me, you know, but the religion is the kind of like the religion piece. What I take from what Jeremy's saying, I'm not saying this is exactly what Jeremy was saying, but what I take from that that applies to me is that there's some kind of like overriding belief system, which kind of enables those rituals, but in which those rituals, you know, sit within. And for me, feeling part of nature and my relationship to spring and all of these different things that are alive with me that I help keep alive in the house is part of that. So I wouldn't say that it's a hobby, actually, some of this stuff, but it's just part of my day. Because I think most people who are deeply religious would find it insulting to say that your religious practice looks a bit like a hobby, partly because there's some sort of association of hobbies with unseriousness in some sort of ways. One of the words you'd put near hobbies, not the same, but you'd put next to them would be something like pastimes. Pastimes, that word just means a way to pass the time. Do you know what I mean? It's distinguished not necessarily from more serious pursuits, but perhaps not necessarily because you're getting paid for it, but because serious pursuits are serious and hobbies are, they're just ways to pass the time, et cetera. I think once again, the borderline between those things is a little bit indistinct.
that's dependent on a moral economy, which places a higher value at work than anything else. Yeah, I agree, yeah, yeah. One of the great lines we'll never stop quoting from Martin Engels is that they say they want to live in a communist society so they can be a fisherman in the afternoon, a critic in the evening. You know, you say you're not defined by the division of labour. It's this liberation of human activity from the tyranny of necessity, the tyranny of work. So, actually, they're saying they want a society in which all anyone does is hobbies. All anyone has to do is hobby. And also, hobby isn't all... I know what you're saying here. Of course, everything you said is totally right, but sort of the point I was making about religion is, well, hobby is only trivial compared to the imagined seriousness.
of like work or religion or religion as work. But then hobby is very serious compared to like just something you do, like just watching telly or like something that's passive. So there's also within a different register, like hobbies are defined by their seriousness and their purpose. Yes, yes. And there's another thing that's interesting that's been raised there, which is this idea of a pastime, right? And I actually don't know the specific history of this, but the etymology of it, as you've pointed out, reveals something interesting, right? So who has, you know, and we're going to get onto this hopefully soon, but who has the desire to pass time?
Very few people have that time of which they would want a desire to pass it. I certainly don't. And I'm not, you know, lacking in a certain amount of, like, I'm not, you know, the most disgruntled and ripped off by capitalism, you know, category in society. But I have very little time. If I had more time, I would definitely fill it with more hobbies, you know. So I'm not looking to pass the time. But unless you are, you know, a lady in, I don't know, like 18th, 19th century Britain who's not been allowed.
to work or not been allowed to have some kind of more interesting pursuit you know you've got all of these hobbies because you're bored as fuck as we talked about in the last episode right but who has the right to be bored to have that time to want to pass it is you know perhaps people of a certain class or it says something about how and where decisions are made you know and we'll talk we need to talk about you know gentlemen sports and that sort of stuff and you know amateur sport for that exact reason right and we also need to talk about hobbies that take place inside the house and outside the house because of course that is quite gendered as well or at least was until you know 21st century There's another set of people who have the time to do pastimes, which is the retired, of course. I like, you know, there's a really big thing about people take up hobbies when they become retired and when they stop working, basically. But that seems, you know, as you get older, et cetera, that seems, I don't know, something a little bit sad about that because you're trying to pass the time. Pass the time until what? Until you die, basically. I don't know. Do you know what I mean? Let's see something a little bit... That's a whole separate issue about how we think about retirement, isn't it? There's all this evidence that retiring is just bound for you.
Basically, if you want to maintain your cognitive function and good health outcomes, you should not retire. You should go part-time. I was in London yesterday. You'll be surprised to know. And I had to get a train. And I got the tube. And then I think it was the Victoria Line was shut. And I was like, oh, shit, I'm going to miss my train. So I ran up and got a black car, which I never do in London. They're very expensive. And then I jumped in. And the guy, classic cabbie, just going on and on, Sadiq Khan, this, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But I wouldn't shut up. And basically, by the time I got to the...
to King's Cross. I was trying to get out and he was like yapping away and all that. Halfway through his conversation, he reveals he's 82 and he basically works three days a week because he's bored. I got out of the cab and he was like charging me 17 quid for five minutes. I'm asking, you should be paying me. Do you know what I mean? This is your hobby, mate. Do you know what I mean? You're doing it because you're isolated and you can have a, you know, basically rant at people in the back of your cab. I think we should play the absolute classic Sitting on the Dock of the Bay by Otis Redding from 1968, which of course is about watching time go by and perhaps the passing of time in itself the ultimate hobby.
Sitting in the morning sun. I'll be sitting when the evening comes. Watching the ships roll in. And then I'll watch them roll away again. Yeah. I'm sitting on the dock of the bay. Watching the tide roll away. Sitting on the dock of the bay. Wasting time. I think before we move on to the other sections of our notes, there's a couple of things we've raised I want to sort of dwell on a little bit more. I think it's hobbies as identity for me.
and hobbies as sort of collective or involving participation in the culture. I've got a good sort of anecdote about this, which I've always thought about ever since years ago, decades ago. In teaching like cultural studies, media studies, or popular music studies to students, it's always an interesting question of what terminology do you use for particular sort of cultural formations? So you might talk about a particular scene in which people are interested in particular kinds of music, particular culture. But for years and years and years, like the dominant way of talking about any sort of cultural formation in popular music culture, like journalists and academics, was this idea of the subculture.
everything's a subculture you know it's the minute you've got five people like listening to the same band and with vaguely similar haircuts they're a subculture then i was really part of a generation of scholars who were really we were basically sick of that because it was stupid like the term subculture was originally coined for people who were literally in the mafia or something like decades ago didn't didn't capture the very dispersed nature of the way people actually participate in or identify with sort of music culture and it particularly doesn't really capture the fact that well you know liking liking a particular band might seem really important to you when you're 16 but it's not really that important objective a little and so i was having this conversation with students about what kind of thing is hip-hop because it was still you know it's a big part of hip-hop culture it's less so much less so these days but historically like up until the early 2000s big part of hip-hop culture that hip-hop is this whole way of life like you do great dance you do graffiti like you do rapping like you sort of you know it somehow governs your every waking moment and i was talking to these students saying well does anyone really live like that is that really how it is they say no no no obviously not really so we're talking about what kind of thing is it what is your actual relationship to hip-hop and one guy just said well it's a hobby basically basically it's my hobby
And I thought that was really smart. Well, yeah, that's good. And again, that's not necessarily, that's only trivializing compared to some overdramatic idea of hip hop as a thing that's going to shake someone's social identity completely, as he was sort of implying. Yeah, there is a sense of belonging to a community. There's a sense of belonging to a culture. There's a sense of it's sort of determining your identity, but it doesn't really determine your social identity as much as your job does. I think for a lot of people, obviously, having a hobby, it is connected to all those things. We talked about role-playing games. One of the interesting features of...
tabletop gaming, especially role-playing games, is this terminology which has been around since the 70s, actually. People talk about the hobby, capital H, the hobby, which I think was inherited from wargaming. And I don't know, there may well be other hobbies where people talk about the hobby, but the hobby is understood to be the kind of collective entity which people are participating in by participating in these particular social and cultural practices. And historically, the idea of the hobby was defined in distinction from the industry. The idea was there was the industry, which is basically capitalism, which is people trying to accumulate profits on the basis of selling products, which allow people to participate in this activity. And then on the other side, there's all the people participating in the activity who don't really need, they're really completely autonomous from the industry. The industry needs them, they don't really need it. It's a bit like Hart and Negri. It's a bit like the empire of a multitude, like industry and hobby. So this idea of hobby as being, to some extent, entirely outside or tendentially outside the kind of logics of commodification and capital accumulation, it's kind of interesting.
and there's also the question of hobbies or hobby conferring an identity i'm not really sure about i know personally like i've always been quite sort of resistant to I don't really like it when people say, oh, you're a gamer. I don't really think of it as defining a thing about me other than that, yeah, I quite enjoy playing these games. I don't really feel like it bears upon any wider set of cultural relationships. I was like that when I was going to yoga all the time. I was telling you guys the other day, there was a period of my life where I was getting up at six every morning to go into town and go to a really intense yoga class, but I was really resistant to identifying as a yogi or something. I just thought, this is a thing I'm doing. It doesn't make me a kind of person to do that. I don't know whether that's just me.
That might just be my hang-up because that is a hang-up I've had ever since I was a teenager when I refused to acknowledge being a fan of anything. And maybe it's a kind of individualism or maybe it's a kind of anti-individualism, a kind of resistance to sort of identity logic. I don't really know. The point is that people have different hobbies, don't they? And so you have a set of friends who are involved in that hobby with you. And for them, that's an important part of your identity in that sort of scene. Do you know what I mean? But yeah, I agree. None of my hobbies are something I would want to form my identity, I don't think.
I do actually like talking to people about the gossip on the dancing scene in a sense. So I like to talk about the culture of the scene. And I really enjoy that, even though I don't necessarily do the thing with my friends. Bit of salsa intrigue. I mean, that is a bit like football. There's two things you talk about in football, which is like, you know, why the manager is wrong.
playing the team he is and why you should follow your ideas and who you should bring on, et cetera, et cetera. And the other thing is like, it's almost like you have to take the perspective of a football owner. Do you know what I mean? And how the club is running and all that sort of stuff. Yeah, I'd say it's similar to dance. It's similar to how we think about the dance schools and who's running it and who the guest teachers are and what they're teaching and why they're teaching it and why they shouldn't be teaching what we want, et cetera. So I think, you know, there's probably quite similarities there. There's a good segue for us because in a dancing school, I mean, obviously it's the same. I mean, it's a huge thing in like yoga, the world of yoga. It's like people becoming professional. I mean, that was really a thing. I mean, that was a...
When I was doing really intense yoga classes, I think most of the people who were going wanted to be yoga teachers. There was a lot of people who were hoping this was going to get them out of whatever soul-crushing private sector job they found themselves in. That's partly why I couldn't really identify with it, actually, because I was like, well, I had a job. I didn't have a job I hated. That wasn't why I was doing it. I was doing it to make me a better teacher, not because I wanted to stop being. But then the question of the relationship between the professional and the hobby.
this is really interesting because when we were talking we were talking about this last week and we were talking about this with Matt and Chow producers and one of the kind of ideas we were kicking around was the idea that the thing is only really a hobby rather than just like maybe just a pastime or an interest it's only a hobby if it's a type of activity that there's a chance of going professional with or at risk of it becoming professional risk of it becoming a job To some degree, it's about the level of industry that's around it, isn't it, basically? So you could think about like playing football, playing football, for instance, you know, basically that's whether you're going to be a professional is sort of like basically decided. Whether you've got a chance of being professional is basically decided by the time you're 11, something like that. You don't start playing football at 12 and then become a professional anymore. Do you know what I mean? That's the level of like seriousness of the industry sort of thing.
Even like 30 years ago, that wasn't true. That's really interesting, actually, yeah. I mean, that does indicate something about why we have this intuitive sense that football doesn't count as a hobby for people unless they're very involved, unless you're involved at the level where... Five aside, surely. Yeah, no, that's true. We're playing. We're not talking about playing. I think that's a different distinction between playing or doing. But if we talk about people at the level I was talking about before...
People who, they go to all the clubs home and away matches. They're in the England Supporters Club to go to England away matches. The next step on from that is you go for a professional coaching qualification or you do get, you go work for a football club or for the FA. Like I have known people do that. So that is, you don't just have to be a professional footballer to end up becoming professionally involved. But I think it's also true. So it's only when you're in that, it's once you're into that zone where you're in sight of the possibility of there being a job in this, that it seems like that's definitely a hobby. When you're not in that zone at all, maybe it's not. That's not just about the level of professionalisation, is it? This is also about the level of activity. It's about activity versus,
passivity. Because I think with role-playing games, I mean, notoriously, hardly anybody makes any money out of it. I mean, even people who, there are lots of people involved in that industry who have other jobs because you can't really make a living out of it. But there's a level of creativity involved. Like, that's the idea that hobbies lots of people. There's a level of creativity involved. Which in terms of the amount of time involved and the amount of time it takes to acquire some expertise, it's like a sort of really low-level kind of arts and crafts thing. It's like playing really easy. It's not as hard as learning an instrument or martial art or even sort of dancing, but like, it's more effort than just like watching movies. What's arts and crafts? Can I just ask for clarification? Like, what do you mean?
by arts and crafts because there's like lots of different things and some of them are really difficult. I mean, there are lots of people who literally like paint pictures at home and it is their hobby and they've got no intent to try and sell them. There used to be, it's almost disappeared now, but I think both here and in the States, there used to be this whole category of the hobby shop. It was supposed to sell things for hobbies and usually what it meant was modelling stuff for boys and men and sort of craft stuff for girls and women. I mean, role-playing games is an interesting equivalent to that actually because I'd say in terms of the amount of effort you actually have to put in.
to get something done it's an equivalent amount of effort to a pretty easy craft project like a kit a sewing kit project for somebody who's quite good at sewing or something it's not like super it's not super demanding but but the point of making is it's that level of it's the level of investment you have to make like to get it done which makes it seem different from just watching film i mean other sort of hobbies we haven't talked about are like things such as like collecting and model making is something i would think of as a classic sort of hobby did you guys collect anything when you were younger i did i was a real collector oh really what what stamps Definitely. I've got loads of stamps. That is an absolute classic hobby, isn't it? I collected stamps and what we call rubbers and what Americans call erasers. So not condoms. The idea that collecting is basically the form of hobby, the basic form of the hobby. That was a really long running idea. And again, in some of the literature and the historical literature on hobbies, on the idea of hobbies, there's quite a big focus on collecting. Because it basically, if you ask somebody, like if you stop someone in the street, I think my impression is like in the 60s, if you stop someone in the street, say, give me an example of a hobby people have. Stamp collecting is the first thing people are going to say.
It was like the archetypical cliched hobby you could have. I guess it's because it was quite easy. I guess it is also, that's a good example. You have to exercise some effort. You have to go out and seek out more stamps that are just going to get sent to you. You have to kind of put them in the stamp album. You have to assemble them by country traditionally in the album. But that's about it. Because I mean, one of the things you have to, with collecting is you've just got to be able to distinguish it from like just consumption in some sort of way. So there's some sort of, it has to be structured in some sort of way. Because I was just thinking about when I was a kid, you know, I read a lot of comics and I've got quite a big comic collection.
And in fact, producer Matt gave me a big box of early 90s, 2000 AD. So we had an ACFM annual general meeting at a curry house. It was a heavy box. It was a heavy box. It was a very fucking heavy box, yeah. Jeremy had to give me a rucksack from his house and it nearly killed me getting them home. And I very much enjoyed going through them. Thanks, producer Matt. But I don't think I can... It's not a collection like stamp collecting. Do you know what I mean? There definitely are hobby collectors. Anything that has conventions is definitely a hobby for some people. I think we should hear from Shonen Knife, classic Japanese girl punk band. Let's hear their hobby anthem, Internet Collector.
I think before we leave behind this question of professionalisation, I think it's really interesting to think about this in a historical context, because historically... as sport who starts to emerge as one of the key kind of leisure activities both for spectators and participants in like the modern era and the advanced industrial era you're really talking about the latter period of the 19th century which is basically when people who are working in industrial cities start to get i mean they don't have any time off really until the second half of the 19th century and then they start to get sundays off because and that's often framed as a religious thing they have to be able to go to church and then they start to get saturday afternoons off and the question of what people will do the saturday afternoons becomes a big thing and one of the most popular things to do is to play or watch sports especially football and cricket So you start to get professional football teams and there's this really kind of extraordinary moment from our volunteer sport historically when there's this big social divide between sports people who are paid by a local team.
and people who are not. And it's like considered much less honourable to be a professional player than to be like a gentlemanly amateur. Like in cricket, there's this sort of formal distinction between the gentlemen and the players. And gentlemen are the people who basically came into sort of playing cricket competitively at a national or international level through their university clubs, through Oxford and Cambridge mainly. And then they go on to play for their county clubs, wherever their family's country seat is. And the players, who are people often from towns or industrial regions or working class, who have to be paid a wage in order to take a day off work to go play a match. And they're really like looked down on, like the idea that being...
a professional sports person isn't somehow degrading to the purity of amateurism. It doesn't completely fade until after World War II, I think. You might know more about that than me. Well, no, I mean, the other sport in which it becomes a really big distinction is rugby. You know, and there's the distinction between rugby union and rugby league. You know, rugby league gets invented in sort of like the late 19th century. Properly. Properly. I disagree. I disagree. But it gets invented as, and they sort of change the rules, basically, to try and make it faster and more entertaining.
for the new sort of sports spectatorships, you know, and like the traditional time for like football matches or rugby matches to kick off in the UK is like three o'clock in the afternoon on a Saturday because that's, you know, that was Saturday afternoon. It was the afternoon you'd have off. The big divide was basically rugby league was formed because, you know, it was going to be a professional sport, basically. It's primarily played in the north of England. And, you know, the distinction with rugby union, which still has this like real sort of status as like a middle-class sport base because it stayed amateur until, I think it was like the 1990s when it...
They were under the sort of counter payments for ages, but then it became a professional sport. So rugby union is still really associated with like a middle-classness in spectatorship, except for South Wales, which is where I grew up, but it's a working-class sport, basically. And I played rugby union at school. I was very good, actually. Thank you, yes. And still in my sporting affiliations, I would support any team playing.
the English rugby union team. Whereas I've been away to watch England football. I can support England football at any time, but I still cannot support England rugby because of its class connotation. The Olympics, you're still not allowed to compete if your class arrived as a professional. Well, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's indistinct because they had like, they have like football or they have had football in there and had professional teams playing basically. So I think it's a little bit indistinct these days with the Olympics. But like, that was a big thing, was that like, yeah, sport.
Sports should be amateur, basically. Something like boxing, for instance, people come up in the amateur leagues and compete in the Olympics, but the Olympics is then a sort of separate thing. So you would then go on to become a professional boxer. And this is all tied to this idea that really these are activities which ought to be socially reserved for aristocrats. Exactly. Because only aristocrats actually have leisure to engage in them. And if we think about the history of the idea of hobbies and pastimes and leisure, I mean, obviously, if you go back to pre-industrial times, then the distinction between the idea of having a pastime, the idea of having free time is pretty incoherent. If you're a peasant working the land, there isn't...
There are actually significant times of the year, especially in winter, where there's no clouding to be done. There's nothing, there isn't that much work going on, but people spend a lot of time just kind of indoors. Obviously, one of the things you can do, or you can kind of engage in more or less of, depending how into it you are, even if you're like a medieval peasant, arguably is hunting and archery in particular. And then, so there are all these, there are kind of laws around, like, to what extent, like, people who are not. members of the warrior aristocracy, the knightly class, are allowed to, or in fact are obliged to, engage in archery. And there's going to shift depending on the political circumstances in the Middle Ages. So there's times when the elites are really worried that you can't have peasants going around shooting all our game and potentially shooting us with bows. And there's other times when they decide, oh, actually, we need loads of archers to come find some other aristocrats over in France or whatever. So actually, people have got to be seen to be spending time doing that. But then I think it's really in the early modern period, isn't it, that people start to get...
you start to get a lot of state attention on the idea that people might have pastimes or hobbies. I mean, they're not really hobbies, but they're like leisure activities which are not approved of. So the great project of the Puritans, like the radical Protestants in the 17th century is partly to get people to stop spending their spare time drinking, carousing, maple dancing, fornicating, etc. And I know that like historians of leisure, historians of hobbies, they see that as a really, well, historians of leisure in particular, they see that as a really key thing. But I think that's also, I think the 17th century, when you start to get people start to use the term hobby to mean something like what we mean.
by it now. So there's this idea, in the early stages of capitalism, there's this idea that how you think about your time has to be thought about in this much more organised way than it is when you're living the rhythms of the agricultural year. One of the few historical texts I know that focuses explicitly on the idea of hobbies rather than leisure generally is by the American historian Gary Cross. And he's really talking about the American experience from the late 19th century. But his analysis is there's something sort of capitalist about the whole concept of the hobby. The idea of the hobby emerges as an idea of productively using your time, even if it's...
even if it's just sort of productive in a creative way. And this idea of using your time in this quite regulated way, in this quite focused way, he says it kind of brings the work ethic and the idea of industriousness into the sphere of leisure and into the sphere of the home. So that was pretty interesting. Yeah, I think that is... these are really interesting points. And I would say also with that, you know, we can press this point that those things that we understand perhaps as hobbies now in a pre-industrial time, perhaps when like work and leisure, like you were saying, weren't kind of divided in that way, there were more of these communal activities, like you're saying, whether they're like indoors because it's dark, but kind of like craft stuff, music, storytelling and stuff like that. And then like, as you said, we get into the industrial era and because work becomes defined in this kind of alienated way and you get this idea of leisure.
as you were saying, it's like, what do you do with this free time? And we start to think of hobbyists or hobbies, those kind of activities in that way. But then I suppose it's interesting to think about individuated activities at this point, perhaps coming in, because there's also mass hobbies when we get into the 20th century, or mass leisure at least, right? I understand how the forces of capitalism engage there, and I think we're going to talk about that in a minute. But I don't think there is a totally clear ethnography on hobbies and the individual and when that comes in and out because of all of these other factors. It is really interesting to think about that moralising aspect.
to hobbies as in you know it is about self-improvement though isn't it and you can see that there is you know there is a lot you could tell a history of the introduction of capitalism as like this is desperate attempt to stop everyone getting hammered all the time because i think that's what people were doing in the medieval times they were drinking beer basically these sorts of things and like basically you know that's not so much of a problem when you when your work rhythms are set by you know by the seasons and these sorts of things you know i mean but as soon as you get clock time you know then you have to you know stop people getting hammered all the time get introduced closing times etc all these sorts of things So there has been this aspect of like self-improvement, sort of like a moralism around self-improvement, that sort of aspect, basically. Is having a hobby seen as uncool these days? I'm not sure. I don't think it is. I think, but for a period of time, like, you know, the image of the train spotter as like, you know, an anorak wearing...
So almost like a loner or something like that, it's really prevalent in my head when I think about hobbies. Do you know what I mean? I think you're raising an interesting point there. Because obviously, I think what you two are both saying correctly is the hobbies is quite an over-determined phenomenon. The idea of the hobbies and the value people place on them is coming from a number of different places. It's coming from capitalism actually wanting to sell people stuff. And once people are no longer just spending their lives in the factory, they're spending...
They've got some free time hobby. Capitalists want to sell them stuff to do with their free time, and that's partly what drives the idea of the hobby. But there's also a kind of utopian element to the idea of the hobby, which we talked about, that Marx and Engels are evoking the 1840s. And all those things are true at the same time. There's a good Puritan idea of self-control and self-development, and there's a kind of genuinely artistic idea. There's a romantic idea about creativity as a source of self-expression. All those things are bearing upon the emergence of the idea of the hobby. But I think that idea of the hobby as uncool, I think that might be a product of post-Fordism. I think it is a product of the post-Fordist dream that your job would be so cool you wouldn't need a hobby.
And I think people don't believe that in the era of Fordism. So hobbies are kind of cool and they're part of what makes life worth living. People don't believe it anymore in the era of platform capitalism. So hobbies are sort of back in a way, I think. It's really Gen X thing to think hobbies are uncool because you're supposed to have found a job that's so fun and cool you wouldn't need it. Do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life, Jeremy.
But I think before we move on to talking about some of the 21st century stuff, I think I'd like to problematise some of the examples that you gave, Keir, because I think they're very gendered. So I don't know specifically about the medieval times, about when you say everybody was getting pissed. Is this the men and the women? Probably more, so more equal than in later centuries, in a sense. In fact, getting pissed all the time is more... That is linked to the industrial era. People are getting wasted all the time instead of being forced to live in the slums in London. That's where people are getting wasted. Fine. But the other point was this idea that the archetypal...
hobbyist or whatever is a kind of strain spotter. So, which I agree, I think for a man. So let's talk about hobbies and gender a little bit historically in terms of like feminist perspectives on some of this stuff before we kind of delve into talking about capitalism more just so that we have that perspective in. So there's one really important distinction between like historically what's been accepted to have like traditionally like female hobbies are supposed to be like hobbies that are good for girls or young women. And most of these things are actually just like an extension of domestic labor.
because women are not allowed to have free time for stuff that is supposed to happen outside the house. So society convinces women that sewing and knitting and this sort of stuff are, in fact, your hobby. All it is is an extension of domestic labour that you need to be done, as far as I'm concerned. And men, of course, had more free time. In general, of course, there's a generalisation for those kind of hobbies, because we're talking about whether it's fishing, model railways, even sports fandom or woodworking or whatever. These are things that happen outside the house, whereas if you're baking...
sewing or whatever like these are inside the house so i don't think they would qualify as leisure so i think it's interesting to think about it in that way and also to think about hobbies through a feminist lens as freedom from care so it's not involving something that is social reproduction like that is i would say gets us closer to the idea of what a hobby is so that that i think is important uh there as well we get back to this kind of concept of the self-directed uh activity right where there's some kind of autonomy over time and body And also, of course, there's the other angle of, well, it's kind of once, you know, girls hit puberty, there's an idea about this, you know, discipline over the body and this idea of how you're supposed to be behaving. So kind of hobbies that involve some kind of play or like outdooriness is tend to, women's and young girls' spaces tend to be curtailed in that sense. You're supposed to be doing effectively things inside when you're sitting politely, et cetera. So that's kind of like, that's one perspective I think is really important to bring in while we start talking about kind of capitalism later, because that obviously interfaces with...
social reproduction and the kind of self-maintenance stuff and housework. I think that stuff is really important. It's something I've felt really strongly about since I was a kid. I have a really strong memory, even when I was a kid and when I was a teenager, being conscious that boys had hobbies, like whether it was football or being in a band with your mates or playing Dungeons and Dragons. Girls just didn't. And especially, exactly as you say, once they hit pu- they might participate in those things before puberty. After puberty, what are they supposed to do? They're supposed to spend all their time basically thinking about boys playing with makeup and clothes.
I mean, the joke I used to, it wasn't really a joke, it was an observation with my friend when I was like 13 was, well, girls' hobby is just being a girl or it's just emotionally torturing each other. And as a parent of like two daughters, there's still a lot of truth to that. You know, and I think it's really oppressive. I think it's really bad. I mean, my observation is that it's still the case today now with teenage girls that basically having a hobby is seen as really non-normative. So, you know, you're encouraged to think of yourself at least as neurodivergent and quite possibly trans or non-binary, basically, if you're a girl who wants to keep doing a hobby. I think that's right. I think there's something really powerful in what you're saying there in terms of the social pressure on that stuff. I think it's true. It might show up slightly differently. I mean, it's something that I particularly identify with in terms of my upbringing. I don't think that that was the kind of pressure that I was under socially. But I do think that...
There was also, there's less, in a practical sense, there's less to encourage girls to do that isn't sport, for example. I think these days it's much better with women's sport, much better that you can see girls rise into playing sport as a hobby as they turn into teenagers. But there's, in general, especially around the world, there's a lot less of that, whereas boys are still encouraged to continue to have sport as a practiced hobby. But also, I think coming back to the idea of just having a thing to do with your mates, I actually think that is quite, I mean, that is a thing that is liberating for men a lot of the time. It can be quite oppressive for women to not have that.
to have the thing you have to do with your friends is have these constant intense conversations about relationships, about your family, your personal relationships, your friendship relationships. Of course, it is good for men to be able to do that as well. But it's also, I think it can be a problem for women. Not that they don't often have these kind of social outlets, but they're just doing a thing with their mates. So they don't have to have that type of relationship to it. I mean, I'm saying all this, this isn't me saying this. This is me having read loads of feminist sociology on this stuff in the past 30 years. There's loads of evidence to back all this up. This isn't just me anecdotally inferring or assuming stuff. The extent to which generally,
girls and young women like just have loads less time in a week to devote to activities other than hair makeup clothes and like talking about boys is it is really well documented and it's really um i think it's really i think i think it's really important it's really important the girls are encouraged to have and maintain hobbies i think You're right. But then an interesting way that we can start talking about capitalism here and how it interfaces specifically with that is that this idea of monetized hobbies and side hustles. So where girls or young women do have a hobby, is it even a hobby, is like, for example, selling clothes on Vinted or creating things for Etsy or whatever. So making money out of things that are kind of traditionally, quote unquote, feminism, not feminist, sorry, feminine, like interest in clothes, et cetera.
Right? So this is an interesting thing about like, okay, well, how is this an intervention by both capitalism and patriarchy on that level? You know what I mean? Like, I'm not actually sure how patriarchal I think that is. It's a really good question. Now I want to know if anyone's done any proper research on that, because it might just be that everyone's life world has now become so colonised by capitalism. I mean, certainly boys now, certainly the idea that your hobby might immediately be monetisable.
even if it's just making music. Like, you know, if you're a teenager, you can stream your stuff on Spotify and try and make money from it. You can sell beats, like, somehow for small amounts of money. And everybody wants to be an influencer. But I wonder to what extent it is gendered, actually. I wonder to what extent. My immediate impression is, you're right, my immediate impression is there's more immediate pressure on girls to start immediately monetizing themselves and all of their hobbies and pastimes than there is boys. We might be wrong. I have got two songs for us today, both of which have the title Bobby is My Hobby. Margie Rabin.
sang this song that was released in 1962 called Bobby is My Hobby, which absolutely explicitly articulates what we've been saying about the gender nature of hobbies. It's a girl basically saying, I used to have hobbies, I've got a boyfriend now, I therefore no longer have hobbies or have any need for them. A pretty explicit statement of that condition of being that we talked about, an explicit statement of the condition of being which was going to provoke the women's liberation movement into existence and so much of our contemporary world as a consequence. I've also got a song called Bobby Is My Hobby by D Essentials and Blue Montego. That was just released last year, 2025. This is a sort of I'm a Piano track. My understanding is that the line Bobby Is My Hobby is just a kind of joke. They were referring to a friend of theirs who is known as Bobby. The phrase just emerged as kind of a joke. It's an interesting track though, really interesting bit of music, a bit of contemporary South African beat music.
The whole point about platform capitalism is it just really intensifies that amateur professional hobby work. distinction, basically. It intensifies it as in, like, what is a platform, basically? You know, a platform is, you know, it's the platform upon which we, the general public, would fill out this platform with our own activity, basically, is the idea, isn't it? It's basically, you know, the platforms are the professionals, and then we, as amateurs, we fill out the content. The content's the word I'm switching, but yeah, so like YouTube, et cetera, even like, you know, social media, et cetera, we're the one who provide all that. And so it's like, it is all based on the monetization of amateur activity, and yet, you know, it's all based on inducements through sort of like micropayments, et cetera, to basically monetize all activities, basically, and to turn all activities into side hassles, et cetera.
Yeah. And I think part of the quote-unquote sell on this is that there's some kind of streamlining of like, we'll make it easier for you. I sell my second-hand clothes or what's now called pre-owned on Vinted to make some extra money. I do that because it's easier for me than actually trying to find a community of people who want to buy that. And so that argument's being made and a lot of people buy into it.
And then from there, but how it interacts with this idea of a hobby is interesting because I don't consider selling secondhand clothes and vintage a hobby, but I think for a lot of people it is, but it's a hobby where they make money. And that's the kind of interesting way of understanding how capitalism incites itself. But then also using that same logic of, okay, you know, amateurs, we're going to give you a platform that is quote unquote efficient or like does it or makes it easier for you. Then the same applies to this kind of, we can start thinking about the optimization, right? And so how people are starting to optimize their own bodies. And this is especially like huge in the manosphere, you know, but this idea that all of these different activities that we do.
which might be either hobbies or sport or whatever, then become optimized through apps and measuring. And then it becomes in a way like, is it still a hobby? Or maybe it's a purer hobby than if it's being measured and cataloged in this way. Yeah, I mean, the algorithms are set in the structure. And we've linked hobbies to like structured activity all the way through.
And like, you can think about like running apps, et cetera, or Fitbits, which are measuring, you know, this, this digital body sort of thing, et cetera. And then you form a social aspect around it, Strava, Strava, et cetera, these sorts of apps, et cetera. But it makes me think about Letterboxd, which, which I find is like, really, it's the only social media app, which basically, I think it hasn't got that many downsides to me, for me. Do you know what I mean? It's just improved my life. Whereas all of the social media I've, I've engaged with has basically, you know, there's obviously some usability, but basically it's made my life worse. Do you know what I mean? Like I'm addicted to Twitter. Are you sure? You love having, you love having a rant online. You love it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. Yeah, yeah. But like, what I don't like is like the doom scrolling, et cetera. And that,
not being able to stop doing it, et cetera. I'm feeling that it's out of control. But that's interesting because it tells me something about this idea of colonized time, about whether you think, when you're doing a hobby, well, the way that we define a hobby, it's supposed to be like your time, right? In theory, it's like your leisure time, right? Or it's like not when you're doing alienated work. But if it starts being controlled by algorithms and you get involved in like the doom scroll or the endless scroll and it's taking away your time, then we have to start thinking about that as colonized time, right? And whether there is a kind of anti-capitalist way of struggling against that colonized time, I suppose.
Well, like that whole, like the platform and amateurs doing stuff, that has got a utopian aspect, you know? People used to talk about commons-based peer production as like this new wave. This is pre-social media, just about the moment of pre-social. This idea that like basically we could do professional level activity as amateurs. And so Wikipedia is the example that everyone points to, but like free and open source software as well, which is where amateurs were like doing stuff and producing products, which were, you know.
much better than like capitalist project, purely capitalist projects could do. And so those are the positive aspects of social media, the ones that we're reaching for. The problem is they got like monopolized, oligarchized, and like inshittified, as Corey Doctorow says, puts it basically. Do you know what I mean? And there's a dynamic of inshittification. So with Letterboxd, perhaps it's just, that's an app that hasn't yet been inshittified. It's at a different stage of the inshittification process. And the inshittification process goes like this.
a platform has to provide some usability to make it to be attractive. You get on that. And then, you know, as soon as you're like hooked or as soon as your social life is, it's hard to like leave that basically, they then sort of like focus on making the usability shitter in order to get to maximize the extraction of rent out of it. So behind all of that, behind all that is shittification, which we hate about social media, all of the algorithms, which are all based around, you know, producing horrific behavior, you know, which you see in this line, these people animated by these apps in like the Manosphere, et cetera, et cetera, all the stuff that we know so well, there is a utopian element to it basically. And that's the thing that runs right the way through.
hobbies. There's a utopian element there, which is the self-directed activity. And the capitalist bit is where they try to dominate that self-directed activity. And so our self-directed activity online is not self-directed. It is directed by all of these algorithms which are carefully tuned to produce particular forms of behavior to lead to rent extraction, basically. And also, in even simpler terms, people are forced into trying to monetize their hobbies by low wages, underemployment, and austerity. So what do we want? We want more. I think we want hobbies, don't we? We want nothing but hobbies.
You know, we want universal basic income and universal basic services and we want AI technology to be used to create massive reductions in workload so that people can go online and do all their bad hobbies with each other. And offline. And offline. And not online if they don't want to be. There is this whole way in which people are experiencing analog practice, like unalienated labour, like craft activity as a kind of antidote to these forms of digitised alienation, which I think is really important.