When Did Free Time Become Scrolling?

Some Hobbies Grow Up With You

Some people are lucky enough to discover what they love as children and simply keep doing it. The child who loved drawing still draws as an adult. The one who learnt an instrument keeps playing. Someone who started knitting with their grandmother still has a basket of yarn sitting somewhere at home twenty years later. There is something lovely about that continuity, about carrying a small piece of yourself through different stages of life.

But not all of us work that way.

Some of us change quite dramatically as we get older. The things we enjoyed at 15 don’t necessarily interest us at 25, and what we thought was boring at 30 can suddenly become something we look forward to at 40. We also discover things about ourselves that we simply hadn’t had the opportunity to discover before. Sometimes you only find out what you enjoy when you finally have the time and freedom to try it.

Free Time Has Become Screen Time

The bigger problem is that we now live in an era where free time has become almost synonymous with scrolling. You finish work, pick up your phone and start consuming whatever the algorithm has decided you need to see next. It isn’t necessarily a terrible way to spend twenty minutes. Sometimes you genuinely want to switch your brain off.

But we are constantly taking something in. You can start your evening watching a funny video and somehow end up an hour later reading about a war, an earthquake, someone’s divorce and a completely unnecessary argument between two strangers on Instagram. It is a rather strange way to spend your free time, particularly when you started scrolling because you wanted to relax.

And perhaps the problem isn’t scrolling itself. Sometimes doing absolutely nothing is exactly what you need. The problem is that we’ve slowly forgotten that there are other ways to spend an hour.

There Is Something About Doing One Thing Slowly

This may be why so many people are finding their way back to hobbies that require focused attention. Mandala drawing, diamond painting, knitting, crocheting, gardening — activities that ask you to concentrate on one small thing rather than everything happening around you.

For me, researching healthier ways to make the delicacies I enjoy has become one of those things. So has crocheting. There is something almost trance-like about getting lost in a pattern and concentrating on whether each stitch is accurate. You have to pay attention, but not in the way you do when you’re working. There is no deadline, no email waiting for you and no particular reason to hurry.

And there is something satisfying about discovering that you actually enjoy doing something you had never considered before. You don’t have to be particularly talented at it. You don’t even have to finish with something impressive. Sometimes the pleasure is simply in figuring it out.

Hobbies Don’t Have to Be Impressive

I also think we’ve made hobbies far more complicated than they need to be.

Some hobbies have social currency. Saying you’re training for a marathon sounds impressive. Learning pottery, a new language or photography gives you something interesting to tell people when they ask what you do in your spare time.

But spending two hours crocheting doesn’t necessarily sound quite as exciting. Neither does sitting with a book, drawing a mandala or figuring out how to make a healthier version of your favourite dessert.

And perhaps that is exactly why they are worth having. They don’t have to become a side business, make you fitter or give you something to post about. They can simply be things you enjoy doing.

Free time doesn’t always need to be productive. But it also doesn’t always have to disappear into a scroll.