Even very different kinds of hobbies have deep commonalities.

Social exposure, social influences, and social identities all shape our individual experience of pleasure.

These social determinants are often overlooked or forgotten.

How many hobbies have you had? Before you count them, try this definition from an earlier post:

A hobby is a regular, leisure activity that provides meaning and enjoyment to a participant, without any expectation of financial reward.

Though pleasurable by definition, other people’s hobbies can appear boring, weird, or pointless. Want to try competitive worm-charming, or extreme couponing? Perhaps dirt polishing or airline vomit bag collecting is more to your liking. Whatever interests you, your people are out there—in more ways than one!

What’s pleasurable, of course, are the emotional, intellectual, physical, or social rewards stemming from the activity. Less obvious is how we land on certain hobbies instead of others; how we transition from ignorance and indifference to passionate involvement; and how we attach value and special meaning to things and ideas we never cared about before.

I’ll offer some directions for addressing these points, looking outward to the hobbyists’ social environment rather than inward to their minds. But first, I describe two of my own potentially boring, weird, and pointless hobbies.

I was a young child in 1964 when my cousins spun their new Meet the Beatles record for me. I was smitten. When my family got a record player, that was among the first........

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