A friend of mine created a tier list for hobbies. The ‘tiers’ are inherently flawed and are probably better at pissing off your friends than they are truly assessing the worth of your hobbies, but we’ll get to that.
Ranked from best to worst, the three tiers can be summarised as.
High tier: Creative hobbies. Examples include composing sonatas, woodworking, painting portraits, creating TikToks*.
Mid tier: Self-improvement hobbies. Examples include exercise, learning a language, meditation, reading self-help/textbooks.
Low tier: Consumption hobbies. Examples include watching TV, doomscrolling, eating at fancy restaurants, reading novels**.
*Proof the list is flawed. Learning a language is clearly a higher hobby than creating TikToks. Unless your TikToks were you teaching people to speak another language...?
**Further proof the list is flawed. 50 Shades of Grey and Crime & Punishment are both fictional novels, and reading either one of them doesn’t necessary equate to self-improvement, unless you argue that reading Crime & Punishment inherently made you a better person, or 50 Shades of Grey made you a better lover (which is gross).
By me engaging in a high tier hobby (creating a blog), you are all forced to engage in a low-tier hobby (consuming a blog). Unless you think my blog somehow makes you smarter, more informed, or more thoughtful - in which case consuming my blog is actually a mid-tier hobby. In the case of brain rot TikTok creators, they’re definitely subjecting us to a low-tier hobby.
What is a hobby?
For tax purposes, you’re not really allowed to make any money from your hobby or else it stops being a hobby and starts being a business. When I write for free, it’s a hobby. When I get paid for doing the same thing, I’m a solopreneur or a freelancer and I need to do those pesky things like set up an ABN, pay taxes, and start getting vaguely interested in those ubiquitous Squarespace advertisements.
A lot of people learn programming as a hobby, and they get satisfaction out of recreating Tic Tac Toe or Snake. Maybe later they find they love it and become a videogame developer. Does that retroactively recolour their hobby as professional development or training? I liked that classic road map rug as a kid, but I am not sure I could call that professional development for my urban planning career.
This rug was pretty sweet though.
The Forge Card Game
Speaking of hobbies and businesses, I made a board game - once a hobby of mine, and now officially a business.
Ironically, The Forge is simultaneously :
Not a hobby at all as I am trying to make money out of it
A high-tier hobby as it requires players to create new theoretical businesses and products
A mid-tier hobby as players are honing their marketing and entrepreneurial skills, and
A low-tier hobby because at the end of the day you are simply playing a hilariously fun card game.
Support The Forge Card Game