Yeju Seol
School rigor and the negative influence of social media have made it nearly impossible to keep up with hobbies.
“What do you like to do outside of school?”
It’s a question I dread every time without fail.
If you asked me four years ago, I would have told you that I like to read and make jewelry. Now, I don’t have an answer.
When I’m not at school, I’m either at work or cooped up in my room doing homework and studying. In the little free time I do have, I find myself too exhausted to do anything except rot in my bed.
It’s a pretty universal belief that school takes up too much of our time. As a senior, school has left me with barely enough time to do the bare minimum in taking care of myself. As I’ve progressed through high school, my weekends have become shorter and shorter. The two days I have to do anything but school, I spend studying for tests or catching up on homework. Not to mention, college applications. With so much to do, hobbies feel like a waste of time.
Although we’re now five years away from the start of COVID-19, I wonder if that was the best chance I had to develop consistent hobbies. Of course, there’s always fall, winter, spring and summer break, but the COVID-19 era put a pause on school for several months. The bulk of that time I spent watching shows and movies or occasionally following a Chloe Ting workout. To this day, I regret not using that time to pursue actual hobbies. Speaking of which, what constitutes a hobby?
The Oxford Learner’s Dictionaries defines “hobby” as “an activity that you do for pleasure when you are not working.” Hobbies can be divided into two categories: consumption and creation. We’ve normalized consumption hobbies like reading, so why doesn’t watching movies also fall in that category? As time goes on, there seems to be an uptick in consumption and a decline in creation.
The main cause of this is social media. More specifically, TikTok. As of 2024, the average U.S. adult is reported to spend 58.4 minutes a day on the platform. This is a 31-minute increase since 2019. TikTok’s endless for-you-page is what makes it so addictive. The amount of mind-numbing content one is exposed to as they scroll fries dopamine receptors that would otherwise be used to pursue a hobby. When the U.S. government shut down TikTok on Jan. 18, users joked about being forced to find an actual hobby. However, the mass panic that ensued because of this was no laughing matter.
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