Many hobbies have a tension between catering to high-effort purists and to more casual people. (And while I think a lot of the Japanophilia in the post is beside the point, Japanese hobby culture does seem to tilt towards pursuing a single hobby to perfection over dabbling in several hobbies). The author mentions polishing an engine past the point that it actually makes a car go faster; I've seen similar things in some cycling cultures where people focus on getting the right bike parts to the point where it overwhelms the original intention of actually going for rides. Or gaming cultures, where serious players want everyone to play optimally so that they can practice their high-level skills, versus casual players who might enjoy it more if they roleplay or goof around a bit.
I think the gaming example is qualitatively different from the cycling example. In cycling, you've lost sight of the goal, which can be best served by cycling. Unless your hobby is actually building bikes, which I'd say is a different but valid hobby.
In gaming, including sports, this tension is common, and it's satisfied by competing at an appropriate level.
I think most of the people that have 3D printers do that.
But modifying a 3D printer is cheap and fast (in labor time, printing stuff is slow, but it's not work), while parts for any other use tend to take much more time designing and applying. So that ratio is misleading.
Shopping for bike parts is the hobby? is this caused by soulless consumer culture where retailers present themselves through advertisement as the source of dreams? At least here in Japan .. Outdoor is a section in the mall, not a place you go.. and you cant just go climb a mountain in your old clothes, you need all the gear, and the gas stove to make the high altitude coffee at the peak, because someone said that tastes better..
I knew a guy like this. He also had 2-3 other bikes that he actually rode, but he spend a lot of time and effort (and money) building his Dream Bike. He was always waiting for some part to be shipped from some tiny manufacturer in Italy or Spain or Japan or Canada, and by the time it arrived he would have read about this other company that had an even smaller/thinner/lighter part, so he would order that as well and wait until he had both parts before meticulously compare them. And once he had managed to finally assemble a complete bike it wouldn't take many rides before either something broke or he decided something wasn't quite perfect so he would take the bike apart again and try to find an even more perfect part.
Some people build guitars other people play them. They are related disciplines and guitar builders know how to play a guitar but it's not their primary pursuit. Biking is no different no? Some people are interested in how to setup and combine components in an optimal way. Others want to ride.
indeed, building vs using is an entirely valid hobby. some people like to repair cars for fun, or restore old ones. i knew someone who restored old steam engines. or people who like to restore/build computers from used parts and give them to kids who need one.
i built my own bike when i was young, but mainly because it was cheaper to get a quality bike that way and easier than saving up the money for a brand new bike. in the end riding is more interesting, so now that i can afford it, i just buy what i need.
It's not necessarily just buying parts. It's the knowledge associated with building and fixing them. That's no different to any other engineering hobby.
And people wonder why NTFs have taken off. They allow you the benefits of the spending money experience, including the difficult and time-consuming procurement; and the ability to lord your knowledge of a technical subject of the others. But without the inconvenience of taking up space in the house or being expected to actually ride the bicycle or take the photos or trim the bonsai.
You could have a goal which is to compete at the highest level that you can and push your abilities to see what you can accomplish, which you might enjoy doing. If you aim for this there's also plenty of scope for losing the deeper goal of just, having fun and enjoying your life.
In this respect I think the gaming and cycling examples can be qualitatively similar.
That's true. I was thinking that hobby goals aren't real goals, because their real purpose is to entertain you, but then realised that all goals are like that at the end of the day.
The whole gamer subculture is really rude and elitist. I love games and I spend a huge portion of my time on them, both professionally and personally, but I hesitate to call myself a gamer because it has so many strange connotations I do not wish to be associated with.
There are lots of games, and lots of gaming communities - Gamer is a blanket term for all of them. The most obnoxious are often the loudest & most visible. There are also lots of competitive communities with young (tweens, teens, early adulthood) participants which is a good recipe for bad behaviour.
What experience do you have with the subculture i.e. via what portal.
> gamer because it has so many strange connotations
With gamergate, and "gamers are dead" anti-gamer PR from gaming/activist media outlets; members of the gaming culture have been associated a culture war. With so much propaganda on both sides it's hard to determine what is real.
The latter part of your comment really emphasizes exactly the whole thing I don't want to partake in.
As for my own experiences: I grew up playing games as did all the people I spent time with in my youth. I've played countless games online, starting somewhere in the late nineties, and joined a number of communities built around those games. I've found that most communities and public servers are quite loud, rude, and unpleasant. I usually have to put in some work to find a circle of like-minded people who just want to enjoy the game in a civilized manner.
The absolutely worst I've come across was probably the Worms 2 online play. Nothing but kids thinking themselves cool by swearing and insulting each other. The best ones were the community some of my friends built in
Dungeon Siege, role playing communities in Jedi Knight Academy, and some of the casual guilds in Elder Scrolls Online.
> whole gamer subculture is really rude and elitist
As with many things in life, you've not found the right people. I know some high level players (perhaps a level or two below the best) in a niche but well-known game community. They're very welcoming and are happy to play against me repeatedly despite the fact they all crushed me without a sweat. That said, I do think that the industry wide move towards skill based match making has made games far less endearing than they were in the past. It used to be that people could find the server that was right for them, be it competitive or casual, and do what they wanted. Now most big games don't give you the option to play against people outside of your skill range and you're constantly facing people about as good as you. To me, that's pretty boring long term.
Don't get me wrong. I know a lot of wonderful people who are a lot of fun to play with. I met many of my best friends, including my wife, through online games.
But there's unfortunately a loud enough unpleasant portion of the gamer community that describing myself as a gamer to people outside of my closest circle of friends and colleagues tends to invoke a picture of gamers screaming insults and rage quitting whenever they lose and insulting and laughing at people when they win.
Aren't a lot of hobbies like this? Personally I just try to enjoy what I enjoy, without worrying too much about the subset of people who might consider me 'too casual' or whatever.
A lot of hobbies have purists, elitists, and hyper-competitive people in them who focus on gatekeeping. But I think for most communities this is something people learn when trying to get into it themselves.
For gaming, it seems to me this to me this is more part of the public perception than for other hobbies. Or perhaps I'm just too far removed from an outside view of it.
I feel like the same gatekeeping is in almost every hobby at some level, but gaming tends to have less social grace built around it -- it's a little more in your face.
Is it? A lot of people identify themselves strongly with their hobbies or vocations. Whether it be in sports, tech, or other entertainment such as movies or music. There's a huge lot of people who largely describe themselves as football fans, movie buffs and music aficionados.
On the other hand I wouldn't say it's something I myself "center" my identiy around. If you ask me who I am my first response is usually that I'm a father of two. But if you ask me what I do, well.. I develop games for a living and I play games for fun. That covers a big part of how I spend my time.
I think it's often hard to cut through the unnecessary stuff when researching a new hobby because the people talking about it the most are the ones that are deeply invested in it. I long for a collection of "good enough" guides to get started in hobbies.
I thought of bonsai as a fun hobby and chic, slightly exotic decor element. When I went to Japan I was dissappointed that bonsai and ornamental horticulture in general is super serious and regarded as a boring, stuffy hobby by anyone under 60. In retrospect it makes total sense that bonsai is not as special there and the casual import version is actually more fun than the real thing. I think a lot of things are like this cross culturally.
I think it ties in with the "Cool Japan" strategy / perception (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cool_Japan); the Japanese tourism industry and the western Japanese fetishists really want to push and believe in a certain aspect of Japan, involving meticulous craftsmanship, ancient traditions, etc. And I respect that.
But the 'real' Japan is a lot less idyllic; from what I've heard, people are overworked, single, depressed, addicted, etc. But that too is probably lacking in nuance, because it's all second / third hand knowledge.
I would say all the messages about meticulous craftsmanship etc are not wrong and that is the difficulty in some sense. When you encounter a foreign culture in its real full scale version its very from the safe toy imaginary version and not friendly to casual hobbyists.
Bonsai annuals are fun, easy, and not much investment to lose of you mess up. By July the garden shops' starter plants are often already started miniaturizing their leaves, you can often pickup a bunch of "damaged" plants for free. Leave them in the nursery pots and keep 'em alive and you can get awesome results.
Peppers, tomatoes, and hemp all work well that way. Tomatoes can make fruits bigger than the plant, if you torture them right.
Cucumbers are lovely as minis but are much harder to keep contained and harder to get to fruit. They grow their fruit too fast and its hard to get enough water into the plant without drowning it.
Tobacco was entertaining to grow in a small pot, i got a 6ft plant that flowered in a 1L pot. it never had great leaves and it scavenged nutrients out of lower leaves to grow higher ones so it was all spindly. Never "miniaturized" the way other plants do. I suspect pumpkins and some other families would behave the same way.
I can appreciate bonsai trees. But I always find that they always put my mind in a similar state to thinking about writing my own novel: something that I want to do when I think about it, but realize that I don't actually want to put in the work for it.
Yes, as the article suggests, a lot of people stay away from bonsai because it smacks of effort, but it can be done simply and easily if you disregard the bonsai love of complexity, age, and perfection
That's where I am! I have a lot of houseplants (on the order of about 100) and now that I own property with outdoor space I've been interested in getting into potted outdoor houseplants. My tiny backyard has a lot of perennials, but what I don't have are many trees or any extra ground space, so I'd love to have some small potted hardy trees, particularly given my love of the real deal (i.e. adult trees in nature).
Ok we will call them penjing like the article suggests, but others will continue to refer to them as bonsai and I am not going to go out of my way to correct them.
Which honestly feels a bit silly to me, because the Chinese penjing community are also obsessed with the details of the craft - may be to a slightly less degree than their Japanese counterpart due to the Japan culture's tendency to formalize things. But I promise you penjing enthusiasts are just as likely as bonsai enthusiasts to object to stick-in-a-pot being called a penjing.
(eg of a penjing site full of guides and discussion about the type of plant, the soil, the pot etc: https://www.pjcn.org/ )
And just like the article says about Japanese and their attitude towards the "not bonsai" - outside of the enthusiast communities, most people don't care, and will enjoy their small-tree-like-plant and call it bonsai/penjing anyway.
So I don't see why one would object to calling a casual mini tree a bonsai but is comfortable calling it penjing. Either both are okay or neither is.
I agree with you. My mom is very into plants but she never calls her pots of mini trees penjing. But I guess there's the language aspect of the word usage as well: 'penjing' (literally pot of scenery) sounds very formal like written language, not very colloquial. It would sound like an advertising word as if from a production video or a market. Whereas the Japanese counterpart is regarded as an established high art/profession (which is common in Japanese society).
What’s a bonsai is the question you’re headed towards. But when people buy a small simply styled tree in a pot, what are they to call it if not a bonsai. It’s a muddle because 99% of what’s sold as a bonsai is bought by people who do not want to become “bonsai” hobbyists
I would assume Japanese people would call bonsai any plant in a recipient that has enough art to be enjoyable to watch. For instance I think moss is accepted, as long as it's artful and well groomed.
Given this is HN I was expecting this to turn into "... and that's why we founded bons.ai, the on-demand bonsai service for the busy person using our unique TaaS technology".
(boringly, bons.ai redirects to some desperately enterprise-looking Microsoft AI thing)
I dunno, I can imagine there would be a market for renting out bonsai trees to either offices (remember offices? Those were the days!) or homes. I mean it'd be a premium service, and you'd have to set up warranties and deposits and the like, but if you can have someone come over once a week or month or however often it needs maintenance (probably less frequently with an automatic watering system), it could be interesting.
Note: This isn't a new concept per se, rental plants are a staple of many offices in the Netherlands. They're usually low maintenance, with someone passing by once a month for watering and other maintenance at the most.
I practice an extremely casual version of the hobby to the point it is not even a hobby.
I did a bonsai course more than 20 years ago. I practiced in the course on my first tree that died weeks later. Then I bought another plant, created the bonsai using what I remembered from the course and I care to it to this day.
It is not a pretty bonsai, most guests don’t even see it as bonsai I think, but it occupies a central place in my living room and I am proud of it.
In a daily basis, I take care of it like any other plant. I trim it like once a year and I wired it only three times in those 20 years. To little dedication to call it a hobby, but it is a part of my life that I care.
This article that talks about the obsession with technique kind of reminds me about when developers talk.
If someone mentions they made a web app, likely I will spend far more time asking them about the programming language, the architecture, the framework, etc than actually about what it does.
Person who sells bonsai trees says bonsai is a fun and easy hobby. And makes a good case. Yes, they made trees in pots sound cool and whimsical. A Don Draper of shrubbery.
"Fun and easy" is almost the exact opposite of my perception of bonsai--when I think of it, I think "I can't even keep mint alive in my backyard. This is a meticulous science and if anyone makes the mistake of letting me touch a bonsai tree, I'm inadvertently going to kill something that's older than my grandparents." The article doesn't quite have me convinced, but it does sound like they're having fun.
There are various plants for bonsai and some of them are super simple. I have had a ficus bonsai for over a year and it has survived all kinds of conditions. Currently it’s sitting on my apartment balcony with no direct sun and strong winds and it seems to be growing strong and healthy. I have done basically nothing but water it. I think I’ll have to re pot it soon but that’s about it.
I've got a brown thumb too, but I've started playing "doctor bonsai" with the seedlings that I uproot while weeding. And to be honest I only 'weed' trees because I don't want big problems in my very small yard. I put them in tapwater, in little cups in my office. One time, I tried to give them plant food and they all died. Should have used the liquid stuff? Oh well. They're just seedlings, I'll have a fresh crop next year. The one I didn't try to feed still has some fine roots, but the cat got its leaves. I figure I should try a drop of liquid food in the spring? Who knows. For now, I change the water every few weeks so it doesn't get manky. I guess all the failure means it isn't 'easy', but I'm sure having fun. Cheap as it gets, too.
Welcome to hydroponics, specifically water culture growing! It’s quite complicated, a whole science itself perhaps, but the idea is simple: grow a plant/plants in a soilless or liquid medium. It’s complicated because plants require certain nutrients in various quantities to be available at their roots to survive, their root system also requires a certain amount of oxygen to be available, and furthermore the whole root environment needs to be within a certain pH range for nutrient uptake to take place. All of this applies no matter the medium one grows plants in, but it’s because of all this that hydroponics is complicated, particularly on a micro scale with a single plant in a cup, where there is little buffering to allow for errors - unlike a medium like soil. But it was experiments like yours that lead to the field of both hydroponics, water culture growing, and aquaponics, and a greater understanding of plant functioning and plant nutrient requirements.
Furthermore, you might find the following four part article to be of interest - there’s plenty of other info easily googled, whether on the background history, or the specifics.
Thanks! I've found other sites for folks doing aqua-bonsai... I'm not taking it too seriously, at this point. It's easier for me than dirt, because I can tell at a glance if my poor plant needs water... oh dear, it does... but the fine roots didn't dry out thanks to capillary force.
Weird thing about bonsai, the goal isn't to maximize... more like, I wanna just fail at killing the thing.
I think I let the other variegated indigenous vegetation overtake it for a little too long. Whatever spiky leafy things we get here are even more aggressive than mint, apparently.
What kind of climate do you live in? I live in Sweden, I have several types of mint in the garden and it's a constant hassle because they overtake and smother absolutely everything else.
Midwest US, so I guess that's some sort of continental temperate? I'm admittedly not the most diligent gardener, I just bought it to cook with and it came with the dirt attached to plant it.
I used to think bonsai was cute but when I learnt it's done by cutting off the young roots of the tree to stunt them and binding the branches with wire, I can't help but feel sad looking at them now.
There's an argument that these trees get better care which I don't doubt but I look at the folded over fins of whales in captivity who are also getting the same "better care" and just wonder if humans should let nature do it's thing without getting in the way.
I mean, if from an ethics/empathy standpoint, we can’t even exert our will over PLANTS, we are going to have trouble surviving as a species.
We have to eat. You can argue that it’s better and more efficient to let other animals be, but you can’t really do the same with plants. What’s left then?
Isn't there a difference between "torturing" (if that's how you see it) plants as a hobby and eating them for food, though?
I eat meat, and plants (and fungi and algae) but I also grow plants and I try to treat them as well as I can. That means giving them what they need to live, and also pruning them when that's more convenient for me or better for them. I don't think bonsai making is actually torture to plants, but I wouldn't inflict them treatments that I feel are detrimental to them (let's say, leaving them to freeze outside when it's too cold, subjecting them to thirst beyond what is healthy for them, depriving them of light).
I think "having a right to exert our will over other beings" doesn't mean you actually should feel free to do whatever you want to them. They are living beings. And if you live with them long enough and have the patience to observe them, some plants are clearly individuals with their own habits and preferences. It's just less immediately obvious because they are slower and more alien than animals.
Also, in the same way you don't treat horses and fish the same way, you could very well consider tomatoes to be dumb plants only good for food and lemon trees or bonsai oaks as "pets".
I mean you can make metaphors between plants and animals all you want, but they break down if you even sort of think about them.
Every monstera and fiddle leaf that is kept indoors is a juvenile plant that will not get the chance to reach sexual maturity.
Under your framework, That’s the equivalent of starving an animal so much that it stunts it’s growth.
I can cut leaves off of a kale plant to eat without killing it. Under your framework, surgically amputating an animals leg and eating that meat would be equivalent.
Plants don’t have consciousness in the way animals do (in fact they are much closer in sensory responsiveness to the bacteria you kill every time you move).
I would seriously ask yourself why you are anthropomorphizing plants if you are making your arguments in good faith. Being able to understand what warrants empathy and what doesn’t is an important life skill.
I don't really want to go down this argument because I know that plants and animals are not comparable.
The comparisons you are making make no sense because plants live in a totally different way from animals: cutting plant leaves is obviously nothing like cutting animal limbs, and plants routinely stay juvenile their whole life, and generally stay partly juvenile in any case. You just can't compare growth between animals and plants.
My examples, freezing outside, depriving them of light or being subject to thirst are actual plant mistreatment IMO because they will die from it. Avoidable death is generally considered a bad thing for living beings.
I don't think one can have empathy with plants at all because they don't have feelings comparable to animals, but suggesting like you do that they simply cannot be mistreated does not look like a good faith argument to me.
Note that the only comparison I made between animals and plants is that we don't have to value all animals the same, and we don't have to value all plants the same either. You didn't refute this, so I don't understand why you're going on about anthropomorphizing plants (especially when I didn't talk about humans at all).
a) Why is "cutting plant leaves is obviously nothing like cutting animal limbs"? Is it because animals can't regrow limbs and plants can? Doesn't that lead you down the road of 'torture is an animal-based concept and you can't torture plants'?
b)'Plants routinely stay juvenile their whole life' precisely because they are deprived light, frozen outside, or lack access to water. Sometimes humans do that, WAY more often it just happens because of where a plant is rooted. And to be clear, bonsai does NONE of those things, the point of bonsai is to keep the plant alive as long as possible!
c) Do you suggest that bacteria can be mistreated? Why is bonsai torture and hand sanitizer is not? Pivoting to fungus, do you realize what we do to yeast in order to make bread/beer? Is that torture? And before you make an exception for food, we do not need beer to survive.
2) >some plants are clearly individuals with their own habits and preferences.
>why you're going on about anthropomorphizing plants (especially when I didn't talk about humans at all).
Maybe you have a very loose definition of 'individual,' but I think you forgot what you wrote.
Maybe the word "individual" doesn't mean in English "a living being that has an individual identity and behaviour that differ from that of its peers". In that case, now you know what I meant. I didn't think it was linked to humans in English.
For the rest, I think you're just ignoring what I said about different species being treated differently and I don't see any reason why caring about some plants means I should also care about all of them and even about bacteria.
Interesting. I have a bonsai Jaboticaba tree. It keeps forming new leaves, so it's still alive. One issue is it gets leaf burn/browning on the outside edges. Soaking with tap water every few days for about a year. No fertilizer added.
My grandmother had cypress and juniper bonsai that were roughly 80 years old.
Ironically thats not a bad idea, you can work on it over a long period of time (making small incremental improvements) like a bonsai tree, without the disadvantage of it keeling over if you don't. Of course you lack the physical touch (I assumed you meant digital 3D models, I guess 3D printing multiple iterations could work too), but you can win em all
