Checking through a list of hobbies recently voted Britain’s most boring, I am delighted to see a few of my favourites included: “watching TV”, “drinking and smoking” (although I only do half of this hobby these days), and “sleeping a lot” (with two small children, my take is more “thinking about sleeping a lot”). If I’d known sooner that these things counted as pastimes, then my own for the best part of thirtyish years might not have been “worrying about not having a hobby”.
I was only surprised to note that the nation’s — no, entire world’s — most boring but also most popular hobby wasn’t included: staring at our phones. If we spent the same amount of time practising the violin we’d be violinists, so perhaps it’s time to give ourselves a name: phone-ists. You can try to persuade me you’re not one, but I won’t believe you.
Barely a day goes by without an impromptu session of staring at my phone — you don’t even need specialist clothing or to cover the table first. It’s so easy to fit into your day too. You can do it alone or in a group, and often while other people are talking to you.
I have friends so passionate about this particular pastime that they’re really pushing the boundary between amateur and professional. Some of them already seem to be making a living from it, but perhaps it then no longer counts as a hobby.
Forget stargazing, we’re all screengazers now. The only bird most of us are watching is the blue one on Twitter. Move over basket-weavers: we prefer the virtual kind that you can fill and never pay for. The days of everyone having a stamp collection or lepidoptery kit might be over but that doesn’t mean hobbies are dead.
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If you define them as something you do between other more pressing things, then I have loads: looking through Instagram; browsing things that I can’t afford from Gwyneth Paltrow’s lifestyle site Goop; setting reminders on my phone so I don’t forget to do all the other more pressing things while I’m scrolling.
In fact, being a committed phone-ist means I’ve actually picked up several hobbies in later life, and I bet you have too. I’m really good at refreshing the headlines constantly even though the news is on in the background, for example.
I also like to watch video clips of animals acting like humans — or children I don’t know acting like animals — while missing key plot twists in the foreign-language box set I chose specifically so the subtitles meant I couldn’t look at my phone. I spend all day looking forward to my kids going to bed so I can look at photos of them instead.
When did I take up staring at my phone, you ask? Well, about the same time you probably did — back when the number of logins I thought about regularly went from two (email and Kenny) to about 75 (social media, news, banking, shopping, health-tracking, sleep-tracking, fertility-tracking, oligarchs’ yachts — tracking, and so on).
It took a little while for me to find my feet but I no longer make beginners’ mistakes such as giving myself blue-light insomnia or engaging with the trenchant views of people I disagree with. I now know it is far better to let the anger and anxiety dissipate throughout my body and colour the way I feel for hours afterwards.
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I’m not even really joking. The only hobbies I really had a claim to were reading and sometimes writing — now I break off both regularly to stare at my phone instead. In the olden days, if I found myself home alone, I might watch a film — yet a couple of weekends ago I spent a precious Saturday night solo looking through property listings on Zoopla, despite having moved house six months ago and not wanting to again.
At least the demands of parenting mean I no longer surface as if from meditation, still in a towel 45 minutes after my shower, having sat down on my bed to check the weather and then segued into opening every single app just to see what’s what. Thank God I am beyond the life-stage of stalking my exes on Facebook. This, in fact, is the only app I don’t open — I do have some standards.
When does a hobby cross over into a compulsion? Has a society ever spent so much time voluntarily doing something it knows doesn’t make them happy? No wonder so many people have taken up wild swimming, pottery and calligraphy — it’s the only way to stay away from the narcotic in your back pocket. I’ve recently taken up a hobby that I’m calling “a Nineties walk”, which is when you go out and leave your phone at home.
Years ago in my A-level French class the teacher went around the room asking people what their hobbies were and a new student declared en français that he enjoyed foraging for mushrooms and looking at bats. What a dork, we all sniggered — but I bet he’s far happier than the rest of us now. I bet his French is also still better too. There’s probably a great bat-fluencer community on Instagram too. Hang on, I’ll just take a look . . .
