Edel Coffey: Our hobbies reveal a lot about ourselves 

“What are your hobbies?” The question took me by surprise. Hobbies? Do people still have hobbies, I thought? 

I was at a party where I didn’t know many people and was engaging in the exhausting post-pandemic experience of making small talk when the question came at me out of left field. I fumbled around for an answer. Reading? Writing? But these things are my job. Would be a bit sad to say the thing you did for a living was also your hobby? My brain obligingly offered an alternative answer. What about the gym? No that wouldn’t do. I haven’t been to the gym since December 2021 and anyway, hobbies are supposed to be something you enjoy doing. 

It’s not often I am lost for words and the question niggled at me on the drive home. The truth is, I couldn’t come up with any hobbies apart from reading and writing. But why did it irk me so much? Surely hobbies are for my retirement years or those mythical people who manage to organise their days and weeks into orderly chunks of time, the kind of people who swim 50 laps on their lunch break and return to work with perfect hair.

I did used to have hobbies. I had a huge interest in music, which provided an emotional language and landscape of expression not fulfilled by any other medium. I played guitar, wrote songs and lyrics, wrote poetry (the less said about that the better), played tennis, went to movies once a week, went to gigs, had a big interest in fashion and pop culture as well as art… Somewhere along the way, the hobbies floated away and now exist as decommissioned satellites floating on the edges of my life.

Had I really become that woman, I thought? The one I never thought I would become? That martyred Irish mammy who erases herself and her own interests, sacrifices it all on the altar of meal planning and laundry? I was still brooding about it a few days later when I met a friend for coffee. She’s a singer but only does it as a hobby. I mentioned the hobby thing to her and she told me that when she had recently recorded some songs people’s immediate response was ‘what are you going to do with them?’ She said it had surprised her, this automatic urge to organise, monetise or commodify what she saw as her hobby. For her singing is just something she enjoys, something to take her mind off things. Why would she want to ruin that by making it something more like, well, a job?

In early lockdown, I read the West Cork writer Sara Baume’s beautiful book Handiwork, which was all about the joy of making, the pleasure of creating, not for publication or for exhibition but for the sake of it, the way we do as children. It’s something that I have lost from my life, the idea that not everything has to be a product, not everything has to have an end goal or even a purpose. I wondered if I had a hobby or two would I perhaps have less books on mindfulness and meditation.

There’s a reason job interviewers ask the question ‘what are your hobbies?’ Our hobbies reveal a lot about ourselves, what our true, deepest interests are, which is why they are a great way of reconnecting with ourselves.

In our busy world, we are all constantly in a cycle of loss and reclamation, of losing ourselves and rediscovering ourselves. Hobbies can help us with that process of rediscovery. In a culture that prizes achievement and busyness, we have denigrated the value of hobbies. Why would you spend five hours playing a round of golf when you could be getting ahead with next week’s work? It will come as a surprise to no one that the science suggests that the people with the hobbies are the ones who actually get ahead. Hobbies can improve our mental health and lower depression.

I thought about all those times I had been invited to play golf and baulked — I could read a book in the time it would take to get around 18 holes; or have the whole house cleaned from top to bottom.

What a waste of time! But maybe the point is not what you can achieve in the time you might spend on a hobby, but rather the point of the hobby is to take you away from that world of achievement, the relentless productivity, the to-do list that divides and multiplies like cells.

Hobbies are play for adults. They are there to enhance our lives, to bring balance and simple pleasure for its own sake. So, I’ve drawn up a shortlist of hobbies that I am going to try. I have deliberately not included anything that will lead to a diploma or make me a more productive person but simply things that I might enjoy.

And hopefully, the next time somebody asks me what my hobbies are, I’ll be able to give them a long and detailed answer.