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