The Complexity of Simple Pleasures

In an unguarded moment during my senior year of high school, a kid from the yearbook staff approached me for a quote to appear beneath my photo. Today, thumbing through those half-century-old pages, it’s obvious that most of my classmates actually put some forethought into the funny, pithy, or vapid sayings forever to be associated with their heavily retouched, acne-free monochrome images.

I had nothing. But the pressure was on for a response, and I remember thinking, “Keep it simple.” And so, on the spur of that moment, I made this my yearbook quote:

Simplicity is the essence of happiness.

Not an original idea, but I’d never seen it expressed so, well, simply. Nor did the words appear in this form anywhere on the internet until 2013. They were written—no one knows where—by the enigmatic and possibly non-existent Cedric Bledsoe. Google finds many instances of his quote, but no published source, and nothing at all about the man.

My youthful words stayed with me through the years and have even become somewhat of a credo. The reminder to “Keep it simple!” (often amended with “Stupid!” to complete the “KISS” acronym) has proven helpful in domains as diverse as relationships, music composition, research design, and virtually everything I ever write.

A direct offshoot of the simplicity-happiness connection is learning to be mindful of small, simple things and to derive pleasure from them. This can transform an ordinary activity or thought into something extraordinarily pleasurable. And beyond the immediate gratification, research shows that experiencing simple pleasures tends to offset minor annoyances that otherwise impede progress toward goals.

Hobbies are great examples of simple pleasures. Here’s a provisional definition to ensure we’re all on the same page. It’s an amalgam culled from several different sources:

A hobby is a regular, leisure activity that provides meaning and enjoyment to a participant, without any expectation of financial reward.

Some people may feel that their approach to, say, stamp collecting, is more serious than just a hobby. Or that their daily one to three hours of watching videos on social media is too passive to qualify. Nevertheless, for our purposes, if the activity fits the provisional definition, we’re going to call it a hobby.

According to a 2022-2023 survey by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the most popular hobbies include watching TV, attending sports or recreational events, playing games, volunteering, gardening, reading, cooking, and exercising.

Hobbies share the properties of being simple to identify and describe. But for those involved, they are rather complicated in their causes, characteristics, and consequences.

As a social psychologist straddling psychological and sociological approaches, this is where things get interesting for me. When you think about hobbyists “doing their thing,” you probably think of that thing as an individual endeavor: tending the garden, watching a movie, reading a book. Each activity is a source of enjoyment, relaxation, and mental engagement for the practitioner.

That’s all very important, but only part of the picture. I’m just as interested in the social aspects of such activities. Not only the obvious aspects, like bowling as part of a team, meeting with a fine dining club, or joining a hiking group. There are also social forces operating behind the scenes. These impact our choice of activities, the specific ways we engage with them, and their consequences for the broader communities and societies in which they are situated.

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I would go so far as to say that the social aspects of everyday activities play a large role in making some of them appear interesting and fun to us, and others insufferable. I collected coins as a preteen, which I found endlessly fascinating. At the same time, my brother was a stamp collector, and my best friend collected butterflies, neither of which struck me as the least bit fun.

Today, I have a better handle on why that was so—and it wasn’t because we were all “wired” differently.

In forthcoming posts, I’ll look at simple, enjoyable activities from a variety of different angles. Some of these have been documented extensively by others, and some will involve my recounting personal experiences. The different “angles” concern (1) the social origins of organized activities, (2) the various social psychological checkboxes that different activities tick for participants, and (3) the broader integrative—or in some cases, disintegrative—consequences that occur at the group level, either as intended or unintended consequences of individual actions.

As a teaser, consider sociologist Gary Alan Fine’s approach in his book Morel Tales: The Culture of Mushrooming. As both a social scientist and mushroom-hunting group member, his narrative ping-pongs between anecdotal observations and theoretical analyses. His observations derive from the concrete world of members’ words and actions, such as non-obvious criteria for defining some mushrooms as “good” and others “bad,” or the importance of respecting their forested contexts.

As meanings associated with these properties begin to emerge and make sense for participants, they become more enmeshed in the group through strengthening social ties and an emerging self-identity as “Mushroomer.” They come to see their activities, and the group itself, as special.

These emergent social properties of leisure activities enhance the pleasures of the hobby itself, and ensure group longevity, innovation, and individual satisfaction for most of those involved.

It is in these ways—barely touched on here—that we can understand how something as simple as a walk in the woods induces such profound feelings of enrichment and gratitude for many participants.

When you think about other hobbies, it’s nearly always easy to come up with social aspects, even for something as solitary as TV viewing. We can watch TV with others present. Others may heavily influence our choice of what to watch. And who among us doesn’t get a kick out of influencing others by telling them about an especially good, or especially bad, program we’ve seen?