There’s something primal about the activities often cited as the world’s most popular hobbies: exercise, gardening, cooking and sewing all have a connection to our survival. We need to look after our bodies, grow vegetables, prepare food and clothe ourselves to ward off malnutrition, hypothermia and premature death.
But there is another kind of hobby, the kind with little or no apparent utility value. Take stamp collecting, for instance. In theory, philately will get you nowhere. It’s an end in itself. Track down and buy your treasures, put them carefully in an album organised according to place or theme – “US presidents, mint, 1960 to present” – and leave them there. That’s it. Although, theoretically, you could try to use your stamp collection to impress a date, and good luck with that.
But how have such traditional hobbies faced up to the technology revolution? Have the venerable likes of stamp collecting, model railways and scrapbooking survived the challenges of the digital age?
Have they ever. Like the rest of us, hobbies have adjusted to the new virtual world order. Unlike many of us, they have retained their dignified central core of creative pottering and slightly eccentric obsession.
Hobbies are good for us mentally and also good for our physical health.
Tamlin Conner is a University of Otago professor of psychology whose academic interests include happiness and wellbeing, and she believes hobbies can contribute to both of those. She also believes she could lift her own hobby game. Conner belongs to a cooking club, but, she says, “it doesn’t have that creative element. I need to fill my hobby gap.”
She believes a hobby contributes to our wellbeing in five ways: “It builds one’s skills and self-esteem, so it makes you feel good. Often hobbies have an element of challenge – they take skills and time to build up.
“It also can connect you with others. A lot of hobbies involve some kind of fellowship. It could be working with others, playing with others, giving to others, gifting to others. So, to the extent that hobbies are relational, that can satisfy some of our fundamental needs.
“And hobbies can benefit cognition – they are good for us mentally and also good for our physical health. We know there’s a very strong connection between physical and mental health.
“Hobbies also contribute to better work-life balance. You’ve got a bit more autonomy, and you’re expressing yourself.
“And the fifth reason is that I think they give you something to look forward to.”
Social connections
The hobbyists spoken to for this story seem to bear out Conner’s hypotheses. Warwick Wright, Christchurch support worker and stamp collector, specialises in revenue stamps, which, he explains, “were used for taxation, not for postage. Postage stamps were first invented around 1840, but revenue stamps were first invented a lot earlier. They stopped around the 1950s, so they’re purely historical.”
He won an award (self-esteem, tick one) for a display in the course of which he had to learn about and explain the historical context of the stamps and their use (skill-building, tick two). He belongs to two stamp clubs (social connections, tick three) and work-life balance isn’t such an issue for him yet, but he does appreciate always having something to look forward to (tick four). “You’ve got no obligation to do it. Just do it whenever you feel like. If you don’t have time, you just leave and come back to it when you want.”
And he has picked up life lessons from taking part in exhibitions. “Younger participants like myself are quite rare. We have a medal system for exhibits, like the medals at the Olympics. There was a restriction that younger exhibitors were not allowed the top awards, even if your score was high enough to be entitled to one. I was very good at it and for some people that was a problem. When I did an exhibition in Adelaide in 2014, the Australian federation gave me a gold medal unofficially because they felt that the level of research and work I did was deserving of an award. In New Zealand, they would always say that the rules meant they couldn’t do that.”
Wright, now 27, still collects but no longer competes, having been put off by tawdry stamp-collecting politics.
Another way in which hobbies seem to hew to old-fashioned norms is gender specificity. There are exceptions, but in general gentlemen collect stamps and build model railways, and ladies make scrapbooks.
Lower Hutt-based Gemma Pascall, regulatory manager and scrapbooker, comes from “quite a crafty family” and has been making what she describes as her “memory books” from a young age. She reckons her earliest examples would have been from “my school prom and when I was a bridesmaid”.
Scrapbooking, fortunately, appears not to suffer from the sort of politics that bedevils philately. But Pascall agrees it comes with psychological benefits.
“It can be quite therapeutic. I have a friend whose husband died, and she had a load of photos and all the rest of it. She spent a couple of years intensely scrapbooking their life, and it really helped with her grief.”
Scrapbooks and stamp collecting operate on a relatively small scale and can be done in confined spaces, but model railways need room to move around (and around and around). Fortunately, the Auckland Model Railway Club lucked out a few years back and has the use of a spacious two-storey building in the suburb of Mt Wellington.
Auckland Council leases the club land and the club owns the building. Membership totals 19 and they meet weekly to work on their elaborate landscapes and locomotives. For most, it’s a sociable affair, but some people prefer to come when they can have the place to themselves. After six months, new members get a key that gives them access to the building at any time.
Improve wellbeing
The variety of hobbies prompts the question: are some better for us than others? “Any hobby is better than no hobby,” notes Conner, who says the research shows “it can help reduce depression and improve mood and wellbeing”.
She says a hobby is not going to outweigh problems associated with, for example, social isolation, but “if you have an isolated older person, and a hobby is able to connect them with others, it can have flow-on effects to their mental health”.
Furthermore, she says “creative hobbies, where you’re infusing it with your own flair or putting disparate ideas together in novel ways, seem to have an added benefit”. Hobbies can reduce the risk of depression and “hobbies such as dancing, hiking or skiing have health benefits. And doing these things outside, in nature, can have some additional top-up. Each of these little increments for the types of hobbies are probably additions to the main effect that any kind of hobby is good for you.”
Probably one of the biggest issues for a lot of people out there at the moment would be connection.
Conner adds by way of context for all this good news that “people who are higher in wellbeing might have more scope to do hobbies. If you’re not so pressured and stressed at work, or if you’re retired, you have more space to do hobbies. But even when you control for all those things, it does seem that there is a causal link.”
Although being useless can be part of a hobby’s appeal, the best can expand to accommodate as much deep-diving and person-hours as people want to put in. For Warwick Wright, learning about the history of revenue stamps became a big part of the fun, and the research skills he developed have been carried over into other areas of his life.
For Auckland Model Railway Club member Thomas Hurst, “the detail aspect” is a big part of the appeal. “I’m quite interested in one particular route, in one particular region of England in the 1960s, called the West Coast Main Line, which is the route that went from London to Glasgow. I really like the rolling stock that ran on it, and that’s why I chose the time period as well. All the stuff that I have would have run in the 1960s, and it’s a crossover of a time when steam, diesel and electric all ran at the same time.”
For the record, Hurst reports, initiates don’t say “train spotters”, they say “rivet counters”.
Doom-scrolling alternative
Things on which hobbyists do not spend a lot of time include their phones and streaming services: traditional hobbies are the gold-standard alternative to doom-scrolling and binge-viewing, albeit even the latter has its place, according to Conner.
“I don’t think a lot of people are deriving meaning and purpose bingeing their Netflix shows,” she says. “But we can’t always be engaging in productive wellness activities.”
Conner and the hobbyists in general agree that when you have a hobby you enjoy, no matter what else is going on in your dreary life, you always have something you can look forward to and which can take up as much or little time as you like.
“If I’ve thought about it in advance, I can get a page done in a couple of hours,” says scrapbooker Pascall. “Sometimes it will take me a whole day to do a page. Sometimes I don’t even finish it in a day because I’m faffing with some little detail.”
She has an impressive array of PhDs – projects half done. “I like variety and I get bored quite easily, so I’ve always got different projects on the go.”
For her, thanks to the wonders of online, the scrapbooking is a way to maintain contact with her mother in the UK. “We can do video chats for six hours, crafting and getting up and making cups of tea. We do challenges where we take an event or photo – something that we’ll use as the centrepiece – and then we each create our own pages. We’re also doing an alphabet book each, ‘The A to Z of Me’, where what is important for me under M, for example, will be different to what’s important to my mother.”
Trains also helped connect Thomas Hurst with his father.
“When he was a young lad in England, he had a Hornby train set. When I was seven or eight, he pulled it out from under the house, and handed it to me, and we played around for a bit. And when I was at intermediate school, we discovered the Auckland Central Model Railway Club. It was definitely a good bonding exercise.”
Unlike online social networks, hobbies foster real-life social connections.
“You could be very introverted and do your scrapbooking in your house and never see another soul. But it is one of those great hobbies that you can do with other people,” says Pascall. She’s an habitué of Scrapbook Central, a craft shop that hosts scrapbooking events that can spin off into people getting together to indulge their hobby in each other’s homes, forming friendships along the way.
Model trains also allow people to extend their social networks, as well as their rail ones. At the Auckland club’s rooms on a Thursday night, you’ll see people working separately or together on different parts of the layouts, swapping ideas and observations without the kind of pressure that often comes with compulsory fun.
“That’s probably a driving factor among individuals who could be potentially isolated otherwise, with unique or niche interests,” says Conner.
Even stamp collecting can be social, says Wright. “There’s two different clubs in Christchurch. One’s more serious, and one is more social, where you can always meet people and have some fun.” Though he adds a warning. “Some collectors can be a total black hole, where you begin talking and many, many, many, hours later, they’re still talking.”
In a classic case of old-style networking, Thomas Hurst got a job through his hobby: “I’m an IT systems administrator. I contract to my boss who I met through the club.”
If you were so inclined, you could discern a political dimension around ownership and property rights in what happens at the Auckland Central Model Railway Club, where people share the layouts, not just running their trains on them but adding buildings and landscape features for the benefit of all.
No one owns the layouts, says Hurst. “If you move to another city, you’ll be leaving your work behind for other people to enjoy. We don’t really contribute to it to own it, just to have done something cool and to the benefit of everyone else.”
Surely in this crypto-anarchic system there have been collisions and crashes from time to time? “Never intentionally.”
Although the hobbies that have been talked about don’t depend on it, technology has increased options for them all. Most obviously, people can buy, sell and trade items easily online that might have taken years to track down in real life. Wright says he has bought most of his stamps online. Tech-savvy model railway enthusiasts have taken to 3D printing lampposts, buildings and even rolling stock for their systems.
Technology has helped make model trains run on time. “Back in the day, it was all analogue,” says Hurst, “so you could only ever run one train on one track at the same time. But nowadays, there’s a code, like a little chip, in every train, so you can control just about as many as you like on the same line.”
There are also digital scrapbooking options where the whole thing exists only online, but Pascall says she can’t do without the tactile element.
Fend off boredoom
Most hobbies can be seen to foster creativity of one sort or another. Even an athlete will likely come up with new training routes and routines to fend off boredom. But anything that involves making will inspire imagination.
“I do a lot of travel scrapbooking,” says Pascall, “so every trip I do, I try to memorialise. Trips and family would be the main themes. I did a safari in Kenya, so I had those amazing photos plus bits and pieces that I bought at markets, lolly wrappers, painted fabric, natural things.”
At the railway club, some members are all about the trains and carriages and what they can make them do, while others pour their passion into creating the scenery and cities through which the trains will travel.
The same activity can be a creative hobby, conducive to wellbeing, or an absolute chore, depending on context. Tamlin Conner says that how much people benefit from her cooking club, for example, depends on what motivates and drives them to cook.
“If you’re like me and you have a family and a nine-year-old, cooking is not necessarily a pleasurable thing. But when I get together with my friends at my cooking club, once every two months or so, that is a very pleasurable thing.”
With all their positive implications for wellbeing, could hobbies replace therapy?
“No,” says Conner. “However, therapies often include some hobby elements. In residential settings, where you might have people with psychiatric issues, hobby-like events or activities are often included as a way to get people engaged. It’s called behavioural activation. If you feel like you’re getting a little down, developing and leaning into a hobby could be a spark that can benefit your wellbeing.”
Most hobbies can be seen to foster creativity of our sort or another. But anything that involves making will inspire imagination.
It also seems likely that hobbies are better for you if they are not a version of what you do at work.
“I would imagine that the benefit of the hobby is it’s adding an extra dimension to your self,” says Conner. “If I read non-fiction science books as my hobby, that’s very much aligned with what I like to do, but it’s not necessarily adding depth, and it may remind me of my work. It may not give me the restoration that it needs. There is research showing that when you are more multi-dimensional, you’re more resilient. If you have one dimension that’s going badly, the other ones are going to buffer you and support you.”
Let Hurst sum it up: “Probably one of the biggest issues for a lot of people out there at the moment would be connection. It’s kind of hard to find a place where you can feel connected and be involved. The nice thing about the model railway club is that it’s a cool place with lots of people who have a like-minded interest. There’s very welcoming people and very little negativity. It helps you feel involved and a bit less alone.”