Origin of Everything

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, and the gig economy.

But why and when did we develop non-compensatory 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 hobby's history and get right into the way we use it today.

Industrialization across Europe and the U.S. 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'd think.

In his book, "Hobbies: Leisure and the Culture of Work in America," Historian Steven 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 business-like 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 were 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 slash 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 or knit endless ribbons of material with no aim in sight.

You start 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 work week.

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 needle work, 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 crafts, 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 it unconsciously enforces a stricter code of conduct than if all those 19th-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 fundraising 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 observed 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 set in by 1929 and continued through the 1930s, the weekend suddenly became a solution for employers who were looking to shorten the work week to save money in the face of economic disaster.

And suddenly, all of those handcrafts and hobbies that you learned 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 structured 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 altogether.

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 vaguely knew liked 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 $500,000 a month from playing "Fortnite" 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 we're 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 misshapen and ugly cookies that taste great and everyone in your family enjoys.

Suddenly your ugly "butta-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 century 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.

Accessibility provided by the U.S. Department of Education.

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