Hobby Crisis

I remember a time when we met because we were friends, because something was funny, because something shared had appeared among a few people and could live through an evening without further continuation. Someone brought things and shared them, someone showed a movement, someone helped with the space, someone stayed nearby; money sometimes arrived by itself and we could accept it, but money did not explain the meeting. Reputation existed somewhere in the air, though nobody had to turn each evening into another deposit in its account.

We had a phrase whose old intonation I can still hear: “They will misunderstand us again; otherwise it would be a step backward,” and opacity remained an acceptable price for keeping our own form. We could make something for five people, leave it undescribed, and still regard the evening as complete; the relationships were already there, while a photograph, recording, or text might occasionally emerge from them.

Today this way of life can look like a poor version of a professional scene that lacked a producer, box office, media plan, and skill in self-promotion. To us, the practice belonged to voluntary life, where friendship, reciprocity, curiosity, and long memory held its value.

This form is also described in the article Juggling: attention, time, choice, and a relationship with an object precede the external result, allowing somebody to practise intensely, travel to conventions, discuss technique, disappear for half a year, and return to people who remembered their place in the shared history and to objects remembered by the hands.

The internet already belonged to this life, but it performed a more limited role. We found one another through forums and mailing lists, checked convention sites, downloaded videos, found schedules, and arranged places to sleep. Much of that infrastructure finished its work after the computer was turned off and we went outside. A forum helped us arrange things and synchronize intentions, and the meeting could then continue for hours without further platform maintenance; a photograph returned to the network when somebody wanted to share it, while a missed publication left the evening complete.

In my experience the change became noticeable around 2016, although smartphones, platforms, and metrics had existed earlier, communities changed at different speeds, and some still preserve the older rhythm. Around that time I began to notice a coordination tool becoming an environment in which a meeting was expected to leave a properly formatted continuation.

Ivan Illich used convivial for tools that extend a person’s capacity to act without subordinating the action to their own institutional logic. The old forum was far from ideal, yet at its best it performed this bounded task by helping people assemble and then yielding the space to them. A newer platform stays beside the activity, proposes its format of registration, ranks the result, distributes attention, and calls the participant back, making the ability of an intermediary to finish its work part of the question of hobby freedom.

Alongside us, people organized events and shops, sold performances, built schools, looked for sponsors, and turned the same activity into a profession, while at first the paths barely interfered with one another. One person wanted an income from juggling while another came with props for a few hours in a hall; one ran a ticketed event, another helped for free, a third received an incidental fee and returned the next week to practise for its own sake.

Programming followed both paths for me. In the early 2000s, I read books and tried Pascal, Borland Delphi, C, C++, assembly, and Perl, installed different Linux systems, reinstalled operating systems, and assembled computers because the activity was interesting. Work arrived later, when an already familiar activity began paying enough to cover daily expenses; the original practice kept a life of its own, and an evening with a broken bootloader had already been a complete event before any client appeared.

Devices and systems now often simply work, which remains a real technical achievement and frees people from much of the maintenance once required. The crisis arises from the social form that accompanies a reliable tool and imposes a measurable trajectory, public evidence, and an economic future on every interest.

The change began in language, when a personal decision was presented as the proper completion of every practice: “Creative work should be paid” was joined by the demand that more people should see it. Both formulations grew from understandable desires, since artists can be exploited through unpaid work, a person may need income, and good work sometimes deserves to meet a wider audience; the word should gradually moved the boundary and changed the category of what was happening.

Monetisation travelled from one possibility to a sign of success, after which its absence required explanation. Visibility likewise changed from a rare opportunity to show a result into evidence of participation itself. A freely given action was now interpreted through a market logic that asked why the person took no payment, undervalued the work, neglected audience growth, and wasted an opportunity; even refusal received a commercial reading.

An action done simply because people cared lost its cultural neutrality as friendship, the joke, and reciprocity were increasingly treated as insufficient grounds for spending time and using one's skills. A hidden question about result, audience, and demonstrated value hung over every activity.

People trying to protect the dignity of creative labour could inadvertently begin to treat as labour what had once lived outside it. They supported the scene through fair pay, better organized festivals, wider audiences, convenient venues, and regular publication. The repetition of these reasonable steps produced a new moral map where unpaid activity looked undervalued, invisible activity became doubtful, and the amateur looked like a professional who had not completed the transformation.

A longitudinal qualitative study of creators and viewers in the YouTube beauty community found a related movement: commercial roles altered relationships and reduced participation benefits for non-entrepreneurial members (Mardon, Cocker, and Daunt 2023). Juggling and music lie outside that study, so its finding serves as a bounded analogy in my account: entrepreneurial logic enters the expectations directed at people who sell nothing.

Intrinsic motives persist inside a commercialized environment. A survey of 377 YouTube and Twitch video creators found enjoyment and social interaction continuing to sustain content creation alongside income and recognition (Törhönen et al. 2019). The crisis arises from a structure of recognition in which an external trajectory gains authority to evaluate participation even while intrinsic interest survives it.

The professional path also begins long before the first payment, with work performed in anticipation of the future: a person builds a public portfolio, learns promotion, maintains connections, and accepts unpaid work in expectation of a future opportunity. That investment may make sense for somebody who wants to turn a hobby into a profession; the crisis arrives when this regime becomes a general norm and every participant has to live as though a future career were already evaluating the present evening.

The shift is especially visible around children and adolescents, where sustained interest quickly invites a question about a profession, channel, or route to income. Research describes social media as a two-sided setting: self-presentation and audiences can support identity exploration, friendship, and acceptance, while public and persistent feedback participates in shaping self-concept (Pérez-Torres 2024). Direct evidence about how an early audience affects later departure from a particular hobby remains limited. I draw a narrower inference from experience here: followers, adults’ investment, and a recognizable role can turn exploration into a promise and raise the social cost of stopping. The full right to end and resume a practice belongs to Continuity.

“Where are your latest juggling videos?” can sound warm, like interest in someone unseen for a while, although in some situations it already checks for a new digital trace and treats the missing clip as indirect evidence of a missing practice.

The pressure becomes sharper when “send a video of how you juggle” places the recording before the meeting and asks it to confirm that the skill remains and the person fits the accepted form of presence. The clip becomes a credential: show the media object first, then receive recognition as someone inside the practice.

The technical difference between event and recording, the camera’s influence on movement, and upload becoming a condition of legitimacy are already examined in Executable Traces. The next social step turns the recording into an entry pass and the infrastructure of representation into a regulator of belonging.

The older direction ran from relationships to shared activity, which occasionally left a media trace. The newer environment increasingly begins with the trace and asks it to produce visibility, assemble an audience, create relationships, and sustain them through regular publication, although we once shared within an existing bond.

Another job grows above the hobby as a person continues juggling while becoming the operator of its media representation: choosing an angle, recording attempts, selecting the successful one, editing, captioning, publishing, replying, checking the response, and reminding people of their presence after an interval. The same tasks arise around music, drawing, cycling, a home-built object, or a program written for one’s own use.

This work affects the original practice before filming begins: movement has to fit the frame, a combination has to finish quickly enough, an error goes to the bin, and a successful attempt represents the whole evening. The next evening the person already remembers the metric and the endless feed, where someone is always younger, faster, better lit, more fluent before a camera, and connected to a sponsor; a small scene of different characters becomes one scale even though these practices never shared a common measure.

Self-determination theory describes durable intrinsic motivation through autonomy, competence, and relatedness, and all three conditions change when a hobby acquires a permanent media circuit. Autonomy narrows quietly: the person still chooses the activity but begins choosing among formats, durations, and rhythms that travel more easily. Competence separates from embodied knowledge and local growth because a view count offers an accessible external measure capable of overwhelming the satisfaction of mastering a difficult movement after months of work. Relatedness moves from the memory of particular relationships into a stream of reactions, where intense activity can coexist with loneliness and a familiar person’s silence becomes indistinguishable from an absent audience.

External reward does not automatically destroy intrinsic interest, and money, applause, or a wide audience can sustain a practice. Experiments on overjustification matter here as a warning about a changing explanation: when an action that already gave pleasure is systematically organized around an expected reward, participants can begin to believe that they take part for the sake of that reward. Platform metrics make expectation continuous because they remain available after each publication and shape the next choice of subject, difficulty, and stopping point.

The resulting loop begins when an activity produces a representation and the platform measures it; that measurement changes the next session, and the altered session produces material better adapted to the same system of evaluation. This feedback works without a direct pursuit of fame; seeing which fragment an audience understands, which movement holds attention, and which interval looks like disappearance a few times is enough for knowledge of the response to settle into the hands.

Local comparison could also be severe, envious, and hierarchical, but it took place among a finite number of people whose bodies, ages, circumstances, and years of practice were at least partly known. An algorithmic feed selects the best results from many scenes and presents them side by side as comparable examples of one activity, removing most context while retaining an exact response count. Classical social-comparison theory explains the impulse to assess oneself through other people, while the new infrastructure changes the circle of people against whom one compares oneself: a few known peers give way to an endless display of exceptional results against which an ordinary evening is measured whenever the channel opens.

Media work therefore acts as a participation tax paid in time, attention, and changes to the practice itself. A participant may accept it for a professional scene, a shared archive, or the pleasure of making video, while voluntariness depends on the ability to practise without this second occupation and remain recognized by people who know them through shared meetings.

For several years I mistook fatigue with the second job for a loss of interest in the first, until I understood that I could love an activity and resist the social form that had grown around it. The props still came alive in my hands, although the expectation of another video felt heavy; music still asked for an evening, although the thought of release, promotion, and profile maintenance closed the door. This pressure had long disguised itself as the disappearance of desire.

The sentence “a hobby used to be allowed to remain economically pointless” describes a freedom that precedes performance, sale, fame, and profession: an activity remains complete with no market value, no media trace, and no required next step. Human meaning already lives inside the event where we meet, struggle for a while, invent a strange trick, fail, and laugh through the evening.

I continue to exist between publications, and practice continues between results, living between videos: in the weight of an object, in movement returning after a pause, in conversation without a camera, and in the hand lifting a dropped ball, while the feed leaves those life-filled intervals blank.

The next article in the series, Antidigitism, moves from one scene to the structure of refusal: what happens when an optional intermediary becomes a condition of participation.

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