What makes a good hobby for the sophisticated modern tech geek?

Chase and I were recently discussing why a certain, relatively small group of hobbies are so highly represented and prestigious among upwardly mobile West Coast software engineers and other technical types.  (And probably those off the West Coast too, but I haven’t watched them as closely.)  Particular examples include: cycling (especially road cycling), ballroom dance, flying, rock climbing, martial arts, and skydiving; and to a lesser extent scuba, surfing, hang gliding, blogging, and very precise forms of cooking and oenology.

What do these hobbies have in common?  On first glance, not much, but with a little more examination, they appear to share a set of common principles closely related to the values and priorities of this subculture.  A good hobby for the sophisticated modern tech geek:

• Should be expensive
• Should involve complicated gear or procedures, preferably both
• Should appear dangerous or at least difficult
• Should not actually be dangerous, or even involve a high possibility of catastrophic-but-harmless failure
• Should not be directly competitive
• Should be good but not excessively strenuous exercise
• Should be social but only loosely so; in particular, there should be other people, but you shouldn’t have to work together in any unplanned or contingent way
• Should involve some specialized, but straightforward, intellectual or embodied knowledge; in other words, the hobby should be reducible to a clear set of instructions, but those instructions should be long or complicated or hard to perform correctly
• Everyone should be able to participate as a group: there shouldn't be an upper limit on participants, and even if it involves specialist knowledge, beginners should be able to muddle along through the basic form of the activity if shepherded
• Should not be creative; difficulty in implementation of the activity is good, difficulty in design of the activity is not

Obviously, none of these qualities are strictly necessary, though some are more important than others.  However, they all help, and it seems like their intersection is pretty well-explored — for instance, I criticized this list of qualities by noting that it predicted that non-competitive orienteering should be extremely popular, and Chase informed me that it was huge among LA tech types. 

This list is useful, because you can use it to compare potential hobbies!  For instance, running is pretty good, but not as good as cycling, because it is excessively strenuous and doesn’t involve any cool equipment.  Blogging in the classic sense of journaling is pretty good, as is tweeting — it’s direct and literal, everyone can chime in, it uses technical equipment — while creative and critical writing are not so good.  Many "classic" nerd hobbies, like model-building, are not very good.  Social dance and traditional ethnic dance are pretty good, choreography is not so good.  Board games aren't bad (especially complicated contemporary ones with pretty equipment), though tabletop RPGs are not as good.  Traditional martial arts are pretty good, boxing and MMA are not very good.

Others are left as an exercise to the reader!

Comments

[Felicity]

This is awesome. Now I'm wondering about the hobbies common among West Coast, largely female, bookish humanities types (writers, librarians, social scientists, et c.) popular hobbies include knitting/crochet, raising chickens, book arts, very sparse and sporadic blogging. I'm sure I'll think of more. In Portland, of course, biking is endemic, but everyone in the cohort I know who bikes bikes to places, not as recreation. I'm just thinking of this because these hobbies seem to carry almost diametrically opposite characteristics to those you list:

-Relatively inexpensive
-Can use a variety and large amount of equipment, but much material is salvageable or cheap and the equipment can be limited, portable.
-Appears quaint
-Apart from avian bird flu, quite safe
-Not at all competitive - can involve nurturing or gift-making
-Completely sedentary
-Can be completely solitary or can lend itself to limited project-oriented community-building, often online.
-You're going to have to help me on the instruction thing.
-I think the difficulty/cap thing is similar.
-Should be creative (with the exception of chickens. In general, the chickens are the hardest to generalize. What is it with chickens?)

Maybe I'd find more hobbies if I analyzed myself. I sure am bookish and West Coast and stuff. Beading? I used to bead.

[mike]

Oh, complicated. Thoughts:

It's interesting that you associate your hobbies with gender, because I didn't mention gender at all in my post. Of course, almost all the tech-person hobbies I mentioned are pretty strongly gendered -- not in that the girls can't take part on their own or (more often) alongside the boys, but in that they're mostly seen as masculine things to do. And I think that this perceived masculinity can explain at least a decent a lot of their appeal to tech types who participate in them -- men and women both.

And, of course, the gender ratio in the subculture I'm talking about tends to skew male -- perhaps to the point that, often, the hobbies you're describing are the hobbies of the wives and girlfriends of the men who have the hobbies I described. This is not to say that there aren't women fully involved in the subculture I described, or that many of them aren't romantically involved with men in the same subculture, or that there aren't queer people in these subcultures, etc. Just that this gender dynamic definitely exists, and connects to various other qualia of these recreations: public vs. private, active vs. sedentary, exploratory vs. reproductive, global coordination vs. manual dexterity, and so on.

You mentioning the humanities is interesting in relation to this. The humanities, social sciences, and to a lesser extent the life sciences are of course the girl academic disciplines, in contrast to engineering and the hard sciences, which are the boy disciplines. But it is also possible that another part of what is going on here are Snow's two cultures playing out in the recreational sphere.

I am also reluctant to completely attach chickens to this, because I tend to see chicken-raising as part of a slightly separate set of activities that both of these cultures participate in: the activities of conspicuously green consumption and production. In other words, I think having chickens tends to be more like a very dedicated form of shopping at Whole Foods or driving a Prius than like going rock-climbing. However, they also attach to another aspect of all the activities you mentioned, which is that they carry a connotation of folksy, traditional domesticity: scrapbooking and knitting and raising chickens, just like our imaginary great-grandmas on the range homestead farm America!

Whew. I think I might have to leave revising your list for another moment...

[Felicity]

I mentioned gender out of a sense of obligation, since in trying to describe the cohort I found that none of them were male. I actually know (by name, if not to-be-recognized-as-an-adult) more male quilters than male knitters (I know one male knitter: my father, who is a lapsed knitter) which is sort of surprising given knitting's currency.

I scratch my head, betimes, over the resurgence of traditional crafts in this group. I recognize the appeal you mention, but I wonder whether the gendered nature of the activities is meant as a reclamation -- of arts denigrated as "craft" by a male-dominated aesthetic establishment, for instance -- or whether it's part of the backlash zeitgeist -- a demographic bathing itself in eau de domesticitie.

I use big words around you even when I'm not AROUND you. Such is the power of your aura of erudition!