Hot pursuits

Philately will get you everywhere. And so will scrapbooking and model railways and just about any other hobby.

- BY PAUL LITTLE • PHOTOGRAPH BY TONY NYBERG

There's something primal about the activities often cited as the world's most popular hobbies: exercise, gardening, cooking and sewing all have a connection to our survival. We need to look after our bodies, grow vegetables, prepare food and clothe ourselves to ward off malnutrition, hypothermia and premature death.

But there is another kind of hobby, the kind with little or no apparent utility value. Take stamp collecting, for instance. In theory, philately will get you nowhere. It's an end in itself. Track down and buy your treasures, put them carefully in an album organised according to place or theme – “US presidents, mint, 1960 to present” – and leave them there. That's it. Although, theoretically, you could try to use your stamp collection to impress a date, and good luck with that.

But how have such traditional hobbies faced up to the technology revolution? Have the venerable likes of stamp collecting, model railways and scrapbooking survived the challenges of the digital age?

Have they ever. Like the rest of us, hobbies have adjusted to the new virtual world order. Unlike many of us, they have retained their dignified central core of creative pottering and slightly eccentric obsession.

Tamlin Conner is a University of Otago professor of psychology whose academic interests include happiness and wellbeing, and she believes hobbies can contribute to both of those. She also believes she could lift her own hobby game. Conner belongs to a cooking club, but, she says, “it doesn't have that creative element. I need to fill my hobby gap.”

She believes a hobby contributes to our wellbeing in five ways: “It builds one's skills and self-esteem, so it makes you feel good. Often hobbies have an element of challenge – they take skills and time to build up.