Leaving the hobby?

In the past several years, I've seen a few people announce publicly that they're "leaving the hobby" because they feel they have been wronged or they're sick of x, y, and z behavior.

Usually I stumble across these announcements in cyberspace well after the fact, and therefore I have to do a little forensic work to get answers to my questions as to why these folks really were leaving the hobby.

Three questions:

1. Do you have stories to share about such incidents? If so, please e-mail me or post them in the comments, but NO NAMES please. Any posts mentioning people by name (besides yourself) will be deleted. I don't want this blog to become catty or, worse, libelous. :P

2. In a hobby community that, thanks to the Internet, can be quite close-knit, what does it mean to "leave the hobby"? Does it mean not collecting, not showing, no longer participating in hobby forums, dropping contact with other hobbyists, or what?

3. There have been a couple of "Whatever Happened to [name of famous 1970s-1990s hobbyist]?" posts on listservs and forums. Anyone know of any particularly interesting cases of people who just faded away, and why they chose to do so?

Addiction?

Again and again, I see model horse people refer to the hobby as an addiction. And as my last post implies, people in the hobby do seem to spend beyond their means, which might be one sign of addiction.

As addictions go, is it a harmless one? Are we hurting ourselves?

Or is our brand of collecting not a true addiction (in the sense that it's aberrant), but rather just another symptom of the buy-buy-buy, spend-spend-spend culture in which we live?

Thoughts?