Illustration by Yuchen Zhou
By Elisa Vincent
In recent years, it seems like every hobby imaginable is accompanied by its own tracking app. Readers use Goodreads or Story Graph, athletes use Strava, cinephiles use Letterboxd, and so on. These apps are incredibly popular – Goodreads, though looking like it belongs in an era of the internet now long forgotten, hosts around 150 million users, and its recently arrived competitor Story Graph just reached usership of 5 million. 180 million people are signed up to Strava, making it the most popular app for tracking activities like running, walking, and cycling. It’s evident that people love tracking their hobbies, and what’s more, they love seeing other people do it. Have these apps taken it too far, however? Have they made us lose touch with the hobbies we’re tracking, and view everything as a numbers game?
One major critique of these apps is the level of competition they seem to create amongst users. After all, what is Goodreads without comparing your reading goal to other people’s, and what is Strava without its local leaderboard? A bit of healthy competition can be fun and motivating, but when it’s the sole reason for reading the books you do or running the routes you run, is there a limit to how much we should compete with each other? Pitting ourselves against each other can lead to the belief that, even when we achieve something we might have previously considered impressive, we aren’t doing enough compared to our peers. I frequently find myself ‘justifying’ runs on Strava – letting my (few) followers know that I’m aware of how slow I was going, when, in another world, I would’ve been incredibly proud of my pace. This culture permeates to social media as well; it can be easy to get lost in a sea of influencers bragging about their recent achievements, leading us to think that whatever we’ve done pales in comparison.
These apps do, additionally, create a certain culture of ‘performativity.’ Alongside his wired headphones, matcha, and tote bag, the performative male probably has Letterboxd downloaded on his phone, with movies like The Virgin Suicides and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind ranking in his Top Four. Aside from the more obvious issue of performativity, which is that we’re not doing things for ourselves anymore, but rather to show to others that we have done them, another problem arises: everyone is accused of performativity, no matter their intentions. All of a sudden, reading a more challenging book is not an act of self-development, it’s an act of performance. Watching films that are deemed more ‘intellectual’ have nothing to do with your personal interests, but serve simply to show off how diverse your intellectual palate is. Not only does this make us more susceptible to judging those who may just be trying to challenge or better themselves, it could even discourage people from tackling these challenges, in fears of being perceived as ‘performative.’
This ultimately leads to the overarching issue with hobby tracking: is it taking the fun out of our hobbies? Initiatives like the Goodreads reading challenge can incite readers to pick up shorter books, even when they perhaps would rather read another, longer text, just so they rack up the numbers on their tracker. I myself have been found guilty of forcing myself to fit in quick, occasionally unenjoyable runs at the end up the week just to keep a consistent graph on my progress tab in Strava – and I’m usually the first person to say that hobbies should be enjoyable, and forcing yourself to do them sucks the fun out completely. Not only that, it makes you less likely to be interested in them going forward. Pushing yourself to engage in these activities only for the sake of tracking them burns you out.
So, does hobby tracking infringe on the actual notion of a hobby? Hobbies are, at their core, things we’re supposed to do purely for ourselves and our own enjoyment. They are not something we have to be great at, or even good at. But in tracking them and sharing your habits with the world, not only have hobbies stopped being something we do only for ourselves, they’ve become something we do for others, sometimes almost exclusively. In trying to become more connected with each other, by sharing what we’re reading, watching, and how we’re exercising, we’ve become less attuned to ourselves. When watching films, I sometimes spend less time actually focussed on the film; instead, I’m coming up with a funny Letterboxd one-liner review the entire time. After going on a run, I’m not thinking about how I felt; instead, I’m logging onto Strava as quickly as I can so I can broadcast it to the world. Partaking in these hobbies have thus become more about tracking them rather than the act of engaging in the activity itself.
Don’t get me wrong – these hobby tracking apps can be a great way to recognize your progress in an activity and even to build community with people with similar interests. They just simply aren’t, and shouldn’t be, the be-all end-all, and they definitely should not be the reason we’re engaging with these hobbies in the first place.
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