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Umami: The Indescribable Taste

Featuring: MORE NORWEGIANS THAN YOU MIGHT EXPECT; PLUS, MEN WITH HOBBIES

Umami has been called the fifth taste, and it’s commonly said to have been discovered just over a century ago. When strung together like that, those two facts seem astounding. It sounds as though we’re saying there was an eighth color in the rainbow and it was only noticed this year, or that there was a fifth Beatle all along and we never saw him because he always stood directly behind Ringo.

But that assumes that the four tastes are some sort of Newtonian law handed down by evolution, when they are in fact a basic consensus. You were likely taught that sweet, sour, salty, and bitter are the basic tastes, just as there are three primary colors and five senses. These nice round numbers sound like science, but the formal criteria for a basic taste—those with specific chemical receptors on the tongue—are relatively new. Humans muddled through for centuries with a rough compromise. Aristotle identified the basic four along with astringent, pungent, and harsh. Jean Fernel added fattiness in 1542, and to that the Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus added sharp, viscous, insipid, aqueous, and nauseous. The Swiss anatomist Albrecht von Haller threw in rough, urinous, spiritous, aromatic, acrid, and putrid. In 1825, our man Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin cleared the decks with his statement that “the number of tastes is infinite, since every soluble body has a special flavor which does not wholly resemble any other.” But if infinity seems a bit much, he’s willing to narrow it down to two: agreeable and disagreeable.

So when Japanese scientist Kikunae Ikeda proposed the taste of umami in 1908, it wasn’t quite like the discovery of a new planet. Everyone knew the basic four didn’t truly cover everything we put in our mouths, but it was hard to agree on what further categories made sense. Somehow, though, umami clicked in a way that the more direct fattiness did not (but give it time: the campaign to classify fat as the sixth taste may well be successful in the near future). It identified a glutinous taste, one common in the seaweed-friendly Japanese diet but also found in foods like tomatoes, fish, meat, and cheese. It’s similar to salty but not quite the same, and is described as meaty but is present in many vegetables. Ikeda had synthesized glutamate from the kombu seaweed, and he could add it to other foods to give them an umami taste.

He presented this finding to the Eighth International Congress of Applied Chemistry in Washington and New York in 1912, where he referenced the big four tastes and went on to note that there was something similar in the tastes of asparagus, cheese, tomatoes, and meat that couldn’t be explained by the other tastes. That something was glutamate.

The funny thing is that glutamate on its own had no real flavor. A spoonful of salt mixed into a glass of water will taste salty. A spoonful of glutamate mixed in water will taste like nothing much. It boosts its companions as the wingman of flavors.

Ikeda resigned from his post at the University of Tokyo before retirement age, and in explaining why, he was openly dismissive of his extremely lucrative discovery. Umami made money—an embarrassing amount of it—in the form of Ajinomoto, the first commercially available monosodium glutamate. Previously, the Japanese had to boil down kelp to get glutamate. By combining it with sodium, it could now be sold as soup stock, and within a decade it was available around the world.

The meaning of umami, for our purposes, is that taste that we clearly crave but can’t quite identify. The sweetness of sugar is an obvious draw, and scarfing a bag of gummy bears at your desk at around four p.m. on a Tuesday has a noticeable and desirable effect, at least until you crash at four forty-five. But why you might want the umaminess of a tomato is subtler and a harder thing to put into words. We still eat plenty of tomatoes, even if we don’t speak of having an umami tooth or getting an umami high. It’s too subtle for that. Preferences that scratch an itch we can’t easily identify are umami.

Preferences that scratch an itch we can’t easily identify are umami.

When we map it onto cultural taste, it’s similarly hard to pin down. The fifth entertainment preference was cerebral, or essentially straight-up information: documentaries, reference books, home-improvement shows, and financial news, all filled with facts and aimed at audiences described as older, self-assured, enterprising, and curious. It’s something consumed because it feels necessary, and that’s that. It’s food for thought: not something you would usually choose to binge on, and something traditionally considered highbrow. So when we talk about umami culture, we’ll talk about the self-awareness that comes with it. In food, unless you follow culinary culture, it’s quite easy to be unaware of umami in a way that you can’t be unaware of the sweet, sour, salty, and bitter. But once you know it, you taste it everywhere and seek it out. A broader definition of umami will extend this effect: umami culture is about a taste that is so necessary it can taste like nothing at all, a miso broth that satisfies without explanation. How do they do that, anyway?

Oddly Satisfying Norwegians, Part I: Karl Ove Knausgaard

The novels of Karl Ove Knausgaard are the pinnacle of umami culture. The six-volume series, My Struggle, which describes the Norwegian’s life in copious, exacting, and mind-numbing detail, is nearly devoid of what is conventionally called a plot. The sentences are clunky and full of clichés. The effect of the books is almost impossible to replicate in small doses—you need to let them wash over you, page after page describing how he took his daughter to a birthday party. (A gathering that clocks in at fifty pages.) But they’ve been phenomenally successful, among no group more so than the literati.

Why? In The Chronicle of Higher Education, Tom Bartlett made fun of how professional readers constantly “attempt, usually with much sputtering and little success, to explain their bent-knee devotion. See, it’s a plotless novel focused on the excruciatingly mundane life of a hypersensitive guy in Norway”—and then they lose the listener.

Ben Lerner put it best in his review of volume three in the London Review of Books: “It’s easy to marshal examples of what makes My Struggle mediocre. The problem is: it’s amazing.” He alludes to the frequent use of drug metaphors to describe the books’ appeal, and cites the literary critic Michael Clune’s observation that the drug metaphor is used when “we find ourselves taking pleasure in a book without being able to ascribe our interest to respectable literary values.” Or to put it another way, when we like something without really knowing why.

The literary world is a good place to look for these kinds of unidentifiable itches, probably because only a great facility with language can allow you to come close to describing something so slippery. Lydia Davis, the great American short story writer, did this when she explained her work as a translator in a column for the Times Literary Supplement.

“In spite of having translated during most of my life, I still don’t really understand the urge,” she wrote. “Why can’t I simply enjoy reading the story in its own language. Or, on the other hand, why can’t I be content to write my own work in English? The urge is a kind of hunger; maybe the polite word would be appetite—I want to consume the text, and reproduce it in English.”

She considers the obvious explanation, that perhaps translation gives her the satisfaction of having written without the need to actually write, the “pleasure of composing it in English, without the uncertainty involved in inventing it.” All the taste, half the calories. And there’s also the feeling of “acquisitiveness,” of taking something that isn’t hers. Ultimately, though, she concludes that the “desire to translate may be something of an inexplicable addiction.”

Outside the rarefied air of the literary world, there is a large subset of people who derive these sorts of hard-to-describe pleasurable sensations from unexpected sources. We can call what these individuals are experiencing “umami culture” precisely because they don’t know what to call it themselves. It’s not so much a situation where the glass is half-full as a situation in which you know the glass is full to the brim of something you enjoy but you have no idea what that mysterious drink is.

Naturally, these people have set up a subreddit. The Web forum called Oddly Satisfying, and it’s described as a place “you can post things that make you feel, well, oddly satisfied. This can be physical (like popping bubble wrap), visual (a perfectly looped GIF), or even aural (the crunching of leaves).”

The bubble-wrap example has been studied by psychologists, or at least one psychologist. In her 1992 paper “Popping Sealed Air Capsules to Reduce Stress,” Kathleen Dillon describes how a group of students reported increased levels of both calm and alertness after being granted access to bubble wrap. She links the poppable plastic bubbles to Catholic rosary beads and what antiquarians call “fingering pieces”: carved bits of jade carried for, well, fingering. Dillon and the very few subsequent investigators of this topic never quite get to a satisfying explanation of why it’s satisfying. As she told the New York Times, “It’s obviously something that’s desirable and addictive at some level.”

The visual equivalent is best represented by GIFs of perfectly rendered industrial processes. In a video compilation of these animations posted to YouTube, viewers expressed satisfaction (often in sexual terms, and in language you might expect if you have ever read comments on YouTube) as well as confusion about the source of that satisfaction.

“Have you ever seen something that makes your skin tingle and for some unknown reason provides you with a sense of unbridled peace and happiness? Gears working in perfect synchronization, a cake frosted with absolute precision, marbles rolling so smoothly it hurts. Something that is just . . . satisfying?” reads the description of this video posted by Digg. “Well, here’s five solid minutes of that feeling.”

As one commenter wrote, “Retitle this: Interesting technical and mechanical feats.” Another wrote “How to get high w/o drugs for free.” Many mentioned obsessive-compulsive disorder, and a few referenced ASMR, or autonomous sensory meridian response, a low-grade euphoria caused by whisper-like sounds and described by Vice as “the good feeling no one can explain.” It is, despite its clinical-sounding name, almost entirely ignored by science, though it’s very popular on the Internet. It is, as many (but not all) of its proponents stress, not at all sexual, but rather a tingling feeling that resembles being scratched on the head from the inside. Beyond whispers and the crinkling of candy wrappers, other commonly mentioned triggers include watching people in deep concentration, seeing people borrow your belongings, or getting the sort of personal attention required for a haircut or massage.

It is similar but not identical to a flow state, the phenomenon of being totally immersed in what you’re doing and, according to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the researcher who developed the idea, the “psychology of optimal experience.”

If watching a tomato being sliced to perfection, hearing someone whisper instructions in Spanish, and popping bubble wrap elicit reactions like those that so many people have described in their responses to reading the life story of Karl Ove Knausgaard, do the activities share some fundamental property?

Arguably, it is this: they’re all about getting the details fully and completely right, no matter how dull, repetitive, or pointless that seems. It’s what psychologists call the “completion principle,” our natural desire to see all loops closed so we can admire the symmetry of the resulting circles. Plenty of people won’t see the point in that, and that’s fine for them. For those who give it time, there’s an odd satisfaction to be had.

For Knausgaard, the key is the endless stream of details, all washing over the reader until you are fully immersed. As reader Douglas Feil explained on Goodreads, there are three possible explanations of Knausgaard’s methodology:

No matter where these details came from, the attention to them is amazing. And not just the interesting ones, but all of them! In that way, it fills in the huge gaps between everything else. Almost every other book, film, or TV show is about (or at least aspires to be about) interesting stuff happening. But the underwhelming majority of our lives are not about interesting stuff happening (that’s why we need these books/movies/TV shows to consume when we’re on the plane, waiting for a bus, or idly sitting at home). Knausgaard completes the story by telling us the boring bits, what one critic termed “the dense material accumulations that make up our lives, and which are essentially trivial”—and that’s oddly satisfying. Indeed, everything that falls under the category “oddly satisfying” also fits as “essentially trivial.”

Many of his most ardent fans report that they mix up his memories with theirs, combining their biographies. It’s a form of total artistic immersion.

TASTING NOTE: MASSIVELY MULTIPLAYER ONLINE ROLE-PLAYING GAMES

Sweet: 20 percent

Sour: 20 percent

Salty: 0 percent

Bitter: 0 percent

Umami: 60 percent

The 2016 novel The Nix follows a frustrated English professor who is addicted to an online multiplayer fantasy game. He locks the door to his office, turns off the lights, and spends endless hours plotting to slay dragons with his elven peers. Why? The clinical data on what’s been called Internet Gaming Disorder is inconclusive, but there is certainly something addictive about understanding and conquering a meticulously created universe. As author Nathan Hill explains it, “these quests—which usually involved slaying some minor enemy or delivering a message across treacherous terrain or locating some lost important doodad—needed to be completed without fail for up to forty days in a row to unlock rewards in the fastest time mathematically possible, which itself was a kind of reward because whenever he was successful at it these fireworks went off and there was this blast of trumpets and he got his name on the public chart of Elfscape’s Most Epic Players and everyone on his contact list sent him notes of congratulation and praise.” It’s worth noting that Slack, the wildly popular intra-office chat tool, was the fallback project of a company that was trying to build a similar MMORPG. After all, isn’t all of office life just another role-playing game full of quests and rewards?

Oddly Satisfying Norwegians, Part II: Slow TV

There’s another possible explanation for Karl Ove, one that emerges when we look to the country that created him. Is there something in the Norwegian water? If so, it might explain the Slow TV phenomenon, which is essentially the AV extension of Knausgaard’s books. Slow TV is a series that premiered on Norway’s state broadcaster in 2009 with a single-camera episode of the seven-hour train ride from Bergen to Oslo. It attracted a huge audience, and subsequent installments included:

Are Norwegians nuts? “I don’t think we are,” Slow TV creator Thomas Hellum said in an interview with the TED Radio Hour.

“I think we have, with the slow TV, we have done something that reacts to a need among people. Trying to tell a story in full length, it can be a window to the world. And if you go on a train journey, if you go on a boat journey, you experience in the same slow way. And that’s made me appreciate slowness because it gives the viewer a possibility to take back some of the control.”

It isn’t just a Norwegian phenomenon either. In August 2016, more than a million Britons tuned in to BBC4’s The Country Bus to watch a bus driving around the Yorkshire countryside. In the same year, the Icelandic band Sigur Ros debuted Route One on their nation’s television and YouTube, taking viewers on a twenty-four-hour drive along the island nation’s ring road. (Arguably, Andy Warhol invented the whole genre with Sleep, his 1963 film of the poet John Giorno slumbering for five hours and twenty minutes.)

The similarities between Knausgaard and Slow TV have been debated and disputed. The critic Nathan Heller noted that the key difference is that the books are “filtered, varied, and enlivened” by the author’s point of view, while the videos are “unshaped by interior consciousness.” But their innate umaminess is much bigger than that. It’s about a nearly endless stream of information, and our similarly sized appetite for that information.

TASTING NOTE: JOHN HODGMAN

Sweet: 10 percent

Sour: 0 percent

Salty: 5 percent

Bitter: 20 percent

Umami: 65 percent

John Hodgman’s rise to fame began with a fanciful list of hobo names. There are seven hundred of them in The Areas of My Expertise, the former literary agent’s 2005 fake almanac, and this list led to a recurring gig as The Daily Show’s resident expert, two sequel almanacs, and a collaborative Internet project to illustrate each of these “broken souls who had taken to the wandering life.” The list is as deeply umami as Hodgman’s persona as a whole: so full of facts that the fact the facts are fictions only makes them more savory.

Martin Parr and the Mundane

At the time of this book’s publication, it was still possible to purchase postcards at tourist destinations around the world. Most of these postcard vendors will even sell you stamps, with which you can send these impersonal if professional photographs across weeks and through multiple postal services to friends and relatives. The whole process is riddled with more anachronisms than any other in everyday life, save perhaps buying a newspaper.

In the pockets of most tourists—assuming tourism requires a certain level of affluence—is a smartphone that can (a) take photos that are as good or better than those on the postcard, in sheer image quality but especially in relevance to what the traveler has actually seen, (b) send these photos to the aforementioned friends and relatives seconds after taking them, or (c) post those photos to Instagram and ensure that the photographer’s entire social network wishes they were there.

The degree to which this improves on a postcard is an order of magnitude beyond how, say, an e-book improves on a book. And yet we still have postcards.

What pictures do we put on these ancient modes of communication? The salty seaside cartoons discussed earlier are relics now, leaving behind a pretty but bland collection of landmarks, sunsets, and points of interest. There are postcards of St. Peter’s Square and the Eiffel Tower and Mount Everest—but there are also postcards of the Holiday Inn Hotel of Huntsville, Alabama, and the Unicentre and Bus Station in Preston, UK.

It is these postcards—the minor landmarks—that have been brought to prominence by the British photographer Martin Parr. In his books Boring Postcards and Boring Postcards USA, he doesn’t really live down to his titles, and he’s admitted as much.

“I think they’re absolutely interesting—the title is a way to get people’s attention,” he told an interviewer. “In fact they have this whole layer of information and revelation about the society behind them.”

These well-photographed office parks, motels, highway overpasses, and shopping plazas are fascinating specimens of a long-gone era. There are examples of midcentury modern architecture, neatly made hotel beds, bowls of truck-stop chili, and aluminum awnings. Nearly all of them shine with civic pride—why, yes, Dayton has a municipal airport, and thanks for noticing!

To send this to a loved one is contrived perfectionism of the everyday; it’s the 1950s version of Beyoncé’s boast that she woke up like this.

It’s also proof that few things are truly boring, and if something is widely deemed boring it’s almost certainly not. There are hundreds of postcards of the Statue of Liberty, but the Dayton Airport likely has only a few. The fact that there probably hasn’t been a Dayton Airport postcard made since, and never will be again, is interesting in its own way.

Especially when you look at postcards like this next to the photos that made Martin Parr famous in the first place: regular people on holiday.

His Small World collection documents the people taking pictures of the places: The three tourists each pretending as though they’re holding up the Leaning Tower of Pisa for their own photographer, for instance. The crowd in front of the Acropolis, posing with their backs to yet another crowd. The man in shorts, on horseback, eyes pressed on a large camcorder.

Is Parr being mean to these vacationers? In his introduction to one of the Small World books, Geoff Dyer says, well, maybe but instantly forgives him: “[T]he people in these photographs would recognize themselves and their fellow travelers. They would agree that, although they have chosen and paid to come to these places, sightseeing in particular and holidaying generally are often the opposite of fun—partly because of all the other tourists.” These people are fools and they are us.

These people are fools and they are us.

So no matter how you holiday, Martin Parr has your number. His work falls squarely into umami culture because it is a flavor we would miss without him. Had he not collected these postcards or framed these tourists, we would have looked right past them. (As we inevitably do when we are sightseeing.) He’s not exactly addictive or oddly satisfying on a Norwegian scale; instead, he is a background flavor that’s been there all along. To notice it, and to think about what it means, is a deeply umami experience.

The actual umami taste is the taste of decay. The glutamate in broth is released by boiling bones, kelp, or whatever other protein source you are using, denaturing the proteins within and releasing the amino acid that tastes like umami. So it’s fitting that Martin Parr has made the gradual unraveling of things his central obsession.

“Decline is so much more interesting than success,” he told the Financial Times. “And decline photographs very well. We are surrounded by propaganda, interviews with glamorous people and so on. They have their own agenda. Decline, or something going downhill, is automatically more interesting to me.”

There was a time when postcards were the fastest way to communicate, back in the Edwardian era when the mail came seven times a day. That time has passed, and yet postcards linger on, artifacts of decline that are themselves in decline.

And Parr’s take on the selfie stick, that modern symptom of decline? It makes his job—photographing the photographers—even easier.

“I welcome this trend as, interestingly, you can get the whole scene in front of the camera and the backdrop all in one photo,” he wrote on his blog. “Previously I had to make do with photos of people from behind as they looked at the view.”

Decline is everywhere, and it can be delicious.

TASTING NOTE: GILMORE GIRLS

Sweet: 40 percent

Sour: 0 percent

Salty: 0 percent

Bitter: 20 percent

Umami: 40 percent

The story of a single mother raising her precocious daughter in a New England town filled with lovable oddballs sounds as sweet as a bag of jelly beans. But Gilmore Girls, in both its original network run and its Netflix resurrection, has always distinguished itself with a thick layer of cultural references. The show is practically hyperlinked with allusions. And in addition to that information overload, there’s that ineffable feeling of satisfaction. The critic Haley Mlotek has called the show “emotionally speculative fiction,” a genre that “takes everything recognizable about life but adds the qualities that remain elusively out of reach in reality, like satisfying endings and triumphant character arcs.” And that’s the rare balance of sweetness and umami.

The Interesting Secret of the Dull Men’s Club

If taste is about making a conscious choice to like something, there is a philosophical parse that must be examined: What’s more important, the choice or the something? We have posited that no matter what you choose—be it French poodles or Jell-O shots or Rembrandt paintings—you have displayed taste, so it stands to reason that the exercise of taste lives in the choice you have made.

But what if you choose nothing? It’s like asking if zero can be a number, or if your pizza toppings can be extra cheese and tomato sauce. If you claim beige as your favorite color, it still counts as a claim. We saw this in basic/normcore, but the recent vintage of those buzzwords is misleading—the choice of not choosing has always been with us. Which brings us to the Dull Men’s Club.

This tongue-in-cheek group of Englishmen and Americans proclaim themselves “dull but not boring,” and they explain this distinction by saying, “Dull men accept their dullness. Boring men are dull men who actually believe that they are interesting.” In this reading, the difference between dull and boring is whether the man minds his own business or not. A larger distinction could be made that the dull do things the rest of the world considers boring, while the boring do things the rest of the world considers normal.

What are those boring things? The 2015 documentary Born to be Mild sums up the activities of the Dull Men’s Club in a sprightly fifteen minutes. There is the roundabout aficionado who loves the traffic feature built around a duck pond; the letterbox photographer whose son programmed a GPS device to help his dad find this elusive quarry; and the milk bottle collector who casually mentions that he doesn’t actually consume the stuff (“I just don’t like milk. It’s nothing I would ever drink.”).

As Jason Kottke wrote, “I could get into milk bottles and roundabouts. What about the truly dull, who don’t collect anything and just watch the news on TV all day?” (Again, those people should more accurately be referred to as boring.)

This is fitting, as the cerebral category of our entertainment preferences was filled nearly to the brim with news and informational programming. The profile for this preference tended to be older, male, self-assured, and enterprising. But those CNN viewers have nothing on the umami of the Dull Men’s Club. The organization itself is an attempt to describe the indescribable—the pleasure you can derive from something that doesn’t seem that pleasurable.

Which is why the Dull Men’s Club is really just an elaborate cover for a disparate group that dares not reveal what its members truly are. The trainspotters and grammar pedants of the DMC have not chosen to like nothing; they have chosen some very specific somethings, and they are blunting any possible criticism of their esoteric choices by proclaiming their ordinariness. They are something different and very describable: men with hobbies. But they don’t describe themselves that way because, well, no one does. Hobbies are umami: deeply absorbing and satisfying but hard to explain to outsiders. On some level, it’s better to call yourself dull than to say you’re a hobbyist.

An important side note here: Why, it has been asked, are there no girls allowed in this dull treehouse? The answer from the DMC website’s Frequently Asked Questions section is distinctly unsatisfying: “Our view is that women are not dull. Women are exciting. Moreover, we think women would be offended if we said they were dull . . . that it would be politically incorrect to refer to women as being dull.”

As one critic asked, “Why not simply ‘the Dull Club’, which also admits women? What are these men scared of? . . . Do they fear there aren’t enough lawns and European train timetables and hedges to go round?”

Though the Dull Men don’t admit it, the real reason for their gender segregation is at least in part spousal avoidance. And sometimes, it works too well.

“My ex-wife hated the fact that I was a roundabout spotter, and in the end she left me,” Kevin Beresford, president of the Roundabout Appreciation Society, says in the documentary Born to be Mild. “But I don’t mind, because I can go out now roundabout spotting whenever I want.”

A Job You Can’t Lose

What is a hobby, and what happened to them? The word itself sounds outdated, and as proof of that, an elegy for the hobby appeared in the New York Times Magazine in 1997. There, Randy Cohen laid out a series of criteria that defined a hobby, rightly noting that productive or occasional pastimes like cooking and bowling didn’t really count.

A hobby requires “a particular—even disproportionate—intensity of attention,” he writes. Photographing every mailbox in the United Kingdom certainly qualifies.

Hobbies will necessitate knowing a great deal of “irredeemably specific information,” knowledge the leader of the Dull Men (official title: assistant vice president) ably showcases when he explains why airport baggage carousels always move in a counterclockwise direction. (Because this gives right-handed passengers more leverage when they’re picking up their bags.)

The hobby should be “absorbing but not transforming. They fill the mind without altering it,” Cohen writes. It should be umami. Or as the Dull Men’s Club puts it in their explanation that they are not to be confused with Dullards Anonymous: “Twelve-Step Programs are designed to make people change their behaviors. Dull men don’t want to change.”

And here is the crux of the hobby, the likely cause of death and a good reason for resurrection: the hobby should “provide a strong counterbalance to work.” The Dull Men are largely retired, but those who are not appear to split their waking hours evenly between toil and their chosen hobbies.

It is worth noting that the hobby was at its peak in the United States during the Great Depression. It was precisely when jobs were hardest to come by that there was a public preoccupation with what were described as the jobs you couldn’t lose. (It would be equally accurate but not quite as appealing to describe them as jobs no one was paying you to do.)

The scholar Steven M. Gelber is perhaps the leading expert on the American hobby, and he describes them as an oxymoron: productive leisure. They inhabit the gray area between work and sloth, “both an escape from and an escape into work.” The hobby movement is closely tied to the industrial revolution, as a way to bridge the new distance between toil and play and a tacit acknowledgment that not all jobs could provide creative satisfaction. Hobby proponents would often quote the old proverb about the devil finding work for idle hands, positioning stamp collecting as a necessary fortification against evil. And in the words of one collector of Abraham Lincoln artifacts: “In the hobby kingdom, every man is his own boss, he can pursue his hobby in any direction he chooses, at as fast or slow a pace as he is disposed to set, without interference from a single soul.”

And so the demise of the hobby roughly correlates to the rise of the dream of meaningful work—the idea that you could find not only a paycheck but fulfillment at your job, and that you should do what you love and the money will follow. There’s perhaps no clearer summary of this ethos than Steve Jobs’s speech to the graduates of Stanford University in 2005.

“Your work is going to fill a large part of your life and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work,” he said. “And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle.”

And yet, there was only one Steve Jobs, and when he and Steve Wozniak built the Apple computer in his parents’ garage, they weren’t collecting a paycheck.

The writer Cal Newport calls this the passion trap, and defines it as “The more emphasis you place on the work you love, the more unhappy you become when you don’t love every minute of the work you have.”

If the way out of this trap is to stop insisting on doing work you love, hobbies can fill the gap. Look at it as layering: Work provides money, camaraderie, and some sense of fulfillment. Hobbies provide a sense of agency and deep immersion in a highly personalized passion project. The two may not merge, and that’s a good thing: think of the workaholic who retires into an early grave. If and when you’re downsized, outsourced, let go, or otherwise put out of work, there should be a silver lining: more time for the thing you really love. A hobby can provide solace if not sustenance.

In a sense, the hobby has already been reborn as the side hustle. This millennial term for the gig a person works in addition to their day job is a tacit acknowledgment that it’s rarely possible to exclusively do what you love. The pessimistic view of this is that there are no good jobs for the current generation; the optimistic take is it’s never been easier to sample a wide range of occupations. Unlike a pure hobby, the side hustle is generally done for money, but ideally there’s more to it than that.

In the words of advertising copywriter/freelance writer Catherine Baab-Muguira, “The side hustle offers something worth much more than money: a hedge against feeling stuck and dull and cheated by life. This psychological benefit is the real reason for the millennial obsession, I’d argue, and why you might want to consider finding your own side hustle, no matter how old you are.”

One benefit of this rebranding of the hobby for the second industrial revolution (or whatever you choose to call our current era) is that it’s no longer a gendered term. It’s not about avoiding your spouse or any other human; it’s about, in Baab-Muguira’s words, building a “bridge between crass realities and your compelling inner life.” Unlike the dull man’s hobby, the side hustle can earnestly call itself compelling.

Randy Cohen lamented that hobbies were dying, to be replaced by television and shopping. He didn’t foresee the Internet, which streamed television and accelerated shopping but also let hobbyists and side hustlers from around the world find each other.

Once, as an adolescent with an interest in public transit, I visited a model train store to ask if they sold subway replicas. “You know what I told the last guy who asked that?” the man behind the counter barked. “Line up a bunch of shoe boxes on the floor and tell people those are the aboveground stations.”

No boy ever need suffer such humiliation again. Hundreds of model subway cars are available at reasonable rates from retailers around the world. (The Berliner U-Bahn looks particularly handsome.) Just think of it: a world of dullness, of productive leisure, of side hustling and all the satisfaction that comes with it, is at our fingertips. The correct reaction to this realization is indescribable.