I don't think hobbies are all that amazing. They appeal to a time when work stayed at work, and, implicitly, most work was dreadfully boring and you needed some

I don't think hobbies are all that amazing. They appeal to a time when work stayed at work, and, implicitly, most work was dreadfully boring and you needed something, anything, to escape. Most of these pursuits didn't feed back into the rest of the human world in any substantial way, had no audience and no conversation outside of the immediate family circle - all of which meant a lot of awkward "family members putting up with your weird interest". Now we're so connected that the line between hobby and market activity blurs constantly. That can be diminishing in that you end up fighting against market incentives to pursue things in the way you want, but it also means that more of our work, in a relative sense, is work we can be engaged in, and can be done as part of a network with healthy feedback and social opportunities.