Honestly, I feel like I have no hobbies, even video games. I feel like everything I do is for the purpose of me escaping Autistic burnout. I play video games to lessen the burnout. I garden to reduce expensive food costs. I learn programming for the sake of escaping my ludicrous job. I build computers in order to work on servers and applications to build a portfolio for work. I spend time with my spouse to, once again, reduce burnout. I participate in PSL to hopefully help push for revolution in the future. I practice guitar to ease my burnout and to build a skill that would allow me to creatively support PSL by playing music in rallies.

I yearn to learn an esoteric language, build Linux From Scratch, design a PCB, practice soldering, learn a CAD scripting language like OpenSCAD for 3D-printing, play board games with friends, go hiking and biking, learn another spoken language, read fiction, finish my drawings and paintings, or anything else just to have fun with no long-term goal in mind. I’m so tired.

Hobbies are whatever you do because you wanna, not because you haveta. To think that hobbies need to somehow be “productive” I usually attribute to a capitalist/liberal/Protestant mindset. This reminds me of R. H. Tawney’s Religion And The Rise Of Capitalism, though I haven’t read it so I can’t say for sure that it’s relevant.

I have definitely been plagued by the “hobby must be productive” mentality. For example, in the context of a video game, framing it around what I’m “accomplishing” within the game, since the game itself is not producing anything. Or in the context of language learning, viewing it as something that needs to show results for it to be worth doing.

I think it ties into a sort of perfectionism for me. But anyway, I agree with you that a hobby does not need to “qualify” as a hobby, for lack of a better word. It can just be a thing that you do. Now as for applying that to my own mind in practice, that’s a whole other question. 😅

This is kinda how hobby is understood in Poland: anything that you like to do in your free time that isn’t your source of income (or at least major income). That “being productive” thing is fairly recent here and obviously to a surprising lot of people came with capitalism and is percieved as part of the hustle culture. Of course USA cultural invasion is beating it into Poles too, but just free time enjoyers are still very common.

I very much agree with this. Hobbies are the way we self actualize. It’s developing our own interests in a self-directed fashion. It’s a fundamentally different activity from doing something out of need.

In my view, a core goal of a communist society should be to minimize work that needs to be done by humans, and maximize the ability of people to pursue self-directed development. And this has to go even further than just providing people with free time. Imagine people having access to collectively owned industrial machinery, computing resources, and so on.

Hobbies were invented to sell hobby supplies, its called doing stuff you want to

Very nice, I had similar impressions because of this too. I think it’s kinda a bit of bourgeois ideology in each of us, because we try to convince ourselves to be “more productive” even in our leisure time

I like this perspective of yours. I may as well expand the range of activities of mine I call hobbies.

If stamp collecting is a hobby, everything is a hobby.