We need a better popular understanding of "hobbies," because it conflates a bunch of highly sophisticated activities, and dismisses them as neutral distractions

We need a better popular understanding of "hobbies," because it conflates a bunch of highly sophisticated activities, and dismisses them as neutral distractions from laboring for the profit of others. The underlying presumption is that your identity is labour you get paid for, and anything you don't get paid for is somehow inessential to who you are. It's an impoverished worldview based on scarcity and ignores growth. A hobby is only a distraction if you have internazlied an identity as the subject of some supervisor, and that "free time," comes as a treat or a reward from some other unspecified party, as though you were just a pet doing tricks for approval. Treating them diminuitively is just a polite way of not embarassing other people who are unable to manage their time as well or enrich their own lives to the same degree. Personally, I don't have hobbies, I just do a lot of things, and so I manage my time to do them, and adopting that worldview lets you do more of them.