Remember when people used to be interesting?

Source: Remember when people used to be interesting?, Ashley Embers, 35:56, uploaded 2025-06-16, category Other / Unclear, playlist index 236.

Ashley Embers begins with a confession that sounds small until she keeps asking it: what happened to hobbies? She has just turned 26 and feels that she has none. Another speaker she quotes is 28 and says the same thing. The embarrassment matters because a hobby used to offer an easy answer to the question of who a person was. Collections, books, sports, crafts, instruments, and the things people practised in spare time gave a life some shape. Embers thinks that many people now spend their free time streaming or scrolling, then wonder why their lives feel flat.

The essay follows several causes. Hobbies have become expensive. Phones give us easier rewards than practice can. Online culture shows finished work and mocks the awkward stage that comes before it. Consumer culture turns buying into an activity that can look like a hobby. The resulting problem reaches beyond leisure because a person who never makes time to become bad at something loses one of the ways interests, confidence, friendships, and character grow.

The missing hobby

Embers looks for evidence that hobbies have declined and finds no current statistic that establishes the claim. The Covid-19 pandemic produced a burst of hobby activity, with sourdough, Animal Crossing, tie-dye, and whatever else could keep isolation from becoming unbearable. Her first revision is that hobbies may have changed since 2020 rather than disappeared. She then makes the narrower claim that the quality of many pastimes has fallen, whilst admitting that this remains speculation.

The strongest number she gives concerns screen use. She cites a worldwide average of 6 hours and 38 minutes of screen time each day, including 2 hours and 21 minutes on social media, 1 hour and 25 minutes streaming music, and 52 minutes listening to podcasts. The figure comes from the Comparitech screen-time statistics page, and Embers presents it as evidence of the time available for other activities rather than as proof that hobbies have vanished. She also admits that her own livelihood depends on people looking at screens and that she avoids checking her screen-time report.

Her examples make the loss personal. One woman remembers reading paper books, crocheting blankets, playing cards, stargazing with her mother, ice skating with school friends, and doing word searches and crosswords after dinner. As an adult, she still has spare moments, yet they begin with Instagram and lead to YouTube and television until morning. A second account describes a resume assembled just after college with rock climbing, beekeeping, oil painting, and hiking listed as hobbies. A few years later, the same person struggles to name one. Parenthood, a house renovation, work, and the disruption of Covid have consumed the time and the social settings in which those interests once lived.

Embers includes a mother’s version of the same problem. She can name solo car rides, long showers, and the hour when her husband takes the children, yet she cannot think of anything she enjoys or does well outside motherhood. She does not treat motherhood as a mistake. The difficulty comes from allowing one necessary role to become the only role that feels available. A hobby gives a person contact with a self that work and care do not use up.

Hobby inflation

The first material barrier is price. Embers cites a LendingTree study that says roughly six in ten Americans took up a hobby during the pandemic and more than half of those people went into credit-card debt as a result. The source’s figures need to stay attached to that study. They describe a survey and a particular period, and they do not show that every hobby has become unaffordable.

The pressure is still easy to recognise. A sports ticket can cost at least $300. Knitting yarn can cost more than the finished scarf. A low-end camera can cost$ 500 before editing software adds its subscription. Baking has absorbed a large rise in ingredient prices. Embers gives her own counterexample in drop-in badminton, which she and her husband used to play for about $5, then turns to children's sport, where the costs climb fast. She cites Canadian hockey rising from an average of$ 4,400 per child to $7,300 for 13-to-16-year-olds, golf's average tee time rising from$ 38 in 2019 to $49, and baseball rising from$ 600 to $1,000 a year. Project Play's survey puts the average American sports family's primary-sport spending at$ 1,016 in 2024, a 46 percent rise since 2019.

The number that carries the argument is the one that follows a person across a lifetime. A journalist remembers shooting sporting clays every weekend from 2005 to 2010. Ammunition cost about $5 a box, and the whole hobby came to about$ 60 a week or $240 a month, paid for with weekend work and occasional help from a parent. Sporting clays now cost more than twice as much in many places. The loss is larger than the price of an afternoon because the sport supplied a community and became part of the journalist’s identity during adolescence.

Embers recognises the adult version of the same calculation. She wanted to return to indoor bouldering after Covid, yet $20 a day was hard to justify whilst she was trying to manage money and recover from childbirth. She went anyway because exercise and the effect on her mental health were worth the expense. A hobby can remain worth paying for whilst still being a privilege that many people cannot afford.

Games have entered the same price structure. Embers mentions the Nintendo Switch 2 launching at $449, compared with$ 299 for the first Switch, and Mario Kart costing $79 digitally or$ 89 physically, with the Canadian price reaching $122. She had imagined buying a Switch for family games such as Mario Party. A separate exchange about Borderlands 4 makes the moral pressure plain: when a fan asks the Gearbox CEO to keep the game below$ 80, the CEO replies that a real fan will find a way to pay. Embers compares the reply to the old advice that people should work harder if they cannot buy a house. The joke works because the hobby has become a test of loyalty, and the person who cannot pay gets treated as the one who failed.

The plateau after the first excitement

Money explains part of the decline. Time and patience explain another part. Embers describes a culture built around instant coffee, instant answers, instant media, instant delivery, instant knowledge, and instant validation. The list is hers, and the larger claim is that immediate rewards have trained people to abandon activities before the slow part begins.

She calls this plateau culture. A new hobby starts with shopping, supplies, a schedule, and a quick burst of improvement. A few weeks later, the beginner reaches the stage where progress slows and the activity starts to feel like work. The person who buys a guitar meets sore fingers and wrong chords. The person learning to crochet sees hours of practice before the work resembles anything. Embers says that the brain interprets the plateau as evidence that the activity is unsuitable, although persistence is the condition that would produce skill.

The internet lets people consume the pleasure of competence without enduring its costs. A viewer can watch a skilled crocheter finish a difficult piece and receive a small part of the satisfaction that comes with completion. Social media displays the finished object, the successful performance, and the first burst of progress. It leaves out the third year of practice. Embers connects this structure to AI, which can remove the middle of a task and return an end product. The comparison is brief and speculative, yet it belongs to the same concern: a person loses the experience of becoming capable when the result arrives before the work.

The phone as a replacement pastime

Embers makes the argument against her own habits first. She has a relaxed job and spends a great deal of the day on social media. She goes out less than she used to, and she feels tired of living through a small screen. She also separates video games from scrolling because games can offer benefits within clear boundaries. The distinction matters. Her target is passive, open-ended consumption that fills time without giving the player a practice to develop.

She cites National Lottery research in which one person in four considers social-media scrolling a genuine hobby, whilst one in three says the time spent there prevents other interests. The numbers support her description of a changed definition. A person can call scrolling a hobby and still experience it as a way to wait for the nervous system to settle. Embers quotes a description of scrolling as an ambivalent procrastination tool that helps someone stay aware of whatever has entered the online zeitgeist whilst they wait for enough energy to take a shower.

That account lets her describe scrolling as dissociation. When stress exceeds a person’s capacity, the nervous system seeks an easy way to lower the pressure. Scrolling provides a stream of small changes without the risk of failure or the demand to decide what matters. It can also leave the person feeling worse after several hours. The alternative takes deliberate effort: leave the phone in another room, use a device that locks it away, or accept the discomfort of beginning a task without a feed beside it.

The problem reaches established hobbies as well. Embers quotes a 25-year-old who used to write, play story-driven video games, jog, speak with family, and get excited about a new book or film. The person now does those things with a phone in hand and spends the time there instead. The barrier is therefore attention itself. A familiar practice can lose against a device designed to interrupt it.

Embers cites a study of students in a high-school AP seminar that found a correlation between heavier social-media use and lower sustained attention alongside greater susceptibility to distraction. She keeps a qualification in view: the debate over attention spans is more complicated than saying that short-form content has made everyone incapable of concentration. App design, notifications, information overload, and years of testing have taught platforms how to keep a person’s eyes on a screen. Her claim concerns manipulation and competition for attention as much as it concerns any fixed decline in human capacity.

Buying as a hobby

Scrolling is only one way to fill the empty space. Shopping supplies another. Embers describes the small reward that arrives when someone orders something online, followed by the larger anticipation that builds whilst the package travels to the front door. She has felt it after ordering packing tape. The object hardly matters. The arrival does.

The same reward has entered the language of leisure. Shopping hauls and day-in-the-life videos turn purchases into content, while collections turn repeated buying into an identity. Embers mentions Starbucks cups, Yeti bottles, Squishmallows, Jellycats, and Labubus. Labubus arrive in blind boxes, so the buyer does not know which design is inside. Embers calls the surprise an element of gambling, and notes that people can spend hundreds of dollars trying to complete a set. Celebrity exposure then turns a toy into a fashion accessory and a status signal.

She gives collecting a fairer reading than the joke about the toys allows. A collection can be a hobby when the person has a real interest in the objects and the work of finding, arranging, learning about, or caring for them. The problem appears when buying the current trend supplies the whole activity. Collection and consumerism sit close together, and a short-lived fad can make the difference hard to see.

Embers uses the phrase zero-effort hobby for activities with almost no barrier to entry, such as colouring books, paint by numbers, and diamond art. She does not call them harmful. They are healthier than scrolling and can give someone a pleasant way to rest. Her concern is that a pastime which demands no developing skill gives less room for a practice to become part of a person’s character. A skilled person can work at a colouring book with great care, yet the activity itself remains open to competent completion by almost anyone. A beginner given knitting needles and yarn faces a problem that requires instruction and repetition.

This is the point at which her argument risks becoming too narrow, and she partly acknowledges it. Hobbies can serve rest without producing mastery. Embers’ stronger claim is that a life made only of low-friction activities misses the pleasure of trying something difficult, failing in public or private, and seeing the failure change through practice. Skill creates a durable source of confidence, a creative outlet, a way to meet other people, and a place to put attention outside work. Those benefits justify keeping at least some difficulty in a person’s leisure.

The shame of being seen learning

The deepest barrier is embarrassment. Embers links the fear of failure to a public internet where everything can be recorded, shared, and judged. Social media shows highlight reels and exposes mistakes, so people become highly aware of how they appear whilst they are still trying to become good at something. She cites Tim Wu, who argues that hobbies have absorbed the pressure to prove a person is as skilled and interesting as they claim to be. Leisure turns into another performance.

The public punishment is the example that makes the idea concrete. A musician records a song about being married within a year in the suburbs and rises onto his toes while singing to a small crowd. The gesture is harmless and the song may be outside Embers’ taste. Online viewers make parodies because his enthusiasm looks excessive. The response treats visible passion as an invitation to bully. A person watching the clip learns that sincerity can become a public spectacle even when the work has done no harm.

Embers sees the same reflex in the demand that Gen Z remain nonchalant and effortless. People can hold ambitions privately, yet mock another person who is still in the starting phase of pursuing one. The target might be a job, sport, social-media account, or fashion project. Its early work may look awkward and produce little attention. Calling it cringe supplies a quick way to shame the effort before it becomes competence.

That mechanism makes irony protective. If everything is a joke, genuine emotion stays hidden and failure can be framed as deliberate. The protection also prevents growth because the person who never commits cannot be seen caring about the result. Embers describes cringe culture as shame and fear returning under the cover of humour. Her claim is broad and directed at a generation, yet the examples show the narrower pattern: a public audience punishes people for trying, and everyone watching learns to remain safely ordinary.

A hobby requires a little humiliation

Embers ends in anger at the return of casual bullying and in admiration for the earlier millennial habit of being openly enthusiastic. She asks people to stop making fun of those who care, whilst admitting that online culture will keep producing the behaviour. Her practical conclusion is modest. Treat hobbies as part of long-term happiness and character, make room for them within the limits of a difficult economy, and choose activities that ask for patience. She adds that hobbies often create a person’s strongest communities, which gives them a role in the current loneliness epidemic that the essay only has time to mention.

The sources in the description give the essay a real research trail, yet they do not establish its whole diagnosis. Embers has no longitudinal measure showing that young people have fewer hobbies than earlier generations. Her screen-time and social-media figures describe use, whilst the claims about quality, character, and boredom come from observation and personal testimony. The price examples come from different countries, activities, and surveys, so they show pressure rather than one uniform inflation rate. The attention study identifies a correlation, and Embers keeps the causal question open. The essay works as a cultural reading of a set of experiences, with evidence that supports some parts and leaves other parts as informed speculation.

The last wish is plain: embarrass yourself by doing something hard this week. A person has to be willing to look inexperienced long enough for the activity to become theirs.

Remember when people used to be interesting?

notes.

Remember when people used to be interesting?

The missing hobby

Hobby inflation

The plateau after the first excitement

The phone as a replacement pastime

Buying as a hobby

The shame of being seen learning

A hobby requires a little humiliation

Further reading / references

related notes