It’s just a hobby bro
It’s just a hobby bro
A rant about betraying your inner child.
I’d like to formalise a rant about a phenomenon I’ve witnessed among my peers for years by now, and that is the phenomenon of the reductio ad hobbium, or in English, “it’s just a hobby.”
I would get this refrain whenever I pressed people to take themselves seriously about the things they have poured their life passion into for years on end. Game development, programming, video production, and basically anything you could engage in on the computer would invite this response after a point. “It’s just a hobby.” What?
The context for these kinds of things is always the sort of thing where people are trying the best they can and learning as much as possible. Everyone can plainly see that their modus operandum is to do 100%, as much and as often as they can. So imagine my confusion when I talk to them with that premise in hand, and I get this kind of response: “It’s just a hobby.” So you mean to tell me you’re not here to do 100%?
Colour me sceptical. All of the evidence still very much points to you doing that. More exactly, you don’t want people to treat you like you’re here to do 100%, even though you are. You don’t want the social responsibility of taking yourself seriously. “It’s just a hobby” is the perfect dismissal of that – you’re saying “whoa man, I can take myself seriously, but no one else can unless I want them to. If you keep doing that, you’re being an asshole." Okay, but where does that lead you? Are you going to be better or worse at what you love doing with no expectation from anyone else to do 100%? My experience says no. Isn’t that kind of tragic? Is that what you really wanted, to be worse at what you love? I doubt it.
This failure mode is tragic with harder sciences like programming, but with softer ones like philosophy or history it is truly schizophrenic. When your thing is dealing with high concepts and abstract thought all the time, and you employ the refrain “it’s just a hobby,” it’s usually in response to your theory running up against a wall called reality. Rather than being an adult and realising that means you have a lot more work to do, you cower behind the ultimate excuse, it’s just a hobby, so you can be free to return to a work you don’t even recognise you just utterly debased. A while of doing that will result in hilarity like this:
I can’t even address the object level of this post because the premise that it’s based on some kind of shared reality is too obviously false to me. Further replies really underscore this fact:
What the fuck is this?
I’m not someone who levies these kinds of criticisms because I can’t read and think that’s your problem. I’m someone who does this because I put in the hours in my work to be more professional, and I don’t see why I should expect any less out of someone who bumps shoulders with every two-bit clown in Austin City and has a few hundred thousand YouTube subscribers. In fact, you have even less of an excuse than I do. And I’m still an amateur, for now. That will change.
For years I had people respond to me in the really hostile way I did just one paragraph earlier: what the fuck is this? And yea, it was appropriate. Years ago I didn’t even know what I was talking about, and was fighting the tide to keep my own intellect independent and intact, because I knew that it could lead to the great things it has since. Now, I can tell you about mechanicalism. Now, I can tell you about C*. I can explain why all of these things are a big deal and what they materially do to computing. My only problem is that I don’t have several hundred thousand YouTube subscribers to blast my thoughts at any time I want, but alas, that’s life. It just makes things like the above all the more shameful in my eyes.
If you love what you’re doing so much, why don’t you take yourself seriously?