Now that the year is closing and every app we use seems to be counting our digital footprints with this oddly poetic confidence, feeding us these bright, neatly packaged recaps of who we apparently were in 2025. I’ve been thinking a lot about how unusual it is to have your entire private year summarized back to you like a report card you didn’t realize you were being graded on. And like all of you, I also wait for my Spotify Wrapped with this funny mix of excitement and mild dread, because it feels like flipping through the diary I never wrote. Except it’s written by an algorithm that somehow knows exactly when I was heartbroken, when I was hopeful, when I was bored, and when I was just looping one song to survive. But something about this year made me pause a little longer than usual, because instead of feeling delighted by the stats, I found myself realizing how much of my life now exists as data points that I never consciously agreed to measure, little numbers that quietly turn my joys into metrics.
So, you know that strange moment when something that used to be peaceful and private, like listening to music on the bus or reading a book late at night or practicing a few phrases of a new language just because it made you smile, suddenly starts carrying this weird sense of pressure. Like there’s an invisible scoreboard keeping track of how well you’re performing at simply being yourself. And you can’t pinpoint exactly when it started, but it’s clear now that our personal joys have been swept into a cultural shift where everything is documented and everything is ranked, turning the softest parts of our lives into new spaces where we’re somehow expected to excel.
When Spotify, Goodreads and Letterboxd Became Unofficial SCOREBOARDS
This becomes painfully clear during moments like the yearly Wrapped explosion, where your music taste becomes a tiny spectacle, and even if you love seeing everyone else’s slides, there’s still that whisper in your head going “oh god, did I really listen to that many hours or does this make me seem too basic or too dramatic or too chaotic?”.
And then Goodreads comes along with its cheerful little reading challenge, transforming the quiet act of turning pages into a race we all fall behind in. You start reading not just for joy but for progress, which is a strange way to treat stories, considering they’re meant to be experiences, not statistics.
Letterboxd joins in too, because even something as simple as watching a movie becomes a performative choice once you know you’re going to log it. You start wondering whether your reviews sound witty enough, or whether your choices make you seem cultured, or whether you should watch that critically acclaimed film you’ve been avoiding just because your diary is starting to look a little too comfort-movie heavy. And again, nobody else actually cares. The pressure exists mostly because once a hobby is trackable, it automatically feels like something you should optimize.
The Streak Culture That Turns Hobbies Into Obligations
And I can’t even talk about hobby pressure without mentioning Duolingo, the tiny green bird who has somehow convinced millions of people that missing one day of language practice is a catastrophic moral failure. Streak culture has turned learning into this tense ritual where you’re half asleep at midnight, forcing yourself to tap through sentences you won’t remember, but doing it anyway because the idea of breaking the streak feels like letting down some imaginary version of yourself who’s better, more disciplined and more consistent. It’s wild how quickly a joyful hobby turns into a tiny daily obligation when an app threatens to take away your digital flame.
When Comparison Becomes Identity
So, somewhere along the way, without really meaning to, all of this has dwindled into a quiet comparison culture, where our hobbies stopped being things we simply enjoyed and slowly became little pieces of identity we felt the need to prove. It became less about the joy itself and more about curating a version of ourselves that looked impressive or interesting enough to display, even though none of these apps ever asked us to turn our private pleasures into performances.
Why Everything Feels Like a Performance Even When No One’s Watching
What’s interesting, and honestly a little unsettling, is how deeply we’ve internalized all of this. Even when no one is watching, even when nobody cares, even when no one checks your profiles or your stats or your logs, the presence of numbers is enough to make you act differently. Metrics shift the emotional texture of the hobby, because once the app is tracking it, you feel like you’re being tracked too. And it turns out that visibility, even imaginary visibility, is enough to make us perform
So instead of hobbies being spaces where you can wander around aimlessly and enjoy whatever feels right, they become these subtle stages where everything has to progress or improve or at least appear meaningful.
Trying to Take Back the Softness of Our Hobbies
Which brings me back to the thought that started all of this, the one I had while staring at my Spotify Wrapped. Maybe the world doesn’t need us to quit apps or stop sharing or pretend we don’t enjoy the little spark of excitement metrics sometimes give. But maybe we do need to reclaim some parts of ourselves that doesn’t exist as data. Maybe the real act of rebellion is doing things quietly again. Reading without logging. Listening without caring how it looks. Watching without reviewing. Learning without maintaining a streak.
Because when we stop measuring everything, even temporarily, the joy comes back in this warm and surprising way, almost like the hobby breathes out and becomes itself again. It stops being homework. It stops being a performance. It becomes yours, fully and softly and privately, the way it used to be before everything got quantified.