I think the fundamental problem is that if you're sitting somewhere bored, maybe at work, maybe elsewhere, you can consume some media about a hobby, and you can make an online purchase of some gear for the hobby, but you often can't actually do the hobby.
It's dumb, but I will catch myself watching a ten minute video on synthsizers while I'm at work, but I would never whip out a synth and spend ten minutes playing it at work. But it's the playing it that actually satisfies the desire. Consuming media just increases it.
It's a dumb loop but it's really hard to get out of because:
1. The activation energy of doing a hobby is always higher than the energy required to just consume media about it, or even buy gear online for it.
2. We're often in environments where it's impossible or inappropriate to do the hobby (work, in line at the DMV, etc.) but where we are able to consume media or make purchases.
Finding the right balance can be hard but for me at least, it's a net positive. But I do have to be diligent about asking myself "Will this piece of gear really further my goals, or am I just bored and looking for a seratonin hit?"
I "stopped" taking pictures after I went down the extreme build your own cameras art tract and found it all devoid of meaning. This was 2005...
I actually didnt stop... I still shoot film because we live in a dark age of cloud storage and I believe there will be little recorded daily history still left in the near future, or overran by AI/Deepfake content...
Next time you have a free weekend, pop into some estate sales and flip through people's old magazine collections and piles of hobby crap. You'll find a few people with well worn items and a sensible collection (people who had enough time to really practice the hobby) and many wealthier people that spent money aspiring to commit time they never made while collecting the most featured and esteemed baubles.
There's nothing new to this.
"Audiophiles don't use their equipment to listen to your music.
Audiophiles use your music to listen to their equipment.” - Alan Parsons
Not to be confused with collecting, which has no notions of taling better pictures and is purely concerned with acquiring things for the sake of having it. GAS always has this underlying assumption of being a better photographer if only the gear was better, as in the latest and highest priced.
Thank you for saying it so clearly.
I used to love reading a few subreddits where I would get tips and advice on doing things that I love doing, like /r/snowboarding /r/photography /r/overlanding /r/vandwellers /r/cycling
and all of them have devolved into exactly what you describe. Endless discussion about purchasing new & expensive equipment to do said thing. Extremely minimal discussion about actually doing said thing.
I've said it before and I'll keep saying it, Reddit has really turned "picking up a hobby" into "selecting and purchasing the correct gear, talking about the gear, and deciding which gear to purchase next". Don't even get me started on keyboard fetishists, who dispense with the hobby pretense and just buy gear (yeah a nice keyboard is a great thing to have but I've never lubricated a switch in my life and never intend to)