Today I'm going a little off-topic, as I'm going to discuss something a little different. In today's chaotic, fast-paced world, it's nice sometimes to just slow down and do something for pleasure. Some, like myself, take our pleasures and turn them into professions. I love reading and typos have always bothered me, so I decided to make a career hunting them down and eliminating them before they could make it to print. Everyone has a story to tell about a passion that became a profession, or a passion that allows one to sustain him- or herself in one's profession.
Hobbies are necessary.
We need them so that we have something we consider fun to use to decompress from the stress of everyday life. Whether it's something adventurous like rock climbing or white water rafting, or something less stressful like gardening or reading a book, our hobbies are what help us stay sane. What most people forget is that it didn't used to be this way.
Not only was stress a much different factor in the past, but things we consider hobbies now were a way of life even fifty years ago. Any kind of crafting hobby now--sewing, cooking, carpentry, etc.--was a necessary survival skill then. We needed to know how to sew to make clothes, how to cook to make food, how to build to make shelter... The list goes on. That these survival skills are now taken for granted is something remarkable, and linked directly to our increased dependence on automation. The Industrial Revolution started it, but the Computer Revolution has put the pin into our fight for survival.
Now we can do these things because we want to rather than because we need to.
In today's incredibly fast-paced, technologically dependent society the ability to simply disconnect for a few hours and have fun is a necessity. The hardest part is deciding what hobby to focus on, particularly when one derives pleasure from multiple different hobbies. As an example, I enjoy reading, watching TV or movies, playing video games, sewing, cooking and baking. And yes, cooking and baking are two different things. A hundred years ago, two of those hobbies didn't even exist, and most of the others would be required skills for a woman. It's a novelty that these requirements have vanished after such a short time, relatively speaking. A hundred years isn't that long in the grand scheme of things, yet we've seen massive developments in that time that dwarf every era that came before. Who knows where we'll be in another hundred years? Traveling faster than light? Manipulating dark matter? Evolving in some currently inconceivable way?
I don't know for sure, but I can't wait to find out.