[jackvalentine]

I was thinking about this the other night - everything is more fun until it becomes professionalised too much. In this case, professionalisation is synonymous with optimisation for engagement.

Motorsports, video games, chatting online, working in a warehouse - all things that are loads more fun to do when someone isn't seeking to eke out more and more marginal gains.

[thom]

Yeah, I see this all over. Every hobby becomes a question of how to get better at it, not of how to enjoy it more. Even if you enjoy your craft and growing your skills, the internet presents you with infinitely many well-trodden paths, completely robbing you of any sense of ownership. Instead of being here and now, possessing agency in a particular moment, you're just a dot in the bottom-left quadrant of some enormous scatter graph. It's the total perspective vortex.