It's really common advice to not start with the cheapest gear. Yes a lot of us learned to play on dime store guitars but would have suffered less with a quality instrument. The same is true for just about everything.
Exactly. I started learning harmonica on those $20 pack of 8 and struggled for weeks to get anything to sound close to what I wanted. When I spent $60 on a decent instrument, I could suddenly do what I'd been practicing. There's a sweet spot for getting good enough equipment to actually learn without blowing the budget on something you may not continue doing
Woodworking planes.
You can go to Home Depot and get a plane for $15-20, and it will - mostly - cut wood. Spend $50-60 and get a decent name brand tool that gives a lot less grief. Spend $500 and get a Lie Nielsen that's just on another level.
Here's the thing, though: you have to be pretty competent to appreciate the difference between the $50 and $500 tools; and if you know what you're doing, you can easily tune the $15 so it works almost as well as the $500. Buy cheap to get started; upgrade if it turns out you stick with the hobby. I'll never know if I could have learned easier/faster starting with a $50 plane, but my guess is that I'd still have been gouging the shit out of everything.
Another thing that works really well is buying old when it comes to some tools.
I have a handful of 80 year old Stanley planes that are all the same quality as the expensive Lie Nielsen options, but I got them for about 50 bucks each.
No not to start with cheapest gear, but get the cheapest one that makes sense, then upgrade it to the best you can afford once you like it.
Makes sense as in the recommended entry level equipment, not the cheap waste from aliexpress/amazon.
This way you can get the feel of the hobby before you plunge a huge load of money on it.
How about this?
You bought the most expensive gear for a hobby you don't yet know much about? I've met many in this hobby, and have never met anyone this dedicated! Good on you, mate! Can you keep me posted on your progress? I'm genuinely interested! Let me know if you need any help or advice, as I'd be ecstatic to help!
I hate these ~/mike types of gatekeeping bullshitters. People in a hobby being excited about newcomers to the hobby, is the reason we still have hobbies.
Depending on the hobby, this is some fucked up gatekeeping.
My first thought was riding a motorcycle as a hobby, and that is one activity that many people severely underestimate how much expensive gear you should be wearing for your safety before you even consider doing it.
Oh that's that new "x"?! Tell me about it?!
Be excited people are joining your hobbies. Without people hobbies die.
How about "people supporting my hobby"? People buying better gear (be it climbing gear, better bikes, airbrush kits for models, or whatever) show manufacturers that people want improved gear which ultimately raises the baseline quality of gear in general.
Real life isn't a video game where we each have to progress up a skill tree to "earn" better gear.
Maybe try engaging with the newbie with the fancy gadgets and making a friend who shares your hobby?
But how am I supposed to feel better about myself when I see someone who can spend more money on my hobby than me?
What about "Well researched hobbyist"
Sometimes the cheapest option is so much worse than just getting the right gear from the beginning.
Yeah the attitude of negativity against this is basically “you aren’t really into my hobby until you’ve spent twice as much money by starting with the crappy equipment and upgrading when you realize its crap”.
Or the beginner gear makes the hobby super tedious and difficult. Who knows if you would've liked it with proper tools instead of trying to make it work with a shitty, poorly working set up.
Better question... how do we find our own self-esteem without denigrating others for making choices that are absolutely none of our concern?
A slur? Why?
Who cares what people want to do with their money.
Buy once cry once.
Paying for expensive gear at the beginning may not be a bad idea, given the possibility: should you quit the hobby and try to sell your stuff, no one is going to buy your knockoff cheap equipment, while more quality stuff holds its value
If you can afford it, absolutely.
There's also an argument to be made for good equipment making a hobby more accessible. Musical instruments especially. It's almost always much harder to make a cheap musical instrument sound nice than it is a good one. From clarinets to guitars to synths. I wouldn't be surprised if half the people who quit an instrument do so because they're trying to learn on a $100 Walmart special, something that ironically would only sound good in the hands of a professional who wouldn't touch it in the first place.
Maybe gatekeeping is a poor method to encourage beginners in your hobby? Perhaps it might be better to encourage them simply to avoid the worst quality cheapos. It's nearly always better to learn on equipment that isn't garbage. It cuts down on waste, and at least you can sell it if the hobby doesn't work out.
In cycling we call them dentists.
But if someone is trying out one of my hobbies idgaf what gear they can afford. We all start somewhere.
We have one in Finnish "välineurheilija". "Väline" is "sports equipment" and "urheilija" is athlete, so it's literally just "equipmentathlete" and used derogatorily towarsd people who — instead of actually practicing — just show up in very expensive gear.
Back in my day, when I tied an onion to my belt, we called these people 'pozers'
I understand the term, but wasn't it "posers"?
Maybe his day was in the nineties, when switching s for z and c for k was a shortcut to coolness!
I have an idea, focus on what you like and don't leave any time to tear people down because it's just shitty and pointless and ruins hobbies for everyone.
In fishing they’re called Googans (no idea of the etymology), but I dislike the idea of gatekeeping in general. If someone’s doing something dangerous, or their googanism is somehow ruining your enjoyment of your hobby, I get it, but otherwise why should you care?
Fuck off Mike. Let people enjoy themselves however they want.
Why care? Don't yuk someone's yum. Envy is a bad look tbh.
I'm probably someone he hates, bought a shit load of hardware for my Farming/Truck Sims. But I use them ~40hr week and it makes me happy. But I guess go fuck myself because I can afford it.
I wouldn’t call them names, but there is something to be said about people with $2500 gaming pc who only ever play league of legends or Fortnite
If they're playing league or fortnite they're probably already getting called plenty of names.
We used to call them Ag-Nags (AGNG’s)… all gear, no game. It was a derogatory term, but it was more reserved for the type of person that would go buy the best gear and never invest the time to learn how to use it or why it had value other than the sticker price.
Go out and learn something new. Enjoy something new. If you have money to buy gear, that’s fine… but know that most people that pioneered whatever sport/hobby your delving into did a lot more with a lot less. Enjoy it for what it is and worry about the gear less… sometimes the squeeze makes the juice that much better.
Is this for like, someone who buys the biggest social media site for top dollar and then doesn't really know what to do with it ?
Although gatekeeping is a bad attitude, I think the worst part of beginning a hobby is not getting super expensive gear as a beginner, but getting the wrong super expensive gear as a beginner.
As a homebrewer, my super janky setup has barely evolved in the 8 years I've been in the hobby. It's a very hands-on process, hard to control for temps and most of my tools are either upcycled or built from hardware store materials, but I know exactly how it works and can let my imagination run wild when creating recipes. Plus, it's fun to spend an afternoon with friends drinking beer while actually brewing beer. I see a lot of people splurging for a Brewfather and losing interest pretty quickly because everything is automated, so your "hobby" is mainly waiting for a timer to beep, or people "investing" in kits and making barely-better-than-low-end commercial beer.
I'm not really into photography anymore but when I started out, I was shooting film because camera bodies were super cheap back then, people discarded them because they were only interested in the lenses. People were buying 800-1000€ m4/3 cameras in droves and put expensive vintage lenses on them to get that "instagram look", which is useless except for driving up the price of good lenses because the sensor is so small that most of the character of the lens is lost. With a bit of patience, you could snag a full-frame, used Sony a7 for less money and actually getting what you paid for in the lens.
Posers.
It's what we called kids in the 80's who would buy and carry around a high-end skateboard just to look cool but had no ability to ride it.
See, if they actually have zero intention of riding, that is a poser and I don't feel bad. If they are trying to learn, help them
"Yuppie" is already a word.
There's a trade-off, depending on the hobby, I guess. For some hobbies, very cheap gear won't even work properly. "Buy once, cry once," is something I hear often.
No we don't, we need less gatekeeping
Not me sitting here with hundreds of dollars in TTRPG manuals when my playgroup only meets once a week and we are in the middle of a pathfinder campaign.
I feel particularly called out because I spent all day today reading Mothership manuals and adventures and I have no idea when I'll get to play it.
Victims. Of salespeople.
I love them because I can buy greatly discounted gear after they return it or consign it. And I never see them back where I go, they couldn't make it.
Most hobbies started using what was available. The activity arose from the impetus.
Mountain climbers used sneakers. Gary Fisher used dirtbike parts on his mountain bikes at first.
All the expensive cushions and benches in the world won't meditate for you. Likewise, worshipping a meditator won't help you.
At some point, you have to do it.
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