My father has a new hobby: making smoothies. Forgive him for being late to the zeitgeist - smoothies may now be passé to the urban twenty-something, in favour of a sugar-free green juice, but he is neither aware nor bothered - and has bought himself a violently expensive Vitamix. For the last month, he has been busy blending his way through retirement, to infinity and beyond.
In the morning, he makes a berry-based breakfast smoothie - in fact, he makes gallons and they go in the fridge whereupon they turn into blancmange curiously, within the hour - before segueing into a pre-lunch smoothie, an aperitif of sorts; which looks and tastes much like gazpacho but heaven forbid if you reduce it to common law gaz. In the afternoon - just because - he veers back from the veg to the fruit and produces vast quantities of melon-based smoothie. The Vitamix has become a symphony to my mother's ears - as ubiquitous a sound to the humdrum familial existence as the washing machine. Smoothies are all my father speaks of. We haven't had the heart to break it to him that all those punnets he's blending contain more sugar than a Yorkie bar. Why deny him this sudden interest in nutrition? And a sudden interest - for my overweight father - this is. One could almost call it a fad. In fact.... let's go there. It's a fad.
Which, in the most Carrie Bradshaw of thought patterns, got me to thinking about the notion of fads in general. When is a hobby, a fad? How long does it take for your irritatingly repetitive, compulsive instincts towards a person, place or thing to become augmented into 'hobby' territory? In 2014, I imagine this less and less. We have more fads than we have hobbies. We declare ourselves obsessed with something we had no knowledge of about 5 minutes ago. We largely lack the patience and dedication to turn things into hobbies, because there is always something new around the corner. No sooner do you make boxing your favourite workout discipline, then barré core, or disco unicycling (coming soon, surely) comes along. No sooner have you decided that the canon of contemporary American literature is your jam - your hobby, your creative bread and butter, your specialist topic - than you realise Scandinavian thrillers provide just the kind of sparse, salty read you've been craving like all year.
Far more than my father's generation - which is why the smoothie fad is so entertaining - Generation Y are prone to fads. We think in pockets of time; long-term goals, long-term savings plans, long-term anything does not translate into our do it now/feel it now ethos. A fad therefore suits us perfectly, before we segue onto the next pocket of time - that until it actually arrived, we hadn't really given a thought to. Over-stimulated, over-stretched and mildly confused at all time, a fad is the best way to sample tastes of everything popular culture now has to offer: a lot. My boyfriend's current fad is the 7 minute workout app - which involves him elegantly star-jumping all over the sitting room twice a day, whilst mine is sesame-based salad dressings. It's doubtful either of these will be sustained long enough to become full-term hobbies. But then who cares? They're your hobbies, and you can dress the up however you see fit. See you at the disco unicycle class.
Far more than my father's generation - which is why the smoothie fad is so entertaining - Generation Y are prone to fads. We think in pockets of time; long-term goals, long-term savings plans, long-term anything does not translate into our do it now/feel it now ethos. A fad therefore suits us perfectly, before we segue onto the next pocket of time - that until it actually arrived, we hadn't really given a thought to. Over-stimulated, over-stretched and mildly confused at all time, a fad is the best way to sample tastes of everything popular culture now has to offer: a lot. My boyfriend's current fad is the 7 minute workout app - which involves him elegantly star-jumping all over the sitting room twice a day, whilst mine is sesame-based salad dressings. It's doubtful either of these will be sustained long enough to become full-term hobbies. But then who cares? They're your hobbies, and you can dress the up however you see fit. See you at the disco unicycle class.