Shrine to the Quitter: Why Posting Your Abandoned Hobbies Is the Most Honest Thing You'll Ever Do Online

Somewhere in America right now, a dusty ukulele is being photographed next to a half-finished resin tray and seventeen unopened watercolor tubes. The person holding the camera is grinning. They're about to upload it to GlumboUploads, and honestly? It's the most freeing thing they've done in years.

Welcome to the Abandoned Hobby Graveyard — not an official section of the site, but very much a spiritual one. It's the loose, beautiful, deeply relatable collection of uploads where people document the creative phases they blew through like a tornado through a craft store, leaving behind nothing but receipts and mild regret. And it has become, quietly and hilariously, one of the most cathartic corners of the entire internet.

The Anatomy of a Dead Hobby

Let's be specific, because specificity is where the magic lives. We're not talking about the half-painted bedroom wall that you'll definitely finish next weekend (sure). We're talking about the committed purchases. The ones that required a trip to a specialty store, a YouTube rabbit hole, and at least one conversation where you told someone, unprompted, that you were "really getting into" something.

The sourdough starter named Gerald who died in March 2021. The leather-working kit that came with its own little hammer. The acrylic pour painting supplies that turned your garage into a Jackson Pollock crime scene before you gave up after attempt number two. The calligraphy set — oh, the calligraphy set — still in its original packaging because you watched one tutorial and realized your hand simply does not have whatever it takes.

These artifacts exist in every American home, jammed into closets and shoved under beds, silently judging their owners. And for a long time, the only socially acceptable response was to pretend they didn't exist, quietly donate them to Goodwill, and never speak of them again.

Then people started uploading them instead. And everything changed.

Why Posting It Feels Like Exhaling

There's a specific kind of emotional weight that comes from carrying around evidence of your own abandoned ambitions. It's not quite shame, not quite grief — it's more like having a bunch of tiny, inanimate witnesses to every time you told yourself you were going to be a different, more creative, more disciplined person.

Posting that stuff publicly, with a caption like "day 1 and also day last" or "this knitting needle has been used exactly once and it shows," does something interesting to the brain. It converts private embarrassment into shared comedy. It takes the thing that felt like a failure and reframes it as a story — one that, it turns out, approximately six million other people are also living.

The comments on these uploads tend to follow a very predictable and very wonderful pattern. First comes recognition: "I have the exact same bread machine still in the box." Then solidarity: "My mandolin hasn't been touched since Thanksgiving 2019." Then, occasionally, genuine encouragement: "Okay but the fact that you tried at all is kind of great."

It's group therapy with worse lighting and better captions.

The Pandemic Hobby Apocalypse Deserves Its Own Wing

Look, we have to talk about 2020. The pandemic hobby era produced what historians will one day call the greatest single proliferation of abandoned creative projects in recorded American history. Suddenly everyone had time, access to Amazon Prime, and a desperate need to feel like they were doing something meaningful with their hands.

Sourdough, obviously. But also: embroidery, woodburning, hydroponics, candle-making, home brewing, resin art, hand lettering, origami, soap carving, and — in what remains a deeply mysterious mass cultural event — a truly staggering number of people who bought looms.

The uploads that came out of this period have a particular flavor. They're not just "I bought a thing and quit." They're "I bought a thing, reorganized my entire kitchen around the thing, texted multiple people about the thing, posted about the thing three times, and then the thing has not been touched since Biden was inaugurated." That's a different energy. That's commitment to the bit of being a person who commits to things, and the community here absolutely respects the hustle.

The Gear-to-Skill Ratio Is a Whole Conversation

One thing that comes up constantly in the upload comments is what we might generously call the Enthusiast Trap: the phenomenon where someone buys every possible piece of equipment for a hobby before actually attempting the hobby even once. This is an extremely American move, and GlumboUploads has documented it in extraordinary detail.

The person who bought a $400 telescope before discovering that looking at space for more than eleven minutes is actually quite cold and boring. The home barista who owns a commercial-grade espresso machine and has made exactly four drinks on it. The cyclist with the full kit — the shoes, the helmet, the aerodynamic shorts that cost more than a car payment — who rode the trail once and found it "longer than expected."

These uploads aren't self-flagellation. They're more like anthropology. Look at what we do! Look at how we are! We are creatures who buy the gear first and ask questions never, and there is something genuinely, achingly human about that.

What the Graveyard Actually Proves

Here's the thing that the Abandoned Hobby Graveyard gets at, even if nobody uploading their sad little bead-weaving kit is thinking about it consciously: trying stuff is good, actually. The fact that you bought the calligraphy set means you had a moment where you thought, I could be someone who makes beautiful things with their hands. The fact that it's still in the packaging doesn't erase that moment. It just means the calligraphy part didn't stick — the curiosity did.

Every dusty guitar is evidence of someone who wanted to make music. Every unused sketchbook is evidence of someone who wanted to make art. The follow-through rate was, fine, not great. But the wanting was real. And posting the evidence of it, laughing about it, letting strangers say "same," turns out to be a pretty decent way to honor the wanting without being crushed by the not-finishing.

GlumboUploads didn't set out to be a monument to human aspiration and its discontents. It set out to be a place where you could post weird stuff without getting judged too hard. But here we are. The Abandoned Hobby Graveyard exists. It is full. It is growing. And every single upload in it is, in its own chaotic way, a tiny love letter to the person you thought you might become.

The ukulele is still out of tune. Post it anyway.