Practice, Worldhood, and the Moral Weight of Unpainted Plastic

Against the “Pile of Shame”

Introduction: A Joke with Teeth

A term we hear frequently within our hobby circles is talk of “the pile of shame.” It begins with a gentle confession around the checkout, a photo of stacked boxes posted to social media. The sense that we are buying faster than we are finishing. Those who know, know.

But the phrase does more than just describe the backlog. It tells the hobbyist that their unbuilt kits “mean” something before they have been touched. It is observing that gap between desire to start and the completion, but it also says that the gap is failure.

For most of us hobby time is not a job. It is a form of leisure that practices attention, patience, craft, and the slow satisfaction of finishing. That label, “shame”, adds a texture to our hobby time that feels like accounting. The backlog is a form of debt, unpaid or un-attoned sin of ignoring that turns the unopened box into an accusation, not the freeform possibility that it was purchased for.

We are not seeking justification for the amount of money spent building a collection of unbuilt kits. Not every purchase is artistically justified. We are just seeking the meaning between a backlog and the relationship we have with it. A backlog can be integrated into practice, feeding and sustaining our desire to make with the forward motion to work through it; or it can become inert, a monument to stalled intentions.

The phrase “pile of shame” merges these two realities into a single category, and in doing so misdescribes the motion of a lived craft.

In order to find a more precise description we look at both Aristotle and Heidegger, and see if we can find a more descriptive term when we are working with our acquired kits, rather than letting them become stale.

The Hobby as Habituation

We become what we repeatedly do.

Aristotle’s claim about moral formation is practical. Virtue is not bestowed, and not a matter of inner feeling, it is cultivated through habituation. By acting again and again, until the action becomes a characteristic of who we are.

“So virtues arise in us neither by nature nor contrary to nature, but nature gives us the capacity to acquire them, and completion comes through habituation.”

In Nicomachean Ethics Book II^[1] He uses analogies that map cleanly onto any craft: builders become builders by building; musicians become musicians by playing; we become just by doing just acts.

Our hobbies are a stream of outcomes, and the more we repeat it the more it becomes a discipline. Painting miniatures trains patience. Assembly trains care. Basing trains composition. Even “failure” trains perception, teaching us what we now see that we didn’t see before.

With this thought, the backlog is not an automated failure. It is a queue of more times we can practice. A set of future occasions for attention and growth.

But, habituation requires doing. A virtue is not formed by owning the tools. Buying is not finishing. Acquisition does not substitute for practice any more than buying a violin substitutes for playing it. If the backlog becomes a pile of untouched labour, then it loses its habituation, and becomes the refusal of our craft’s application.

Aristotle does not rescue us from responsibility, but he shows us where the responsibility sits. If the backlog is no longer part of our hobby cycle, if it has gathered dust, if we have stopped returning to the hobby bench, then it becomes a stalled archive, a pile that could be classed as “shameful”.

But if we refer to our “pile of shame” while we are returning to our hobby, engaging with our craft, and working through the backlog (even if it takes a while), we have classified our future hobby time as a negative. Our hobby is justified by the continuity of practice, not by the purity of our purchases. The backlog is ethically neutral until it becomes a substitute for habituation.

When Tools Become Accusations

In Being and Time^[2] Heidegger argues that our main way of encountering things is not through observation but practical involvement. We live in a world of equipment, our tools are used “for” something in particular: a brush is for painting, the clippers are for trimming, a knife is for scraping mould lines. When we are in an activity, the tool is not something that we contemplate; it is an extension of the task. A brush absorbed into the task of painting, not separate from it. Heidegger names this mode readiness-to-hand.

But readiness-to-hand is delicate. If a tool breaks, goes missing, or becomes an obstruction from completing the task, it becomes unavailable, something that is no longer part of the task. This is present-at-hand, an object working against us. Heidegger describes how breakdowns in equipmental flow make the equipment-world visible in a different way. What was part of the flow, fails, and becomes conspicuous, obstinate, or obtrusive.

A backlog is a stack of interrupted equipment, sitting on the edge, threatening to become pure objecthood. If the hobby remains alive, then the pile belongs in the world of readiness-to-hand: the boxes are “for” future builds, “for” future learning, “for” future sessions at the bench. They are part of the practice-world even if they are not yet active within it.

But if our practice breaks, months pass, and the boxes gather dust, they are not longer tools-in-waiting, they become inventory. And inventory is intention without action. The pile is a visible reminder of unfinished progress. Our collection is now present-at-hand in a way that Heidegger suggests: no longer neutral, but a thing revealed through breakdown.

This explains how the term “pile of shame” feels like an adept naming convention. It is the experience of our boxes becoming an accusatory object. The shame being emergent as our relationship with practice drifts, and the kits become “stuff”. Our relationship to these tools becoming a mode of being-with-things.

There is no excuse here for our endless acquisition, just the way in which we find where the moral weight appears. Shame is not the default condition of our backlog. Shame is what our backlog becomes when it is no longer involved in the world we engage in.

Synthesis: From Shame to Expectation

In combination of Aristotle and Heidegger, we can describe the backlog without pretending it is always healthy and without shaming it as always unhealthy.

• Aristotle says: the hobby matters because practice forms character. The ethical centre is the continuity of doing.
• Heidegger says: the backlog feels moral when the equipment-world breaks and the kits become mere objects standing over against us.

So maybe the backlog is a “pile of expectation” when it remains connected to habituation, when it is part of something we return to. It becomes a “pile of shame” when the equipment-world has collapsed into inventory, the pile serving as an inert witness to a stalled practice.

This reframing refuses to moralise the backlog as a fixed marker and instead moralises the relationship. The guilt is relocated from ownership to abandonment; from collecting to disengagement.

There is also some kind of dignity in recognising that a hobby has phases. People change. Skills evolve. Tastes sharpen. A completed model becomes a snapshot of who we were when we painted it, and that is not a reason to despise it; it is a reason to keep making. In that sense, leaving projects behind is not necessarily failure, sometimes it is the natural signs of growth.

A Contemporary Pressure: Output Without Touch

One thing that marks our current era is that output has been cheapened. We can generate images, music and text at a scale: artefacts where the appearance of art is completed with minimal friction. This does not devalue the output, but introduces a new desire to make art that bears the marks of the maker, something slow enough to savour.

Hobbies like miniature painting satisfy the desire of slow engagement. They are tactile, steady, involved and non-automated. These hobbies preserve friction, resist speed, and insist on us spending time. The hobby bench is a small sanctuary of attention and focus.

While not a magic excuse for our spending, it does allow us to see what this hobby retains, entertainment, yes, but it leaves behind something spent with time. Brushstrokes, mistakes, and choices. When we use negative words, like shame, to refer to a positive practice we can harm the relationship to spending time in a positive way. A better framing is one that keep our hobby reachable - our pile is inviting, not an indictment.

Conclusion: A Modest Ethical Proposal

The backlog is not the problem. The breaking of our practice is.

If we look toward Aristotle, the ethical measure is habituation: whether the hobby remains a living discipline that forms attention and craft. If we lean into Heidegger, the phenomenological measure is mode of encounter: whether the kits remain equipment-in-waiting or have become accusatory inventory.

So the proposal is simple and strict at once:

• Call it a “pile of expectation” when it is integrated into practice, when it still belongs to the world of readiness-to-hand, when it represents future repetitions of craft.
• Use “shame” only when the pile has become the substitute for practice, when acquisition replaces making and the equipment-world has collapsed into present-at-hand clutter.

With this framing it allows us to speak accurately about what is happening in our hobby-lives. The tension between intent and action, between collecting and craft, between the pull forward and the slow work of finishing.

Language matters because it shapes whether we return to the bench or hide from it. Being aware of how we approach our hobby time influences what we call our pile our attended or unattended boxes. The name we have for our pile is the relationship we have with our practice, is it an invitation or an accusation?