The Admin-to-Payoff Ratio
Somewhere around the third month of keeping a sourdough starter, I'd guess the feeding schedule stops being a ritual and starts being a debt. Discard a portion, feed it, wait, bake eventually, maybe. The bread was never the hard part. The daily accounting was.
Nobody quits a hobby because the output got worse. The loaf tastes the same in month three as it did in month one. What changes is everything standing between you and the loaf: the flour you have to keep stocked, the jar you have to clean, the log you keep meaning to update so you can track hydration ratios you'll never actually look at again. That overhead has a cost, and the cost is separate from whatever you feel about bread.
Call it the admin-to-payoff ratio. Every hobby has two curves running at the same time. One is the payoff: how good it feels to actually do the thing, sit down and play, bake, shoot, ride, build. The other is the admin: scheduling, upkeep, cataloging, acquiring and maintaining gear, all the work that makes the thing possible without being the thing. Early on, admin is low and payoff is novel and huge, so the ratio barely registers. Over time the payoff flattens, because repetition always flattens payoff eventually, that's not a flaw, that's just what doing something enough times does to the dopamine curve. Meanwhile the admin usually climbs. More gear to store and maintain. More logs to keep current so the ones already filled out don't become orphaned. More scheduling complexity as a once-flexible hobby accumulates obligations, a league night, a subscription box, a community you now feel responsible to.
The ratio crosses somewhere in there. And it crosses quietly, because nothing dramatic happens on the day it crosses. You don't have a bad session. You just have a Tuesday where feeding the starter feels like a chore for the first time, and you do it anyway, and you do it anyway for another six weeks, and then one week you don't, and the starter dies, and when someone asks what happened you say you lost interest.
You didn't. You crossed a line weeks before the interest itself had time to fade, and the fading you're describing after the fact is really just the resentment backfilling as an explanation, because "I got bored of bread" is a tidier story than "the discard jar made me feel like I had a part-time job with no manager and no pay."
This matters because the two diagnoses point you at completely different fixes. If you believe you got bored, the fix is finding a new hobby, something fresher, and you go buy a different set of gear and start a different log and the whole cycle has a head start on repeating, because the actual mechanism, admin creeping past payoff, is baked into basically every sustained hobby and you haven't touched it. If you believe the ratio flipped, the fix is auditing the admin: which of these tasks is load-bearing and which is cargo. Does the starter actually need daily feeding at your baking frequency, or is that advice written for people baking twice a week when you bake twice a month? Does the log need updating every session, or would once a month capture everything you'd ever actually reference? A surprising amount of hobby admin is inherited ritual rather than requirement, carried over from someone else's cadence, never questioned because questioning it feels like cutting corners on a thing you supposedly love.
The honest test is to imagine the payoff staying exactly where it is forever, no further novelty, same ceiling of good feeling every time, and ask whether the current admin load is still worth paying for that. If the answer is no, you're not falling out of love with the subject. You're correctly pricing a bad deal, probably months later than you should have, because nobody ever told you the ratio was the thing to watch.
Interest is usually fine. It's the invoice that got too long to read.