Just Wondering

[ladysprite]

What do people without hobbies do? I know they exist; as far as I can tell in just about any workplace the vast majority of the people there just don't have any real interests or activities they participate in outside of their job. So.... what do they do with their time?

I've got a half-day today. I spent the morning shopping for ingredients for recipes to try at this weekend's SCA Cook's Guild meeting and starting preparatory cooking for that; while the eggs were boiling I worked on translating the next part of a period Italian cookbook. Now I'm going to work on writing up part of a period dance manual; if that gets boring I have a shawl I'm crocheting that I can work on. Tonight I'm having friends over for a gaming session. Last night was dance practice, this weekend is Cook's Guild, the weekend after that is a gaming convention.

If I didn't have any outside interests, I think I'd end up just growing into the sofa. I can't fathom that lifestyle.

Comments

[z-gryphon.livejournal.com]

I suspect it's just that most people in any given workplace don't care to discuss their outside interests with their co-workers. I know I don't.

[ladysprite.livejournal.com]

Yes and no. I'm a fairly gregarious person, and in at least a few of the places where I've worked, I've gotten to be friends with most of my coworkers. We've gotten together for dinner, gone out together, and generally chatted about most of the details of our lives. And as a whole, most of them.... just didn't do anything. They looked at my hobbies, and speculated aloud that I was insane, and when I asked them what they did in their spare time they just drew a blank.

It was the same with a lot of my classmates in vet school, too.

[starcat-jewel.livejournal.com]

I'll bet a lot of them didn't feel that they had any spare time. What with job, housework, raising kids (and kids are a HUGE time-sink, as I've had occasion to find out!), maybe taking care of elderly parents... it's easy to fall into the mindset that you'll do something for yourself after everything that SHOULD be done is done, and that never happens because there's always something else that you SHOULD be doing.

And watching TV is a huge time-sink too, if you actually watch it (by which I mean that your attention is focused on the TV as if you were seeing a movie in the theater), rather than just having it on in the background. But most people don't think of that as a hobby.