The price tag on having fun: Why do hobbies feel more expensive than ever?
Why does it feel like hobbies are getting expensive? (AI generated image) Before the age of commodification The disease called: ‘it’ The cycle of an
Why does it feel like hobbies are getting expensive? (AI generated image) Before the age of commodification The disease called: ‘it’ The cycle of an algorithmic hobby The cost of a hobby The cost nobody talks about Annual income vs spending So what are we actually paying? You may logout, delete every social media app or change your algorithm, but can you escape the commercial packaging of simple activities that were once free but now cost a good portion of your salary?Some latest additions to this ever-diversifying social media dictionary include "maxxing", "locking in", and the most ubiquitous of them all - "grinding." These are not, on their face, alarming words. They signal for us to be driven, to be ambitious, to be the best, at least on the surface and one realises that they are all labour words, slowly driving us to commodify our very existence. Why can no one have fun anymore?You can no longer run a mile and feel happy for trying something new. You need to clock your stats on an app and somehow convince everyone on your contacts list that the next Olympic long distance medalist is a saved number on their phone. The culture of commodifying did not even spare the movies, everyone is now an unpaid film critic on the internet.Before the Industrial Revolution pushed everyone into overly cramped factories, rest was not something you had to schedule. Agricultural life allowed humans to have periods of rest, though there were still variations in the allowance.Then came the Industrial Revolution, and that understanding collapsed almost overnight.The factory did not just change how people worked, it changed what they thought work was supposed to feel like. It structured work down to the hour but, that also meant that it provided this rigid and extremely strenuous structure to a person’s entire being. You became your work.Unionisation and protests did come to the rescue of workers. In 1825, carpenters marched through Boston under revolutionary banners calling the dawn-to-dusk schedule despotic servitude. The fight for shorter hours was not really about hours, it was about the right to exist outside of productivity. Leisure and liberty turned out to be the same argument.When free time was eventually won, people were remarkably uncreative with it, in the best possible way.
They bowled. They built miniature trains. They went to the pub. They lived for themselves. Working men across Britain and America constructed entire social lives around activities that produced nothing, optimised for nothing, and answered to no one. A hobby was almost defined by its uselessness.This is what makes what happened next so strange. Pickleball was invented in 1965 in someone's backyard, cobbled together from spare equipment and an afternoon with nothing better to do. For decades it stayed exactly that: slow, communal, the kind of game your uncle was inexplicably good at. Today it is a nine billion dollar industry, with every brand trying to spoonfeed it to us as an “it” hobby to have.There is a particular lifecycle to how we are told what to enjoy. It begins innocuously – someone, somewhere, is doing something purely for the love of it. They post about it, the internet reacts to it. Some find it charming, some want to find an opportunity to berate a stranger and some just like it and move on. But all our reactions make the algorithm notice it, make it viral and, the moment it trends, the vultures of commodities circle it.The algorithm is not a neutral thing. It does not simply show you what exists. It decides what gets seen, and in doing so, it decides what gets made. Fariha Ahmed, an artist and researcher described it in her thesis Algorhythm: the platform does not just govern visibility, it governs behaviour. You do not just post differently, you start believing in it.This is what the "it" hobby does to the actual price of things too. Pilates was developed inside a jail cell. It did not always require anything beyond a mat and floor space. Now a single hour-long class in any Indian city starts at Rs 2,000, and that figure does not account for the trending socks, the matching gym set, the tote bag that signals you belong. The hobby is the same, but it got commodified to a degree that from being designed for accessibility it became famous for inaccessibility.A hobby can go from niche to unaffordable in the span of one good social media post, and the person who made it go viral will be checking their metrics every fifteen minutes wondering why the algorithm is not pushing their next post.There is a financial cost to a hobby, there always has been.
The BriefWire