Tips, Tricks, Hacks and Grifters

Or: The misleading nature of hacks, tips & tricks

We have all been subject to the lambast of the snake oil salesman promising that by purchasing the latest gadget from their corporate overlord or by simply following their totally original and not at all ever done before brilliant breakthrough technique that we, yes you and  I, mere mortals will be able to elevate our hobby output with absolutely none of that horrid, uncomfortable, time consuming and all round nasty thing called effort.  That while having to expend less calories than it takes to blink a pair of eyeballs or pass wind in your sleep we may rival the titans of the hobby world. 

 It is of course fitting as it is the height of fashion these days that one must endeavor to spend as little time and effort to receive maximal results in every aspect of their waking lives.  So long to yesteryear and the toils and trivialities that composed everyday life.  Forget the nastiness that is the collection of labors and tediums which make up the worthless hours of your leisure time and embrace the altogether lovely and gorgeous secret success habits that will transform you into a jet setting executive sex god….   

People don't buy what you do, they buy WHY you do it  - Simon Cynic…Sinuk..  

Why?  Why is it that the lowest common denominator has entered every aspect of our life.  Why would it matter that my productivity has to follow me out of my inconsequential day job and be imposed on every activity in what should be my “real” life.  Real being the idea that there is some small allotment of time allowed us all in our days where we may put aside the many expectations of our keepers and actually indulge in the trivialities that make us feel as though we are an actualized individual.  

When we speak of progress these days it's almost as if we have fallen into a collective psychosis that the idea implies an infinite potential of growth.  We are complicit in a fiction that wantonly denies the existence of the immutable first law of thermodynamics.  Growth, optimization, enhancement, all onward and into infinity forever and unstoppable.  With this delusion we are told we can stem the flow of time, save minutes in an hour, hours in a day and days in week all while not compromising or even increasing the quality of our output.  And how do we achieve this? I promise you I will let you know if you read to the end of this next paragraph. 

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The delivery method for these miracles? The sale of promises. The promise that watching a video will bestow life-altering secrets, or that subscribing to a newsletter will finally provide the echo chamber you need to feel perpetually correct. It's the grand promise that your entire life has been misguided, but fortunately, a visionary has locked themselves away like  an anchorite in a 12,000 sq/ft domicile, subsisting on trust fund dividends and a half-forgotten Bitcoin, to seek the answers on your behalf. Their prophetic visions? Your undiagnosed ADD is the sole obstacle to a perfect life, a problem they will gladly solve if you just subscribe to their Patreon, newsletter, OnlyFans, and their newly recognized Church of Bed Baptism and Beyond.

Hacks, Tricks, Tips.. These are the revelations according to the later day prophets of Social Media.  But what are these? In and of themselves they are miniscule and amount to an inconsequential part of a whole.  If I were to collect 10,000 tips I may have something amounting to an education but if I were to have only one trick I might be able to claim how to hold a brush. It is a start but it's a long way from this circus to Piccadilly.  

So, as in all things, we are left to our own devices on reading through the lines.  What is it we are actually being offered?  And why, according to Mr. Sinuk, are we following these trends?  It seems that under all the ribbon and cheap wrapping what we are being sold is an artifact of an idea, a Meme in the strictly Dawkinsesque sense.  We see the punchy titles, the mouth gaping Thumb Nails, the videos that are said to have literally broken the internet and in our efficiency obsessed brains we see salvation, the answers to the questions we never asked, to the problems we never knew we had.  

 Do we think adopting hobby hacks will make us better?  No, they will make you a parroting disciple of a middling social media influencer.  Will adopting AI make your work better? Again no, it will make your magnum opus an undifferentiated collection of slop.  

So my friends, what have we here other than a long condemnation in the form of an anonymous diatribe?  Surely these thoughts cannot be original.  The colluding opinions must be manifold and the contrary two score times those.  How is my view point worth your time and consideration?  What I can propose is something small in comparison to the cornucopia on offer: an invitation.  An singular and exclusive invitation to pay no mind to the hype mill and instead remember why you bother to have a hobby in the first place. To remember why we all sit down with our small plastic kits and spend a few joyous hours engaged with the practice of cutting sprue and smoothing mold lines.  We do it precisely because it is not our day job. This is our sanctuary from the metrics of productivity, a small, personal rebellion against the tyranny of optimization. That "horrid, uncomfortable, time-consuming thing called effort" is not the obstacle to our enjoyment; it is the very source of it. It is the price of admission to a state of flow, a realm where we are not consumers, audiences, or productivity units, but creators in a silent, tactile dialogue with our materials.

The true progress we seek is not measured in hours saved or outputs maximized, but in the quiet satisfaction of a skill honed, a challenge met, and a thing made with our own hands. So, accept this invitation to pay no mind. Reject the maxim of infinite growth. Embrace these so called worthless hours not as time to be reclaimed, but as the essential substance of a life that feels authentically our own. Let the influencers of the hobby world keep their hacks; we will keep the joy found in the work itself.  

-Kevin