An 18-year-old in Bremen, Germany, juggles pole dancing, running, bouldering, piano, violin, guitar, DJing, crochet, chess and more — logging her runs on Strava and rotating through three hobbies at a time so nothing gets neglected. Bao Le is a textbook case of 'hobbymaxxing', a Gen Z trend that treats downtime like a to-do list, and a new piece in NZ Herald Travel asks whether the whole thing has gone too far.
The idea sounds harmless on paper: fill your free hours with enriching, offline activities. But for many young people the result isn't rest — it's a parallel workload. Le admits her hobbies aren't relaxing because they feel productive, and that unstructured time now registers as wasted time. Psychologist Michael Inzlicht of the University of Toronto explains the trap: effortful leisure feels more meaningful up to a point, but past that point the relationship flips and extra effort drains the meaning out of an activity entirely. Metrics accelerate the slide. Apps like Letterboxd, Goodreads, Backloggd and Beli turn films, books, games and restaurant visits into numbers — and as Inzlicht puts it, once something is measured, people want to maximise the number, even when the number is meaningless.
The trend has history behind it. Hobbies only became seen as virtuous after the Industrial Revolution, when leisure time raised fears of delinquency and structured pastimes offered a respectable fix. And surges of hyper-organised hobbying tend to crop up during periods of collective anxiety — the Great Depression, the Second World War, the pandemic. Cultural sociologist Sarah Pritz notes what's different now: social media keeps showing us other people's supposedly successful lives, while apps and wearables hand us the tools to monitor our own. Even relaxation has acquired a job description — recover, so you can perform better later.
The burnout stories back this up. Dana Gould, 23, maxed out her strength training and running, restricted her reading to self-help books, and posted every hobby online until the wonder disappeared. Quitting the tracking and posting, she says, felt like a cheat code. Arden Yum, a New York consultant, went the other direction and leaned in, building a 'six-week creative restart' curriculum that she shares with more than 13,000 Substack subscribers — complete with timelines and self-rewards like a favourite restaurant meal or a spa day. She's honest about the tension: filming herself cooking 'totally ruins the real-life experience', and her Substack now carries pressure to monetise. But she argues that if performativity leads to genuine connection or intellectual stimulation, it's a net positive.
Why should travellers care? Because holidays are the ultimate leisure time — and this mindset is quietly reshaping them. If a beach afternoon triggers guilt, or a trip only counts once it's been logged, rated and posted, you've brought the office with you. The lesson from the people who burned out and scaled back is a good packing rule: leave the metrics at home, and let 'I enjoyed it' be reason enough.