I've been getting back into making music so I wanted to spend it on something fun related to that. And this triggered a surprisingly intense amount of anxiety where I found it really hard to decide what to get. After a lot of soul searching, the understanding I reached was:
There are two flavors of happiness I'll call "joy" and "satisfaction". Joy is stuff where the act itself is intrinsically pleasurable. Taking a warm bath, eating a good dessert, a conversation with close friends. Pleasures to the senses that require no effort on your part. Satisfaction is stuff where having done the act feels good. Writing a short story. Cleaning the garage. You only get out of it what you put into it. If you've heard of "type 1 fun" and "type 2 fun", it's that same distinction. In practice, most hobbies blend the two.
There's a sort of third in-between category for activities whose joy/satisfaction ratio is skill dependent. Sitting down at a piano when you don't how to play well is almost pure satisfaction. It's uncomfortable and repetitive. It doesn't sound great. Your fingers hurt. But you feel good about making progress practicing the skill. Sitting down to play piano when you have mastered it is very enjoyable. You get to perform and it feels good seeing your body create the delightful sounds you hear in your head.
My experience is that the hobbies where people acquire the stuff but then don't use it are the ones that weight more towards satisfaction than joy, and in especially the ones that are skill-dependent. YouTube makes the latter particularly failure prone because there are infinite videos of people who have mastered skills that make the hobby look like pure joy.
(For me, the realization was that since I wanted to maximize joy, I should get gear that built on my existing music skills instead of requiring me to learn more to get fun out of it. I got a little MIDI keyboard and a looper pedal since I already know how to make music on a computer and play a little guitar and those make that existing skill more rewarding.)
