Reassessing Hobbies In The Age Of Social Media

By Ooi Kee Beng, Editorial, July 2026, Penang Monthly

WRITING DURING THE middle of my writer’s retreat at the Rimbun Dahan arts centre, near Sungai Buloh, I was inspired by its peaceful environment to adopt some generous perspectives about the world. I turn to a seemingly innocuous subject: the hobby. How much time do you need to spend on an interest, and what proportion of your earnings and savings do you have to be willing to spend (not invest) on that interest, before you can honestly call it a hobby?

It is a difficult question, deciding what a hobby is, and what is not. But let us ponder further.

I like doing some gardening on my big balcony. But when I consider the little time and money I spend on it, I would not claim that gardening is really a hobby of mine. What I really like is having a green and luxuriant balcony.

I have more books at home than most people do nowadays. But they are, in the final account, just potential reading material. I shelve them more or less meticulously by subject, as a way of reminding myself of my intellectual pursuits, lest I forget what I was once excited about. Well, I suppose collecting books can be considered a hobby.

I used to spend a lot of time watching television—almost every evening. I doubt it helped me sleep, but it did entertain me. Was that a hobby? I do not think of it as such.

Now, when screen time on cellphones or computers is ravenously eating away at the limited hours we have per day, are we able to have a hobby at all that does not involve swiping and clicking?

Maybe the more interesting questions are as follows: does everyone have a hobby? Why do we have hobbies? Why do we want to have hobbies, yet brush off their importance by dismissing them as “just hobbies”? Are hobbies a modern phenomenon? Or is this discussion actually much ado about nothing, since humans beings are necessarily interested in many things at the same time?
The very concept of hobbies, if the term’s contemporary usage is anything to go by, most likely emerged in the context of the all-consuming modern working week, or was at least deeply configured by it.

It de-stresses us and is also supposed to be fun—in contradistinction to Work, which stresses us and is not meant to be fun. By these metrics, if a hobby brings forth anxieties or becomes a necessary source of income, then it has transformed into a “chore”, or even a “second job”.

Sigh.

Defining hobbies is turning out to be more com-plex a matter than I had assumed at the start. Let us browse through the relevant literature; from it, I glean the following points of departure for understanding what a hobby is:

1. A psychological need. A hobby can be a search for an “experience of mastery”. This endeavour can function as a buffer against burnout, or anchor a sense of personal identity heedless of what the world likes and rewards.
2. A sociological response. Hobbies can be a form of “conspicuous leisure” to signal wealth and privilege. Conversely, they can offer a way for people to gather over uncontroversial activities, like knitting, reading books or pottery.
3. High-end consumption. A hobby can also be the consumption of goods, through wine-tasting or film-watching, for instance. Interestingly, a hobby can be a process for producing something that is clearly less valuable than the investment of time and money would otherwise suggest.
4. A research laboratory. Traditionally, if your hobby brings in substantive income, then you would in fact be working. However, with the advent of the gig economy, the choice to work (or not) in this sense has become a personal and immediate undertaking. A “First World problem”, in fact. This slippage challenges the very concept of the “hobby” itself, revealing the artificiality of the separation of professional from regular personal activities. Since there must have been countless cases where hobbies developed into successful businesses, a hobby can clearly be tantamount to a laboratory for creative research and development.
5. A moral corrective. Hobbies may involve what many would consider frivolous and childish pursuits, which serious adults should be mature enough to not indulge. The common admonishment “to take up a hobby” is thus meant as a disparaging directive to procrastinators and lazy people to stop idling away their lives.
6. An emotional regulator. Among neurodivergent communities, hobbies become deeply immersive, dopamine-controlling activities.
7. A philosophical occupation. Most of you would probably like this viewpoint. A hobby can be a so-called autotelic activity, wherein the doing is the point. Hobbies are not means to ends; the goal is intrinsic to the doing. The journey is what matters, as a radical act of existential defiance against the utilitarianism pervading modern life. On a simpler plane, one could look directly at the activities involved in a hobby. This approach makes a hobby several possible things, such as: (1) an act of creativity, of producing something novel, of nurturing something, like gardening or painting; (2) collecting or curating classes of objects, like coins or antiques; (3) an intellectual but not utilitarian pursuit of knowledge, like amateur astronomy or genealogy; and, finally, (4) a physical activity like jogging, climbing or dancing.
   
   In weary conclusion, I venture that the term denotes too much. In fact, I wonder if hobbies really represent the pursuit of the many lives we wish for, but which are not for us to properly live. Humans have countless capabilities and therefore suffer a strong need to feel and exercise agency. We are individually in constant struggle with society’s norms, demands and judgements. That is life, and a hobby, in short, is our silent act of defiant self-definition.