Your Hobby is a Job You Don’t Get Paid For
The insidious creep of performance metrics into our leisure time.
The phone screen is a harsh, blue-white light against the ceiling. It’s 11:49 PM. My thumb hovers, a tired predator over its prey, waiting to tap the icon. Not for the thrill of the game, not for connection with friends, but for the login bonus. The streak. A digital chain I’ve been forging for
119 consecutive days, and the thought of it breaking feels like a small, sharp failure. It’s a ridiculous feeling, a manufactured anxiety that has somehow become a load-bearing part of my evening ritual. A tiny digital chore that feels disproportionately heavy.
The Work-ification of Play
We didn’t get here by accident. This feeling, this low-grade hum of obligation to our own leisure, is the result of a deliberate and fantastically successful invasion. The architects of our digital playgrounds have borrowed the most effective tools from the workplace-performance metrics, daily check-ins, progress bars, key performance indicators-and dressed them up as fun. They call it gamification. A better word might be ‘work-ification.’ It’s the colonization of unstructured time, turning the open fields of play into gridded-out factory floors where the product is our continued engagement.
Leisure
Unstructured time
Work
Gridded factory floors
The Contradiction
I complain about this constantly. I see the wires