Passive Pastimes
What are your favourite pastimes? Maybe you like to get up early and go for a run, or perhaps you’re a crafty person who loves to sit at the dining table all weekend and work on your scrapbook. Maybe you love getting together with friends and watching your team take on their rivals; perhaps you enjoy online gaming or sailing or mobile blackjack or playing basketball. Whatever your favourite hobbies are, there’s a good chance that you’ve had to put a few of them on hold or even give up a few over the last few years. The whole world has had to contend with stay home orders, social distancing and a general lack of time outside of the home or interaction with others. While we’ve had to spend so much time isolated and indoors, many of us have turned to passive or home-based hobbies. Those who enjoy gaming or crafting have been lucky enough to keep their hobbies going while they’ve stayed safe at home. Those who enjoy things like surfing or trail running or even taking in a movie at a cinema once a month have had to find different ways to while away their free time.
Passive pastimes have been the order of the day for a while now. Many people’s new favourite hobby is now watching Netflix or building puzzles. These new habits that we’ve built are not ones that are easily broken, so they’ve carried on through all the public health and safety changes and restriction relaxations that we’ve undergone. The question is, now that the world is opening up and we’re not housebound anymore, are people getting tired of their passive pastimes?
Are people tired of passivity?
As of 2021, these were the top ten hobbies of people all over the UK:
- Making and listening to music
- Food: cooking, baking, learning new recipes and eating.
- Reading and Writing
- Travel
- Video games: console, pc and mobile gaming
- Pets; who doesn’t love them?
- Health and fitness
- Socialising
- Watching various sports
- Gardening.
Prior to 2020, travel was further up the list, as was socialising. The change is clearly influenced by events associated with recent world events; home-based hobbies took over because they had to. While they were, in some cases, taken on out of necessity, the large majority seem to have made this adjustment more or less permanent.
Since these don’t appear to be on the way out anytime soon, we’ve listed some of the most popular ones in the UK today. Maybe some of these will grab your interest and change up your home hobby routine a little!
Themed Dinner Parties
While this isn’t exactly a passive activity, it is home-based! Put all those cooking skills that you’ve worked so hard on to good use and throw a themed dinner party for your close friends or family. You could try a French night or maybe a Disney theme with foods from different Disney films. You could take this as far as getting dressed up in costume and even adding fun theme-based decorative elements to your home and the table.
Learning
These days, education is available from the comfort of your couch. There are many well-regarded education apps online that offer courses on everything from philosophy to language to photography and cooking. In most cases, these sites are well priced, and all you’ll need is a few notebooks and some pens. If you want to take a slightly less structured approach, find TED talks or youtube videos on subjects that interest you and spend a little time watching those instead of your regular TV viewing.
Curate Playlists
Is there ever a bad time for a well-curated playlist? We don’t think so! Sign up for a service like Apple Music or Spotify, and you’ll have a vast majority of all the world’s music at your fingertips. Curate playlists by mood or for specific events: you could try making a nostalgic or happy playlist, or even one that will make you smile while you get ready to go out with your friends. If you share these playlists publicly, you’re opening up your playlists to anyone who might get joy out of hearing them.
Meditation
Meditation is as passive as hobbies get if you don’t count sleeping! Meditation can help you in various ways: it can help you wind down before bed to get a good night’s rest, allow you to focus your energy and direct it better or help you stay calm and peaceful. Guided meditations are great for beginners, and there are a lot of apps that offer a wide variety of them completely free of charge.
Fitness
If all this passivity IS too much for you, there are many different kinds of fitness that you can try out at home. Yoga, Kingry, pilates, kickboxing, Zumba, weights…there’s guaranteed to be something out there that suits you, your fitness level and the goals you have in mind.
Wrap Up
Whatever your choice of hobby, enjoy it to the max! Remember that your free time is your own and whatever it is, if it makes you happy, it’s the right hobby for you.