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 age of commodification
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.
The disease called: ‘it’
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 cycle of an algorithmic hobby
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.
The cost of a hobby
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.
The cost nobody talks about
There is a financial cost to a hobby, there always has been. But now it has been trendified, magnified and quietly taken advantage of.Yu Tai, a Chinese national whose hobby is K-Pop, conversed with TOI in relation to how she herself has commodified her hobby for herself. Her interest in K-pop started as casually listening to it on a Tuesday, and now consumes her whole life.She shared, “I post about it daily to keep up with my groupchats. I think since 2026 started I have been to 5 different countries for concerts, I even went to Japan for one night because they had limited edition merch.”Between 2025 and 2026 alone, she has followed her group from Thailand to Korea to Paris to Hong Kong to Japan, rearranging her life around a tour schedule the way most people rearrange their lives around a job.“I have to prove that I am a fan, sometimes it is not enough to love the music.” Yu Tai shared. The K-Pop fandom, like most hobby communities that have migrated online, runs on a quiet and exhausting competition — who does more, who spends more, who is the most devoted. The person who attended two concerts is made to feel lesser by the person who attended five. The person with the standard album feels the pull of the limited edition box set, the photocard that was only available at the Tokyo venue, the merch that proves you were actually there. Love for the artist becomes almost impossible to separate from the performance of that love for an audience.This is what the culture of sharing does to a hobby at scale. It does not just raise the financial floor, though it does that too, relentlessly. It creates a hierarchy of participation where simply enjoying something is never quite sufficient. You must be able to show it, and show it better than the person next to you. The hobby becomes a competition you never signed up for, with entry fees that keep climbing and no clear finish line.
Annual income vs spending
Her habits have affected her adversely. Once converted from GBP to INR, she earns Rs 17.9 lakhs a year but spends up to 51.5 lakhs. Now she has to put in overtime to pay for all the credit accrued over the months. Yu Tai has still not stopped, but she admits, if you ask her, that she cannot always remember the last time it felt like casual fun and not a dedicated job she was doing.
So what are we actually paying?
Think about the last hobby you quietly gave up, left in the corner to gather dust. The guitar which has not been tuned in years, the sketchbook you bought with good intentions, the running shoes that became purely functional.Chances are it did not end because you ran out of time or money, though you probably told yourself that. It ended because somewhere between the algorithm and the aesthetic and the hierarchy of people doing it better than you, it stopped feeling like yours. That is the cost that never appears on any receipt, the slow erosion of the feeling that the thing you love is still allowed to just be yours.This is the real cost of commodification and it does not show up in any market report.Boutique fitness studios can project all the growth they want. The K-Pop industry can keep manufacturing limited edition photocards for fans to chase across continents. The pickleball brands can keep telling you that you need a carbon fibre paddle to have fun in a car park. What none of them will tell you is that every time a hobby gets an aesthetic, a community ranking, and a price point, a quiet number of people simply stop.The workers who marched through Boston in 1825 fought for the right to exist outside of productivity. They wanted hours that belonged to no one but themselves. Two hundred years later we have those hours. We just handed them back voluntarily, dressed it up in matching activewear, posted about it, and called it passion.The grinding, the locking in, the maxxing — we adopted that language ourselves. Nobody forced it into our mouths. The hobby is not dead. But somewhere between the first viral post and the nine billion dollar industry that followed, it stopped being something we did for ourselves. It became something we performed for everyone else.And the worst part is we are still refreshing to see if anyone noticed.
