Edit: so it turns out that every hobby can be expensive if you do it long enough.
Also I love how you talk about your hobby as some addicts.
Music production. And IT in general.
But specifically the music production; started off as “I’ll by FL Studio and muck around with it” to “I need ALL THE VSTs!”. I’ve sunk like $2500 into it in the last two months (which is a hell of a lot of money to me), and I keep buying shit for it.
Am I any good at it? Fuck no. But it’s not stopping me from keeping at it and buying shit I probably don’t need :P
And the IT stuff consists of rack-mount servers and Pi’s. I’ve sunk around $25k into it all over the last 12 years.
I think the only cure for gear acquisition syndrome is experience. After a few years of buying everything in sight, I noticed that I really only used my FabFilter and Universal Audio plugins, with occasional instances of Soothe2 and MH Thump. When I changed computers, I didn’t reinstall 70% of my plugins.
After a few years of composing, I noticed I only really used my samples from East-West, ProjectSAM, and Cinesamples.
But it took me a while to get to that point.
Man server racks are so overpriced. I wanted one for my home server but after seeing the cost for a couple pieces of metal, I said fuck that and just put it in a regular pc case. In retrospect I wish I had put it in a NUC and gotten an external drive bay for the NAS
Same. I started with the Akai MPC mini 2 and Ableton Live lite. Now I have a Yamaha P 515, a couple of Genelec 8341, a Sabaj a20d 2022 DAC, A MacBook Pro 2021 with Ableton Suite, Pianoteq 8 and Spitfire’s BBC Orchestra on it and I only sold 2 songs on Bandcamp for a total of 10 euros…But boy is it fun!