Funny, I just told this story on a forum elsewhere and this totally reminds me of it:

As an activitst youth in the 1990s, I was in our what was, in retrospect, very silly Bloomington Peace and Justice Center and someone I knew was eating granola out of a bag and offered me some. I tried it and it tasted like soap, so I spat it out.

I told him that and he said, “I found it in a dumpster, so I washed it before I ate it.”

Bear in mind that this wasn’t a guy that had any reason to be eating out of dumpsters. He was either a college student or a college dropout, probably the latter. This was a “I’m not participating in society, man!” sort of thing.

I think I understand what they’re saying. Replace the “belly drumroll” thing with your favorite hobby; and “status-quo” with “normies”.

The first message is pretty straightforward. The consumer wants the best but has an ungodly number of options to pick from.

The second message builds on the first, establishing that this character (lets call him Bob) is a “normie”. Bob thinks OP is a weirdo because they find something mundane, like belly drumming, to be a fun hobby. OP tries to convince Bob that it isn’t the belly drumming that OP enjoys, it’s the hobby that OP enjoys. It’s the people around it, the culture that surrounds it, and so on. This concerns Bob because OP has just admitted that they aren’t really into belly drumming, it’s everything around belly drumming that they enjoy. Bob is even more concerned about OP when OP tries to share the hobby with him. Bob then gets confused when OP ditches Bob and finds a group of friends who appreciate their enjoyment of belly drumming.

The third message then complains that, at some point, belly drumming might become a fad, at which point people who are only into belly drumming as a fad, become the main voice in the hobby; destroying whatever culture the hobby had built up.

I think there’s another message missing somewhere in there that OP either meant to write but forgot, or they went full ADHD and just didn’t properly connect their thoughts (it’s okay, it happens a lot to me, that’s probably why I feel like I can understand this lol). I’m guessing this is closer to what OP was trying to say:

People who enjoy the status quo, aka “normies” (actually lets call them Bob again), tend to look at a particular thing and, if they desire it, want to jump to the best. However, when Bob approaches an enthusiast or hobbyist for advice, they get many conflicting answers (because it often comes down to personal taste regarding “the best” of a thing). When Bob probes further, they may find that many of the enthusiasts don’t actually give a shit about the thing itself, but instead they enjoy the act of finding “the best” thing.

One example that comes to mind is the running gag that hardcore audiophiles don’t actually listen to music, they listen to their hardware. They spend hours and hours fine-tuning their setups using special audio tracks for calibrating your speakers, room, and so on; only to listen to a song or two to confirm their choice. They then return to tweaking their setup, spending more time placing crystals, buying outrageously expensive cables, and so on. These are people who enjoy the hobby itself more than the actual subject matter, and that’s okay. As long as they know that the crystals and cables are placebos at best, then that’s okay. Maybe they just want to support their favorite audiophile blogger, or think the cables or crystals are very pretty but feel silly for spending $200 on a 3ft cable; so they come up with a story about how it makes the sound better. As long as they’re aware that the cables probably aren’t doing anything special, that’s okay.

(Edit: I can say from experience that when you get into a hobby, you tend to be more willing to spend more money on something than necessary if it means you’re helping to support another enthusiast, group of enthusiasts, or small hobby company that you like. I’m guilty of doing this myself and I’m sure many of the people here are guilty of it too if they’re honest about it.)

However, people like Bob get confused by this. Why would someone spend thousands of dollars on something they don’t care about? Bob doesn’t understand that the rituals are what makes it fun for this individual (lets call them Joe), not the objects themselves, and he thinks this is strange. So Bob makes fun of Joe for spending thousands of dollars on something they supposedly don’t even like. Joe tries to introduce Bob to the hobby so that Bob might understand why Joe finds it fun, but Bob, not wanting to spend the time to commit, just gets even more confused.

“This is boring”, says Bob, “I want to listen to music, not frequency sweeps playing through standalone phono preamps to find the one with the most accurate RIAA curve.”

Joe gets tired of Bob mocking his hobby, ditches Bob and finds a group of friends who can appreciate Joe’s hobby, even if they don’t actually enjoy it themselves. This makes Bob very upset.

However, this isn’t the end of OP’s saga. OP then goes on to talk about how, at some point, Joe’s hobby becomes a fad. Sarah, armed with Beats by Dr. Dre, believes that this is what being an audiophile is. She thinks Beats are the best-of-the-best and that anything more expensive is a scam. She thinks buying whatever is marketed as “the latest and greatest” is truly, the latest and greatest. She believes that this is what audiophiles do. They buy $200~$300 headphones and listen to their favorite music all day.

As such, she gets confused when she runs into a “true” audiophile like Joe. She’s more likely to talk over Joe and “fadsplain”(?) the hobby to others because “audiophiles don’t listen to frequency sweeps, that’s what weirdos do”. Furthermore, she’s likely to mock Joe for being “behind the times” once the tide goes out. As such, Joe’s hobby has been ruined.

I think there’s also an implied message that consumers tend to trigger fads if enough of them are looking for “the best” of a thing, but it’s vague enough that I’m not confident about that.

Edit: missed a bit; I think the last message is also trying to reference the first message with the “drum was always attached to their belly” thing and is saying that the hobby was always there, but the fad was started because Bob wanted an easy answer to his question and the market replied. Bob is happy with the market’s answer, but hobbyists aren’t because it redefined the hobby.

I dunno if I 100% agree with the message, but I probably agree with about 90% of it and can sympathize with OP.

Edit: accidently swapped Bob and Joe at the end, should be fixed now.

Remember, Mastodon had its own Eternal September, and not all of the refugees from Twitter were the sane ones.