What is your "inexpensive" hobby that turned out to be expensive/ you gradually invested lots of money into?
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.
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I’m not sure it can get worse than bird watching. Completely free to start. Then you are like “man I wish I could see that bird over there” so you buy some binoculars. Then you think “dang this bird is moving too fast I still can’t identify it, maybe I should try photographing it”. Two months later you’ve spent 10k because bird photography is apparently the most intense kind of photography. Turns out photographing very tiny things that move very fast from very far away is very difficult and the lenses you need start at thousands of dollars and go up to tens of thousands of dollars. That isn’t including the camera body, which you probably want very fast autofocus on, along with bird eye tracking, which hardly comes on any cameras at all.
Yeah…
That sounds like bird photography is the problem. Bird watching is still pretty cheap. Just enjoy the experience of watching birds in the moment; you don't have to capture it for later.
Oh sorry I guess I didn’t really expand on that. Part of why I like bird watching is that all (almost all) of the apps to identify birds are free. But then you have to actually be able to input parameters and stuff. So then you need to be able to pick out small details in a split second at a very long range. Even then, sometimes it’s not possible without help from others. So bird photography helps with the identification (and scientific study) of the birds.
But yeah. Bird photography is the expensive part.