Still, it was not until the late 1800s that hobbies became viewed as virtuous. Before then, the word referred to any fixation, even riding a hobby horse, hence the name. But after the Industrial Revolution increased leisure time, hobbies became associated with moral success. As Steven Gelber explains in his book Hobbies: Leisure and the Culture of Work in America, leisure time created an opportunity for delinquency that hobbies could solve, and so they were promoted.
Throughout history, what we now call hobbymaxxing has occurred in times of national economic distress or existential dread: the Great Depression, World War II, the Covid-19 pandemic. Hobbies offer a solution to idleness, but also to deep-seated unrest and anxiety.
Hobbies can be pushed too far, and, at their max, they feel like labour. The direct relationship between effort and meaning eventually flips. Inzlicht explains, “At a certain level of effort, you get maximal meaning. The harder it is, the less meaning we derive.” As Jia Tolentino writes in her essay “Always Be Optimizing”, about how the internet and capitalism pressure women to constantly improve, “most pleasures end up being traps, and ever public-facing demand escalates into perpetuity”. She continues, “The worse things get, the more a person is compelled to optimise.”
‘I never allowed myself to indulge’
This desire to optimise is fuelled by metrics and digital record-keeping. Letterboxd (for movies you’ve watched), Goodreads (books you’ve read), Backloggd (video games you’ve played) and Beli (restaurants you’ve visited) are just a few of many popular apps to track hobbies. “As soon as you put a metric to something, people want to maximise that metric, even if the metric is nonsensical or not real,” Inzlicht says.
But these extrinsic measures also reduce the pleasure we derive from leisure over time. In other words, “it feels like a job”, Inzlicht says. By putting numbers to hobbies or posting about them online, “you’re making it an obligation to yourself and, ultimately, it will undermine your performance”, he continues. As Alfie Kohn argued in “Punished by Rewards”, praise causes people to lose interest in the task itself, turning play into work.
It’s counterintuitive. Dana Gould, 23, experienced this firsthand. She maximised her strength training and running routine. She let herself read only self-help books. She tracked and posted about each hobby on social media. “I never allowed myself to indulge,” she says. “I thought that I needed to be this crazy entrepreneur who locks in.”
Soon she lost the wonder and curiosity that drew her to those activities in the first place. All the rules and recording took away the “true essence of a hobby that makes you enjoy life”, she says. “Everything becomes work.”
She’s since stopped posting and found hobbies to be “so much easier when you don’t have that pressure”. When Gould sees videos of hobbymaxxers appear on her feed, it feels jarring. “Everyone’s in this simulation of trying to maximise everything,” she says. Opting out, she says “feels like a cheat code”.
The irony is that optimisation culture promises more pleasure. “Digitalisation has intensified this development because social media constantly exposes us to other people’s supposedly successful lives, while apps and wearables provide us with technologies for monitoring and improving our own,” cultural sociologist Sarah Pritz says.
Although social expectations have never let leisure quite run free, she continues, “what is distinctive today is the extent to which leisure is becoming organised around ideas of productivity”. Even relaxation has acquired a purpose: to recover and perform better afterward.
Doing nothing begins to feel like wasting a resource, especially when a meaningful-feeling hobby could replace that unused time. She says, “It becomes increasingly difficult to justify an activity simply by saying, ‘I enjoy it,’ or even, ‘It serves no purpose at all.’”
Hobbies as validation
Those words ring true for Arden Yum, a 23-year-old consultant based in New York, who longs for the days of semester-long syllabi. “That sense of structure was really exciting. You were working toward something with every book, every chapter,” she says.
If she spends an hour in front of the television, she describes feeling guilty for having not done anything productive. In part to stave off this guilt, Yum turned her hobbies into a personal curriculum complete with timelines.
She writes the Substack Ad Hoc, where she shared the curriculum with more than 13,000 subscribers. Her “six-week creative restart” transforms hobbies into goals ranging from exercise to written reflections to work on a long-term creative project.
Some may consider hobbies rewards themselves. But Yum’s are challenges, and finishing comes with a self-reward. She offers a few possibilities: “A meal at your favourite restaurant, a spa-day, an upgrade to your home you’ve been contemplating, a night dancing with friends.”
From the thread in her subscriber chat, Yum estimates at least a couple of hundred readers are following the goals alongside her. “I don’t find it relaxing. I definitely find it motivating,” she says of her restart.
Yum is conflicted by the performativity of hobbymaxxing. “If you didn’t post about your book, did you even read it?” she jokes. “Actually engaging in hobbies, or reading outside of your phone or computer, is becoming a status symbol,” she adds. “You’re intellectually rigorous and different from the Gen Z stereotype. It makes you appear to be more ambitious and smart.
“Even if it starts off performative, if it results in genuine connection or intellectual stimulation, it’s a net positive,” Yum concludes.
This may not be the case for all of Yum’s hobbies. She’s tried to film herself cooking, for example, but “it totally ruins the real-life experience. There’s tension between actually living life and then telling people on the internet that you are.”
Yum’s Substack, which started off as purely a creative outlet for her, is another example. “I totally feel pressure to find ways to drive paid subscribers or do brand partnerships. Not even because I need it as a second job, but because there’s pressure on all sides to constantly be optimising and monetising.” She’s still figuring out how to balance optimising for the Substack algorithm with writing essays important to her.
Le believes her hobbymaxxing may be rooted in following others on social media – “seeing all these people doing so much”, she says. She posits that her parents’ generation didn’t have the same exposure to other people’s lives, and perhaps this exposure is why she so often feels behind. At the same time, Le became internet famous for posting about her hobbies. “I like to say I’m doing it fully for myself, but if I’m being honest, some part of me does really like the validation,” she says.
She’s taking a break from certain hobbies, such as designing nails. “I wanted to spend my time more productively,” she says, and nail art seemed to be eating too much time relative to the other hobbies. Even as Le embarks on her first year of college, she can’t imagine stepping back from hobbymaxxing any time soon. She says, “I don’t think there’s ever been a time where I quit all my jobs.”
