Timoni West is a web designer in San Francisco.
This is her blog.

On Those Crazy Hobbies

I hesitate to link to this article, because it’s the type that makes my teeth hurt (see my previous bashing of a similar article about grups), but here it is: the New York Observer’s summary of “New Vics”. New Vics are, apparently, kids my age who are noteworthy for being responsible, have jobs and definitely considering kids, and of course have lots of crazy and obsessive hobbies.

A snippet of the wallpaper from the Renegade Craft Fair

The hobbies thing has come up in a lot of conversations recently. Pretty simply, there’s a clear pattern of each upper-class generation (or sub-generation) doing something to differentiate themselves from those who came before. In the eighties, kids went to Ivy League schools, wore alligators on their shirts, and worked hundred-hour weeks. In the nineties, they wore plaid and felt deeply about things and had no idea what to do with their life. Now we must have cool jobs that we love, but also some weird OCD hobby on the side that shows (a) we’ve got enough time to cultivate weird hobbies; and (b) we’re interesting. It’s a curious blend of displaying wealth through the allocation of time, and trying hard to be different, and I’m pleased that I missed the nineties, because they didn’t do a good job of it.

Somebody’s knitting project, on Flickr

But back to the charming hobbies of those from nineteen to thirty-two: the trend seems to have started off with swing dancing, and t-shirt artists, made a quick spin around knitting, stencilling, alcohol and food, and folded into things like exotic gardening and reappropriating electronics to be used in a manner inconsistent with their labeling. Like Make. Like cakes shaped like video game characters. Like your friends the obsessive salsa dancers. This isn’t so much like graffiti (which was had rebellious or reactionary beginnings) or wanting to be in a band (which is something everybody wants at some point). I’m talking about things that just seem a little interesting or old-fashioned, like refurbishing Radio Flyers and then joining a club of young, cool, interesting and like-minded Radio Flyer refurbishers. I’m getting silly, but it’s a good change. Having a father who makes a treehouse out of recycled computer screens is going to be way better for our kids’ mental health than a father who was Never There. The “New Vic” stuff I’m just going to ignore, as it’s not catchy enough to become a meme and anyway it just seems like a pale ripoff of Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age. But the hobbies? The hobbies can stay.

—Timoni