Random Hobby Generator

What the hobby generator does

You have some time and no idea what to do with it. Or you have run out of things to be, and you want somebody who is not you to suggest one.

This gives you a hobby. Pull ten and one of them will annoy you, which is useful information. The one you dismiss fastest is often the one you have already decided you are not the sort of person who does.

What follows is the single most important thing anybody can tell you before you start. There is a well replicated finding in psychology that says the standard advice about hobbies is exactly backwards, and it will cost you the thing you were trying to get.

How to use it

1. Choose how many you want. Ten is better than one. You want a spread to react against.
2. Press Generate. A fresh set every time.
3. Press Copy to keep the shortlist.

It is called a hobby because of a toy horse

A hobby was a horse. A small one, a workaday ambling sort of horse, and the word goes back to the medieval period.

Then it became a toy. A hobby horse is a stick with a horse's head on it that a child gallops around the room on, and it is one of the oldest toys there is.

And then, in the seventeenth century, it became a metaphor, and this is the good bit. To ride your hobby horse meant to be off on your own private obsession again. The thing you always come back to. The subject you bring up at dinner that everyone else has heard about. You are not going anywhere, you are just galloping, and you are delighted.

Hobby is the abbreviation of that. It is a shortened toy horse.

Which means the word contains its own definition and nobody notices. A hobby horse does not take you anywhere. That is not a failure of the horse. Going somewhere was never the point, and the child on it is not going to be a worse rider next year for having played.

Keep that in your head for the next section, because everything wrong with how people treat hobbies now is that they forgot the horse is a toy.

The worst advice you will ever be given

Somebody is going to tell you to monetise it. Turn your passion into a side hustle. Do what you love and never work a day.

There is a study from 1973 that should be printed on the back of every one of those posters.

Mark Lepper, David Greene and Richard Nisbett went into a preschool and found the children who already liked drawing. Nobody was making them. They drew because drawing is good.

Then they split them. One group was told in advance they would get a certificate for drawing. One group got a surprise certificate afterwards. One group got nothing.

A couple of weeks later the researchers put the markers out during free play and watched who picked them up.

The children who had been promised a reward drew significantly less than the others.

Not worse. Less. They had liked drawing, somebody paid them for drawing, and afterwards they wanted to do it less than the children who had never been paid at all. The surprise reward group were fine. It was specifically the expecting that did the damage.

They called it overjustification, and the mechanism is quietly horrible. You did something because you wanted to. Then a reward turned up, and your brain went looking for the reason you were doing it, and found the obvious one sitting right there in your hand. So the reason updated. You are not drawing because you like drawing. You are drawing because you get a certificate.

And the moment the certificate stops, the reason is gone, and you cannot get the old one back just by wanting to. It has been overwritten.

So look at this list again. Photography, baking, woodworking, knitting, writing, pottery. Every single one of those has an enormous industry telling you it could be a business, and every one of those has thousands of people who used to love it and now have a shop.

Sometimes that trade is worth it. But be clear that it is a trade. You are exchanging the thing you were getting for money, and you do not get to keep both, and you cannot undo it later by deciding to relax about it.

The point of a hobby is that it is unjustified. That is not a weakness in the concept. That is the entire mechanism by which it does you any good.

One hobby, three completely different lives

Take one off the list. Photography will do, because everybody has a camera.

Photography is three unrelated hobbies wearing one word, and most of the misery around picking one comes from not knowing which you are signing up for.

The casual one. You take pictures of things. You enjoy it. It costs nothing, needs no equipment you do not have, and you can stop for two years and start again on a Tuesday with no penalty. Nothing accumulates and nothing is owed.

The serious one. You learn the exposure triangle. You start seeing light when you walk. You get worse before you get better, because you now know enough to see what is wrong with your own pictures, and that stage is genuinely unpleasant and it is where most people quit. Come through it and you have a skill that keeps giving for thirty years.

The equipment one. You buy a camera. Then a lens. Then you read about lenses. You spend more hours on forums than outdoors, and the pictures do not improve because the pictures were never the point. This one is real, it is common, and people who fall into it are often having a lovely time, but they should know they have taken up shopping.

Now run any hobby on this list through those three and it works every time. Home brewing. Model railroading. Fishing. Chess. Each one has a version you do, a version you learn, and a version you buy.

None of them is wrong. But the casual version is the only one that survives being busy, the serious version is the only one that gets better, and the third one is the only one that will empty your bank account while feeling like progress.

So when the generator hands you something, ask which of the three you want. That question is more useful than the name it gave you.

Where these come from

The hobbies here come from a list our team put together and checked by hand. Press the button and one is drawn out of it at random.

That is the whole thing, and it runs on your own device.

Actually picking one

The generator is the easy half. Here is what actually decides it.

Notice what annoys you. Pull ten and watch your own reaction. The ones you skip past are neutral. The one that produces an actual flinch, a no, that is not me, is worth a second look, because that is not a preference. That is an identity defending itself, and it is usually defending something you decided when you were fourteen.

Pick for the state, not the noun. Nobody wants pottery. People want an hour where their hands are busy and their phone is across the room and nothing is being measured. Pottery is one delivery mechanism for that. So is bread, so is fishing, so is a guitar. Work out which state you are short of and the noun sorts itself out.

The good ones have a floor and no ceiling. You can enjoy a chess game the first day and still be learning in forty years. Same with cooking, drawing, gardening. Avoid anything where the first six months are all cost and no return unless you have a very specific reason, because you will not be there in six months.

Cheap first, always. Buy the worst version. If it survives the worst version it will survive anything, and if it does not you have lost the price of a paperback instead of the price of a kiln. Everybody who owns a wildly expensive unused thing bought it on day one to prove to themselves that they were serious. Buying is not being serious. It is the feeling of being serious, which is available immediately and does not require you to be bad at something in public.

Then leave it alone. Do not measure it. Do not track it. Do not set a goal, start an account for it, or let anybody pay you. Look at the 1973 study again. You are protecting the one thing in your life that does not have to justify itself, and the world is extremely keen to help you ruin that.

Questions people ask

What if I do not have any hobbies?

Then you are in the ordinary condition of adults and it is not a character flaw. Most people lose them somewhere between twenty and thirty, when time gets expensive and everything in the day starts having to be for something. The generator is a way of skipping the hard part, which is not doing a hobby but choosing one, because choosing means admitting you would like something for yourself and then being bad at it for a while.

Why do I always quit after a month?

Usually because you picked the serious version by accident and hit the wall where you are good enough to see how bad you are. That stage is normal, it is where the learning is, and it feels exactly like proof you have no talent. The other common reason is that you made it a project. A hobby with a goal attached is a job you do not get paid for, and you will quit it the way you would quit that.

Do I have to be good at it?

No, and this is the question that stops more people than any other. You are allowed to be bad at something for the rest of your life. Being bad at the guitar for twenty years is not a failed guitar career, it is twenty years of playing the guitar. Somewhere along the way people picked up the idea that an activity has to be heading somewhere to be allowed, which is the same mistake as the horse.

Are hobbies actually good for you?

The research says yes and says it fairly consistently across countries and age groups, particularly for older adults, and the effect turns up in life satisfaction, mood and self reported health. Worth noticing the trap in that sentence though. If you take up a hobby in order to improve your wellbeing score, you have just attached a reward to it, and you know from the drawing study what that does. The benefit seems to come from doing the thing for its own sake. You cannot aim at it directly.

How many should I have?

More than most people have and fewer than the internet suggests. Two or three is plenty. One that moves you, one that uses your hands, one that is just consumption and asks nothing. Anyone running seven is either retired or is doing a hobby about having hobbies, which is allowed and is arguably the most honest one on the list.

References

1. Lepper, M. R., Greene, D. and Nisbett, R. E. (1973). Undermining children's intrinsic interest with extrinsic reward: a test of the overjustification hypothesis. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 28(1), 129 to 137. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0035519
2. Deci, E. L., Koestner, R. and Ryan, R. M. (1999). A meta-analytic review of experiments examining the effects of extrinsic rewards on intrinsic motivation. Psychological Bulletin, 125(6), 627 to 668. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.125.6.627
3. Mak, H. W., Noguchi, T., Bone, J. K. et al. (2023). Hobby engagement and mental wellbeing among people aged 65 years and older in 16 countries. Nature Medicine, 29, 2233 to 2240. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-023-02506-1
4. Online Etymology Dictionary. Hobby. https://www.etymonline.com/word/hobby