Getting into a creative hobby can be tough, especially if that creative hobby is either mostly or wholly experienced through the internet.
As big as the internet is, it can feel very empty if you’re keeping your head down creating, only popping up to post your results when you’re done and waiting for reactions.
It’s inevitable on something as massive as the internet. Whatever you’re into, there’s probably a bunch of other people out there doing it. You can do your best work, and there’s going to be a horde of similar work competing for attention.
Sometimes real life can be just as hard. If you’re deeply into things that other people in your life aren’t, it can be hard to get someone to engage with the thing you’re doing.
I’ve been on both sides of this dynamic, by the way. There are things some of my friends are into that I’ve never been able to get into, and it’s hard to do more than throw them a thumbs-up reaction in Discord when they post photos.
There are ways of interacting with hobby communities that can provide a better balance. Do social media marketing as you work. Get involved in communities; don’t just show up when you have new work to post. And you should absolutely be doing those things if you’re serious about creating content in TTRPGs (or any other hobby, for that matter).
But you also have to work on yourself when you’re feeling disappointed, burnt out, or out of ideas.
The metaphor I like to use is: recognize when you’re building trophy cases.
I came up with this metaphor when I was doing hobby video game development. A few times a year, I would spend a weekend participating in a game jam–a competition where you would develop a game from scratch based on a revealed theme.
Game jams were fun, and I learned a lot from them. In most cases I created a decently playable game; in some I was actually able to polish my entry up and release it on Google Play or itch.io.
But at some point, I started to get burnt out.
I never really made any money, not that that was a major goal. None of them felt like they really took off. In some cases, I struggled to get friends (outside my fellow game jammers) to play them. I wanted a level of connection out of that work–with people engaging with my games–and it just wasn’t happening.
Almost everything you post on the internet has some sort of analytics, and it’s probably going to make your heart sink when you look at the reports. I can remember handing out beta keys to an Android release, and realizing from my stats that most hadn’t been even been downloaded. That was rough, but it’s easier when you’re ready for the possibility.
Friends encouraged me to keep at it–I should be doing more of it, pursuing new ideas, taking on bigger projects. But it just felt like a lot, and the encouragement actually made it worse.
I was doing it for myself, and that was fun for a while. But I hit a point where that was no longer enough. I had gotten all I could get out of it alone, and I risked just going through the motions and burning out. There were better uses of my time.
I think that’s normal for a lot of hobbies, especially if you dive in hard. They can come with an expiration date.
What I realized was, my itch.io page was not a portfolio of my work or a storefront. It was a personal trophy case.
There came a point where putting more trophies in the case didn’t do anything. It didn’t prove anything to anyone, and I wasn’t really feeling accomplished or satisfied with it. It was just a grind, and once I finished one it was on to the next, hoping it would do something.
At that point, quitting was the best option for me. Quitting meant I could pursue other hobbies that I hadn’t burnt myself out on, ones that might bear more fruit.
This advice feels backwards. Your friends want to encourage you to keep going in moments of self-doubt or exhaustion. They might even balk if you step away from a hobby, as if you’ve given up.
But I think it’s important to recognize–for your own sake–when you’re building trophy cases out of your hobbies, rather than engaging something that fires you up. You need that level of self-knowledge to stay sane on the internet. Admitting it might feel like failure, but it’s actually an important step in knowing yourself honestly.