Applause addiction is sneaky. One day you realize you only practice guitar when there’s a phone recording.

Being watched is a genuine reward, and rewards reshape behaviour whether or not you approve of the change. It rarely announces itself as a shift in motive. It just gradually makes unrecorded effort feel pointless, until the private version of something you love quietly stops happening. You miss it because each individual recording seemed reasonable at the time.

Spend one session this week with the phone in another room. See whether the thing still holds your interest with nobody watching. That answer is worth having either way, and it arrives quickly.