Do people not have hobbies anymore?

Hey CM30, I feel you are using too much internet.

I started writing tweets with Ruby tips and engaging with people for sometime and I've noticed most people tend to find a way to monetize their activity. I only do it for the pleasure of learning with the community. I don't care about writing ebooks or making people pay for things they don't need.

But I can definitely conclude that on the internet, most people are looking to make big bucks. But have you tried going climbing or doing outdoor activities? There is always plenty of amateurs that never dream of becoming a professional climber or anything like that.

Also depends on where you live, but I live in Europe and here you see people having hobbies and doing random stuff everywhere you go, people just drinking a coffee and staring at the sky.

It could be that this is what you need. Disconnect.

The modern classic "Rock Stardom for Dumbshits" [0] encapsulates this amateur achievement anxiety well. The target audience is musicians but I feel the aphorism has general applicability:

Level One: you do it for love, you do it for fun, you do it for friends, family and community. No expectations of making it big. Maybe you get invited to perform somewhere because of your skill and love of the craft. Maybe some lucrative opportunity emerges, but this is not the goal, merely a side effect.

Level Three: The big time. Private jets, mansions, groupies, free drugs, widespread recognition, adulation, and infamy.

Level Two: the vast purgatory between Level One and Level Three. The grind of trying to "make it." Self-promotion in a saturated or disinterested market; sleeping in the tour van playing to empty rooms on a Tuesday night; the endless parade of bookers, agents and promoters all promising one thing or another and disappearing when dry reality evaporates the wet dream. Sisyphean strivers, performing the same futile acts week after week, month after month; Tantalean hustlers dangling one ephemeral opportunity after another before hapless hungry mouths.

If you cannot jump directly from Level One to Level Three, Stay at Level One.

[0] https://www.sfweekly.com/music/the-phantom-surfers-pen-rock-...

It has a lot to do with not understanding the other person's motivations. If a person's hobby doesn't interest you, but you can see the lucrative value of said hobby, one might be compelled to suggest making said hobby a career.

I think this is a prevalent phenomenon because most people don't actually have hobbies if you disqualify food and entertainment. Some of them will have a passing interesting in something, but unless they spend some money on it, that can hardly be called a hobby. People who have actual hobbies probably understand why another person doesn't want to make a career out of their hobby, but those who have no hobbies likely don't get it and see the hobby as the seed for some kind of dream job.

The way society views hobbies has gotten worse due to things like hustle culture, the artificial celebritydom of social media, and the devaluement of being hands-on with things that comes with living in a highly industrialized society.

It is hard to hobby on the internet.

Have you ever tried to Kayak on the internet? You have to buy a camera and be entertaining in your videos. In general no one does that unless they are getting paid. So you either Kayak, and don't plaster it all over the internet or you try to get paid for it. Same goes for pretty much every other hobby, doing it is fun, doing it "on the internet" is a job.

I wouldn't even blame the internet for that, doing something in a way that is interesting enough to be shared is hard work.

I believe that yes, people do have hobbies. The problem arises when they show those hobbies to someone else. That's when the pressure to turn a hobby in to a hustle begins.

And making money off something you love is not, by itself, a bad thing. The issue is that making money off a hobby you love will often kill that love, because the hustle requires a lot of extra work that is related to making money, not the hobby.

Just ask almost any self-employed contractor how much time goes into tasks that aren't billable (i.e. the hobby).

Anecdote: I do.

Background: I work full-time as a computer programmer to support myself, my wife, and three children.

Hobbies…

I collect and digitally archive MCA DiscoVision laserdiscs. I currently possess one of the three largest collections in the world.

In addition to this I digitally archive anything (books, brochures, and other paperwork) related to the early development of the Laserdisc format from MCA DiscoVision, Philips, et al.

I am also involved in film and video digital restoration projects, but not as much nowadays as I once was. I started an online community dedicated to 35 & 16mm film restoration back in 2015 which is, thankfully, still alive & kicking despite me having passed the torch several years back.

I've considered creating a YouTube channel to help fund things, but my interests are too niche to turn a profit.

You are on HN, managed by Y Combinator, a startup incubator. If that's your reference, you will have a biased view since building companies and "going pro" is literally the reason why this community exists.

Not only that but programming is a highly marketable skill, it is relatively easy to turn that hobby into a well paid job so of course people will discuss that.

> Has the financial situation forced everyone into always looking for a side hustle or way to 'escape the rat race'?

Inflation has risen and minimum wage hasn't kept up with it. Unions are dead in the US. Boomers got their college education paid by the GI bill, Millennials got their college education paid by excruciatingly huge loans that are impossible to get out from under even by bankruptcy. Some of those have been forgiven by the federal government, with the utmost reluctance. Keeping up with the bills is not easy.

You can afford to have a hobby if you're making enough money to not worry about paying your bills. If you're constantly on the verge of going broke then yes, every single thing you do ends up being examined for its money-making possibilities.

And then when you do, you have to deal with the fact that the social-media giants that are where you have to go to tell people about whatever hobby you're trying to turn into a side hustle are immensely reluctant to let anyone divert eyeballs off their sites; they'll actively hide posts with words like "patreon" or "commissions", or links to your own site where you can get people to look at your stuff and consider giving you money. Oh yes and those social sites are of course also highly optimized for addiction, so your own scarce free time is colonized by mindlessly scrolling FacebookTwitterTiktokInstagramEtc and not really having a good time but being too amused on a moment-to-moment basis to get up and do something that's actually fun.

tl;dr: Yes.

I think this is very true. I have a sense that you are right, though I'm not sure if anyone is doing high quality studies on the topic.

One reason I think is due to declining economic stability. It's hard to have the mental space for hobbies when the basics of healthcare or shelter are out of reach for so many people. And even if you are doing well, there's the constant sense that one slip-up could have you fall off the middle class pedestal, never to recover.

I think an equally important reason is that pervasiveness of the attention capturing tech companies. Some of the world's largest companies build their empires around capturing every last second of free attention. The smartest people in the world are measuring and experimenting to make sure their product is as addictive and time consuming as possible. There's even an advertising company trying to invent self driving car robots so that they can colonize the last bits of our day not spent staring at a screen.

Put these two things together and it doesn't leave much room for stamp collecting for the typical person. My mom collected stamps and coins, which seems positively quaint now.

>> It feels like every time someone gets into a new field now, there's always the expectation they'll 'go pro' or turn it into a day job. Every open source project or website gets treated as the potential basis for a company, every creative seems to think they'll become a full time artist or creator, every writer wants a book deal or mailing list or whatever...

This sounds like "Availability bias" to me. You're judging this phenomenon based on what you see, and what you see is likely to be the loudest people who are trying to get attention, and succeed to some extent. You aren't seeing the person who does hobbies and tells no one (does it just for themselves) and hence you're assuming they aren't there.

Lots of people write blogs because they enjoy writing. They dont pitch it or try to become influencers or try to gain followers. Similarly I take amazing photos that rarely go beyond my phone. The photos are for me. I know someone that wrote seven books, non published!

I post photos to IG but i dont stuff it with hashtags -- because i really dont care if I get a hundred likes.

I've been playing Pokemon recently with GBA and now DS emulators on my android phone. I knew about emulators before but never connected that I didn't need to be on the waiting list for Analog Pocket to get one. :)

I cook dinner for 1-2 hours 3 times a week. I take long drives on the weekend. And sometimes I record music. I was collecting new kinds of plants for a while but my cats keep destroying them.

Just because there are people shouting about side gigs and "hustling" (oh, how I dislike that word at this point), doesn't mean that's actually what everyone's doing.

Just do what you want to. :)

I kind of think it depends what stage of life you're in and what your friends and colleagues are talking about. At least that's what it has felt like for me. When I lived in San Francisco, all anyone talked about was their side project and how rich they were going to get in the next 6 months. Now I live in Monterey. I play with the dog everyday, she has a whole group of friends, when they get together their humans don't talk about their side software projects. On the weekends we go hiking. I've also picked up long distance precision shooting as a hobby, lots of arithmetic and geometry to keep my mind interested. It is not very likely that either of my hobbies will ever be a gig, and I really like it this way.

Make your hobbies what you want them to be.

Sure. I hunt, kayak, garden, cook, and home brew. The last thing I want to do as a hobby is "program." That isn't to say that I don't enjoy writing software but if i'm sitting in front of an IDE it is either for work, on some side-project I think I might be able to monetize, or to pick up new skills to do one of the other two better.

The average person wants to turn their hobby into a day job because the average person's day job sucks (the sucking is typically why someone else pays someone to do it).

Figuring out how to make money from something is also an interesting problem. It also is an excuse to learn more about people who do make money from it. For example, wanting to make money from writing is an excuse to watch Stephan King talk about writing on Youtube...

...and if you watch Stephen King talk about writing, you'll learn that Steven King writes every day as if writing is normal and that provides an excuse to treat the act of writing as normal, and that can reduce the self-inflicted inhibitions to writing.

tell you how much money you should be making from it, and encourage you to monetise it

This is an ordinary way of paying a complement among people who don't have an informed opinion about the activity.

For example, "You should make an app and sell it in the app store," often completely ignores the logistics of app development and the expected economic rewards of an app once it is in the app store.

The uniformed opinion is also usually the basis for "I should make money from this." I mean Steve King still writes stuff with an eye toward what will sell, that's why Stevorini has an editor, an agent, a publicist, and a publisher.

And lawyers to negotiate contracts for book deals.

Good luck.

> Currently working on a site to revolutionise gaming journalism, though it needs a lot more features and development before it can be posted here on Hacker News.

I have a feeling that this post is somewhat personal? Maybe your social circle, either online or offline is doing this?

It's also not very new. At my previous job, many people had side gigs. And people have done this for a very long time. In the Netherlands we even have a word for it, 'beunhaas', which is a person that does a job they have no formal education for. Like the school teacher who lays flooring on the weekend.

These days, however, there are many things that probably used to be considered hobbies, that can now earn you a living wage. You don't have to be a PGA pro anymore to earn money playing golf, you can just make video's and post them on the internet.

And then there's all the stories about hobby projects that turned into businesses that are all over the internet. So in stead of laying flooring or fixing roofs on the weekend to earn some extra cash, people try to do so with their hobbies.

Personally, I'd love to earn some money with 3D printing or flying drones. It just seems that the market is saturated with everyone wanting to do so.

I think there are a few things going on.

One is that the Internet makes showing off what you do so easy, and adding ads is just a small addition to a website, blog or YouTube channel so monetization is fairly straightforward.

Another Internet related phenomenon is that the availability of training, information and equipment online makes it easier to produce 'professional' quality work than in the past. I homebrew beer as a hobby and fellow hobbyists can make niche brews with obscure ingredients in stainless steel fermenters, with temperature control and even low oxygen processes. A few years ago this would have been very difficult. I think the situation is replicated in other hobbies.

So standards of 'work' achievable in hobbies are higher, partly through information availability. Sharing and monetising your work is easier.

If you're looking to change career then turning a hobby into a job sounds like a great idea. Otherwise it just seems like a way to ruin the pastime.

There's hundreds of thousands of people that stream on Twitch. Most of them don't think they'll be the next great thing, but they also might not promote themselves because it's just a hobby.

So I'd argue that, most likely, you don't see the hobby work because if it's a hobby you won't dedicate several hours to promoting it.

I had a hobby of hacking around in Hadoop to download SEC data and make visualizations showing the relationship of the language used in their filings to their Morningstar ratings. For example: The lowest 10% of rated companies referenced bankruptcy a lot. The 11-40% range or so (which basically means they did NOT performed well, but they were not the worst) actively avoided avoided saying the words more than any other group.. and bankruptcy curved back up as an more commonly used word in the top 70-100%, where companies did outstanding.

This was a complete hack job (in my opinion) improperly using Hadoop's mechanics because it was an easy hook to distribute jobs. This was entirely for fun, and I even had nodes running on old laptops because I had them sitting around.

Sure, I had thoughts if it had amazing revelations I might redo it properly, but I didn't advertise it or try to sell it. I had a friend at first with this project, but he eventually got a job at a mega company that worked him 60 hours a week and he didn't have time for the fun project anymore... And I eventually decided I needed a partner with those skills, but didn't know where to find one, and again, didn't want to go advertising my hobby and looking for someone.

I also know several people at my workplace that have hobbies in with IoT'ing their house with custom arduinos and Pi's, and hooking them into custom databases and dashboards... Though my workplace has a (fairly) strict 40-hour/week limit, and our commutes are generally <15 minutes, so we have more free time then, for instance, when I worked for a private company in Northern Virginia, which worked 45-50 hours/week, and had another 10-15 hours of commute time/week

A lack of safety net and hustle culture means people are busy leetcoding than tinkering or pursuing hobbies. Its hard to pursue hobbies when one can barely afford to buy a house while my buddy leetcoded to a 300k job and bought a house next to my favorite brewery. Also I am spending more time watching youtube and tiktok videos of my hobbies than actively pursuing them.

“So is there a reason for that? ”

If you work 60-80 hours a week, your job is your hobby. Pretty simple unfortunately.

Sure people have hobbies, you just happen to be listening to the wrong people ;)

I personally like to play with lua mods for surviving mars, garden, hike, woodworking, I don't know if reading is a hobby, let's say pastime.

I have more hobbies than work interests.

White water kayaking, surf, rock climbing, hiking, road and mountain biking, travelling, playing guitar, bass, piano and singing. Playing chess, lots of random stuff with my kids. None of them I take remotely seriously.

If I back off a bit at work I might even enjoy programming again in my spare time!

It might be your social cycles, or communities you are most attached to online.

People around me read, write, go to cinema and watch movies with commentary, paint, play sports, build legos and doing all kind of interesting things.

I personally draw and paint, am learning piano, practice photography, read, write, take various classes as a hobby and probably something else that does not appear as something special. Zero interest of changing career into any of those things, as I enjoy my long, more than 20 years, career in software, and do not see any reasons to switch fields.

When I was growing up it was called being well-rounded person. My observation about some folks around who are younger than me is that there are a lot of them who are a bit more shallow and not really interested in going broad and explore things around, I can relate to it thought, as it is really hard to be dedicated in this ocean of information we have now.

On the other hand I know non-trivial number of 20-25 year olds who traveled more than me, or have more hobbies or do more than one thing well and are dedicated to learning and self-development. Although, most of them are from privileged families, by at least the fact of being California based, or in extreme cases having parents that are doing really well.

> It feels like every time someone gets into a new field now, there's always the expectation they'll 'go pro' or turn it into a day job.

Where are you seeing this?

> So is there a reason for that?

Selection bias? People who aren't doing that won't be visible to you, so...

I have several hobbies that no one will ever see, because I'm not interested in sharing them. By your "analysis", that means I have no hobbies.

I was blessed with watching my father try to turn his photography hobby into a profession. It flopped. Turns out you make a living as a photographer by shooting basically the same wedding every weekend during the summer. Not by selling the photos that you actually enjoy taking.

He hasn’t taken a picture in nearly 20 years and IIRC finally sold his equipment around the start of the pandemic. The saga was hard to watch but at least I know with 100% certainty that my hobbies aren’t money makers and never will be.

Does “everything seems to need a financial reason to exist now?” - no, it was like that 20 years ago too. Unless “now” refers to this millennium.

My advice, CM30, is to get a little swagger in your step. Do your hobby, whatever it is, because you like it. And if you feel pressure from anyone to monetize it, cut that pressure out. Most likely, this just means unfollowing any “financial gurus” on social media or even cancelling your accounts all together. I actually like Instagram for hobby stuff but you’ve got to be judicious about how your train their algorithm.

I think it’s the fallacy of being in the tech industry. Before I got into “tech” aka a software engineer job I thought how cool that people work together on OS projects and build interesting tools and hack some random device to run doom.

Then I got a job and found that all these cool OS projects were used for commercial purposes or re-engineered to work for the company. Over time this kind of mindset of making everything “work” (like, for money) took over and it made me cynical.

Now I’m personally focusing on the hobby aspect and making cool apps and backends for apps that I think would be great for the world. I’m a community minded person and I really love seeing people get along and thrive, so how can I build something to motivate that part of living in a society? I’m not sure it will go anywhere but I’m going to keep learning all the things to make what I find interesting. :shrug:

We need 4DWW - Four Day Work Week to give us our time back!

I have hobbies and enjoy them, but it's hard to find time around a full-time job, life obligations, and hedonism. Having 1 extra day per week would do wonders for my life-work balance, mental health, social relationships, ability to learn new things, etc.

Let's fight for 4DWW together!

This just gave me a realization...

I'm a person with way too many hobbies. I like to pick them up and drop them as it suits my interest. Some days I'm very excited about electronics, other days I'm more interested in reading or woodworking. Some hobbies truly demand regular practice and study, but even those I often rotate just on longer timescales.

This brings me to the realization. Many of my hobbies which require software change dramatically by the time I revisit them. Kicad updates, or changes to the way my DAW works. Not to mention the need for a subscription which commits my interest for a month or more! What if I'm just trying to jot down an idea and then drop it again for a year!?

Software services with subscriptions are like joining a club that has expectations of you. Useful in some cases, but altogether way too overbarring for my hobbies most of the time.

On one hand it is easier to monetize things than it used to be. In the 1990s for instance you didn't have AdSense to make money off a web site. Today somebody can start something and hope to make money with very little effort. It's not hard to make 10 cents but to make real money is often more work than people want to do.

Making money from a creative project can add spice to it the same way that gambling on sports adds to the enjoyment. It also means you can buy whatever equipment you want for your hobby (e.g. think how many $1000s you could spend on photography gear.)

Myself I have an art/crafting/photography project that I'd like to sell some work from because getting other people interested enough in what I make to pay for it would be validation that I'm on the right track.

>It feels like every time someone gets into a new field now, there's always the expectation they'll 'go pro' or turn it into a day job.

I think the nature of this has changed recently, but I feel like things were like this in the USA to some degree even before.

I migrated to the USA a long time ago (20+ years). Among other culture shocks, I still remember experiencing this "go pro" mentality was when I first came here and wanted to get some basic stuff like shoes and a bicycle.

Going into a bike shop, I couldn't just purchase the cheapest bike. The person said maybe now I want to bike for 20 minutes on weekends for fun, but in 1 year I'll want to bike 50 miles. So I should consider buying bike that is 3X as expensive that is made of carbon fiber. Want to buy a pair of shoes to go for a 20 minute run? Well, then you want a custom measurement and evaluation of your gait and ... you see where this is going. When you go into a sports store to buy something they want to sell you a lifestyle, not a product.

Obviously the majority of people buying running shoes and bicycles aren't going to become triathletes. But that's the vision to upsell people into a particular lifestyle.

I think monetizing things is just the latest incarnation of this. The vast majority of people are probably doing hobbies for fun, but if you go onto social media people are selling you a lifestyle, not a hobby.

I'd wager it's simply that there are more ways than ever to alchemize something into a source of income, so you can always find people looking for that angle in any field these days.

I get a judgmental vibe from OP though that rubs me the wrong way.

One, because they came up with a rather negative interpretation of other people.

Two, because I'm reminded of gamers complaining about some game mod developers deciding to charge money for their work. It's like an employer telling me I should be motivated by passion aka the money is shite.

Of course they do, but I get what you mean. I've even written a few articles about my thoughts against this mentality:

Why I prefer making useless stuff https://austinhenley.com/blog/makinguselessstuff.html

Programming as play https://austinhenley.com/blog/programmingasplay.html

"A satisfactory hobby must be in a large degree useless, inefficient, laborious, or irrelevant...all in all, falconry is the perfect hobby." - Aldo Leopold

I've got the same mindset. In my case though, I feel it's mostly because I want to put my stamp on the world somewhere. As a web developer, I've built some pretty amazing sites over the last 20+ years in the industry, but I can count the number that still exist out there with just a few fingers, probably not even a good portion of one of my hands. I accept that as part of the industry that I'm in, but I've still got that nagging feeling of wanting to put something out there more permanent. So, I do game development, and art, and writing, and music production. Do I think I'm the next person to make it huge with any of these? No... it would be nice, but no. I just want to have something tangible out there that when I'm gone and forgotten, someone can load up an old game of mine, or listen to a track that I produced, or see an image hanging that I drew or painted, and for a brief moment, my legacy will live on.

Now, the problem I face, I've got way too many hobbies, and I'm not even to "Jack of All Trades" level for any of them... can't seem to focus my talents in any single direction.

Yes, I still have hobbies. I sometimes write about them on my personal site, but not all that often. I don't really post anything about it to social media regularly. If you looked me up online you'd be hard pressed to know what I do with my free time these days, because I'm spending that time doing things I enjoy not talking about it to strangers. All of my hobbies actively cost money and are not really monetizable in any meaningful way, and I wouldn't have it any other way.

There are thousands of people doing what I do (not necessarily my specific hobby, just doing their thing without posting about it), you are just unaware of it because we don't post about it. I would recommend you get off the Internet, go do something that sparks curiosity or interest in you, and stop worrying about other people, what they're doing or what they think of you.

There's likely a generational element here, younger people are more consistently "always online", but I think this eventually gives as they grow up and they too realize the value of disconnecting.

I suppose the question you're asking is why we've socially moved away from doing stuff just for fun in an effort to make a “passive” income and monetize as much of our time as possible.

Personally, I've seen my peers (by both profession and age) stop participate in activities that don't have an immediate reward, the only exception they make is if there's a long term financial reward. Odd.

During the lockdowns I started a hobby, something about garments: think suits, watches, perfumes, shoes, backpacks, hats... I'd rather not say exactly what it is to avoid useless discussions here.

I went into it in a very similar way to other passtimes of mine: reading as much as I could, frequenting forums and online communities, watching videos, buying the basics and even trying to be a maker, not just a consumer to a certain extent.

What I found out: most people in the hobby fall into two categories, sometimes overlapping: shopping addicts and youtubers. Most of the online conversation is utterly ignorant, when not directly brain-damaged. At first I didn't notice because I didn't know better, but as soon as I started to have some knowledge, it was disheartening.

Fellow aficionados spend huge amounts of money in products that they're not going to make use of. YouTube crowd consists of some of the addicts (bragging about what they're senseless hoarding) and some malicious sellers that hide the fact that vendors are paying them. Most of them don't make much.

I think there may be some bias to your information sources. For example, I have a friend who was long time single and one day he told me that marriage is awful, nobody likes it. Well, turns out that none of his friends were married so all his information was discussion in the break room at work, of course people are much more likely to complain about their spouse then suddenly profess their continued domestic harmony. When was the last time someone shared over r lunch how they didn't argue about something? In this case people are more likely to talk about an activity if they are interested in the money angle.

I have hobbies with and without money. I never talk about the ones with no profit aspect. I just spend time enjoying them. I like woodworking, cycling, and making things around the house.

I do talk about my tea shop. It is a hobby business and I love it. I run it as a fairly serious business, and it makes a decent amount of money, but I don't optimize for profit. Eg, if someone is unhappy they get their money back regardless. I optimize for fun and happiness.

I can only talk about this for myself. But I think I tend to look at this differently than a lot of people.

'Hobby', to me, means something I do that (a) isn't my main source of income, and (b) is done for primarily because I enjoy it. (I think some people feel that it should involve skill building of some sort, but I don't think that's a requirement.) So not making it a business is sort of definitional to me.

But, things cost money. So I do sometimes make things for other people for payment. But I absolutely will not treat it "like a business" - you are not my customer, you're a peer exploring this stuff with me, and the best way to become an ex-peer is to expect "customer service". Which results in me being very selective about doing so - a lot of people just don't seem to understand that mode of interaction.

I am exploring commercializing something I'm working on. But that is no longer a hobby - writing a business plan and chatting up people for instrumental reasons can be rewarding, but not something I do for fun.

"This person would establish his appetitive and money-making part on the throne, setting it up as a great king within himself. ... He makes the rational and spirited parts sit on the ground beneath appetite, one on either side, reducing them to slaves. He won't allow the first to reason about or examine anything except how a little money can be made into great wealth. And he won't allow the second to value or admire anything but wealth and wealthy people or to have any ambition other than the acquisition of wealth." ~ Plato

The facile reading of this quote (and Plato more generally) is that things never change and humans have always been greedy.

The deeper reading of this quote is that history moves in discernible patterns. There are commonalities in what happened to Athens and in our own trajectory. Plato watched as the Athenian democracy ate itself alive. The end result was the Macedonian subjection of Athens, leading to explicit imperialism in the form of Philip II and Alexander the Great.

I have too many hobbies.

Amateur radio operator, yoga, volunteer firefighter, vintage computer/typewriter/camera collecting and restoration, film photography and development, weightlifting, astrophotography, motorcycling, roller skating, ballroom and lindy hop dancing, and bromeliad and orchid growing.

My personal calendar is more crowded than my professional.

All you really need is one hobby but I really like all of that stuff and most of them don't take too much time, and most of them are cheap!

For rollerskating all you need is a pair of skates and a clear day. For camera collecting all you need is time on the weekend to stroll around musty old thrift stores.

Hell, dancing is the most expensive and time consuming hobby I have. Ticket fees add up.

Besides, staring at a computer screen eight hours a day leaves me tons of energy when off the clock.

If you're feeling frustrated by overwork, just pick something, anything, enjoyable that doesn't involve the internet or your phone, and do it until it becomes a routine.

The challenge is when you research any hobby you run across people demonstrating things on youtube that have monetized it. This is because of SEO and they have engineered their content to show up in the best way possible. What you aren't seeing are all the people that like to just do stuff for the fun of it. The ones that do stuff for the fun of it and post poor quality videos online aren't going to surface in results as much.

From watching some hobbyists who turned professional, turning a hobby into a successful youtube channel looks to involve: script-writing, video capture, video editing, lighting, sound, audio editing, SEO optimization (thumbnails, descriptions), affiliate marketing, analytics, and also doing the actual hobby. Also you have to be really good, entertaining or different in some way that sets you apart.

I've been a keen cyclist for nearly three decades keeping up with developments/technologies and even raced numerous times against professional athletes in multiple disciplines.

I'm also slowly building my knowledge about the legendary 1.8T VAG engine in dozens of car models including my Audi TT mk1.

This evening I bolted my super rare OEM roof bars to the TT so kayaking and surfing are definitely on the horizon!

Might as well throw vinyl DJing into this comment too.

Randomly, I'm also training to be a volunteer alpaca (& llama) trekking guide

All of these activities are 100% in the "hobbies" territory with zero relation to my profession or interest in somehow monetising them.

It's also why I have zero Github projects to show off and I intend to keep it that way.

That's because the place you are looking for these people with hobbies is the place where people who want to "go pro" are going to start that journey.

At least in my case, if I'm talking to friends that have a hobby they don't think about that at all. It's selection bias.

I've noticed there are phases, where something twigs us that creates an image of what we want to become (the dream), and then the work we do in pursuit of becoming. It becomes a habit, where it's just something you do when you aren't doing anything else. Then, in time, there's a necessary point where you have to choose between comparing yourself to the image in the dream and, knowing what you do now with some experience, letting the naive belief go, and pursuing the thing only because you enjoy doing it, and for no other reason. That purity of intent can only come after you have some experience. Then one day a long time later, someone out of nowhere says, "wow, I want to be able to do that like you one day."

Do you people find their artistic hobbies to be relaxing? I actually find it to be some what stressful and difficult. Painting is constant problem solving.

With art, I would imagine people find it useless without sharing. So you feel like you need to publish or get into a gallery etc

I just started picking up tennis again since I played 5 years ago. I'm stretching late twenties with no intention of going pro soooo... yes, people do have hobbies?

Also picked up drawing as a pandemic hobby and just vibing with it with no intention of cashing out on it

Yes, lots of people are monetizing their hobbies. TikTok and YouTube are full of such people. Pick your hobby - any hobby, and you'll find dozens of popular channels for that hobby. Here's the thing to keep in mind though, there are billions of people. Any hobby you can think of has millions of people engaged in it yet only dozens (maybe hundreds) of people gain prominence and are actively trying to monetize their hobby. This has actually always existed, it's just in the past these were small-scale, home-based businesses. Now there are more markets to reach your "customer", to use business parlance. Most people aren't bothering with any of this.

Does doomscrolling count as a hobby?

More seriously, I'd like to think you're in a bubble. Hustle culture is strong in tech, and especially here on HN. On the other hand, my mom and mom-in-law are both artists who have been variously pushed towards selling their work, increasing volume, yada yada. Even my kid, at 5 years old, is all about the money -- any time he learns about something new (how is pepper made), he wants to scale it up and sell it at volume (it's just a plant? let's start a pepper farm and sell pepper for a million dollars!). None of his parents think like that, so we're left wondering where that's coming from.

This reminds me of a business coworker many years ago who couldn’t wrap his head around open source. Why would anyone write software and then give it away for free? In his opinion, if you weren’t making money off of it, it wasn’t worth doing.

This could be a special case of what I like to call "efficiency bias". It is probably cultural and probably driven by a huge (and widening) gap between what most people think they need and what they actually can afford. As a consequence, "have more for the same amount of $ spent" is perceived as obviously good, even at the cost of significant optimization effort. So then squeezing a bit more $ out of _anything_ is also perceived as self-evidently-top-priority.

I think humans gravitate towards what gives them attention. It's a very primitive thing of wanting to be in an in-group. Given that most people don't have enough money to cover a minor emergency I think a lot of hobbies were "side hustles" even long ago. It's truly a privilege to have ascended the hierarchy of needs such that you can do things for fun.

The difference is today the audience isnt a swap meet or local music scene. Its the internet. To differentiate yourself you have to be as boisterous as possible. The culture of advertising, grifting, etc have all been taken to their maximum.

I think it's about what people are choosing to prioritize. Money from tech industry or leisure. Turning a project into a job or a startup or something is performing your talents for cash payment, which is a different experience than performing your talents for leisure. The key change away from leisure, I think is a wider phenomenon where more people are spending their time looking for financial rewarding activities because money/the things money can buy are less and less available/distributed. Thus the growing preference for startups and day jobs rather than prioritizing leisure time.

At about 30 I found out about ability to rent a sail boat and have a fantastic week-long vacation with friends for a price of a decent 4* hotel. It was true in case someone has a recreational sailing license instead of hiring a skipper. Then I decided to make a living from that, being that "skipper for hire" for other people. It was fun for a while, but routine quickly killed most of the joy. Also, money was far south from what I used to make. So I got back to IT and kept sailing as a hobby since. I don't regret a single moment of it, though.

I blame hustle culture and self-improvement gurus. They have hammered the message "if you're not making yourself more marketable, or grinding to make money, then you're failing".

I feel like for many of my friends who aren't in tech their primary hobby is media consumption. TV and film certainly enabled this in the beginning, but the internet helped 100x it.

I have definitely shown hobbies to other people who immediately get on my case about monetizing the project. I would say this has happened at least 2 times in the past 3 years. Every time I tell them the same thing. “I am having fun now and the effort to monetize isn't fun”.

I think I agree with OP. An alarming number of people are only thinking about money that could be made. To them, there is never enough. “Fun should not come at the expense of profit”.

I love some of these people but they are sick in the head.

Whenever HN discusses life outside the hustle, I find it striking how many people say "get off the computer and go outside", and how few people say "like anything else, computers can be great, just don't get carried away".

As someone who has been fascinated by technology from an early age, it's curious to me how often I see people advocate keeping their use of computers to a minimum like it's a point of pride and not just a personal preference.

>It feels like every time someone gets into a new field now, there's always the expectation they'll 'go pro' or turn it into a day job.

This is a peculiarly American phenomenon. And there is also the flipside: people ask "why do you do [challenging, expensive and/or time consuming hobby] if you're not getting paid?".

Don't worry, there are many people with hobbies around. I have two, but one of them is on the backburner while I become not injured.

I have felt this about open source projects in particular. Feels like the hacker spirit is gone and it is now very commercial or for resume building.

Not really anything else however.

Every man needs a hobby he can't afford.

For me, I have multiple: * woodworking (always need more tools, things to build, techniques to try) * playing guitar (always more gear to buy and things to learn) * baking (more recipes to try, and equipment)

The hard part, since hobbies is more about how you spend your free time, is not making the easy ones your hobby, like watching movies or spending hours on social media. At least for me.

Pretty much everyone I know has hobbies -- straight up hobbies, not side hustles. Most of them are active -- cycling of some kind, for example, or fishing, but I live somewhere that sort of thing is viable year-round.

A really liberating thing to understand is this: You are under no obligation to be good at your hobbies. It's not my line; I forget where I picked it up, but it's absolutely true.

On the contrary, recently I went to a networking event hosted by a founder of an AI startup in Bay Area. That was just after I started an unofficial sabbatical, ostensibly to travel the world and focus on my hobby. Granted, it is a hobby marred with controversial monetization circumstances, but such an expectation, to turn it into a day job, never came up in the discussions there.

I recently bought an RC car because why not. Just started building a RWD drift car. I've spend way too much and driven way too less, but seriously, driving a few stupid toy cars on a parking lot always brings a smile on my face. Met some new friendly folks as well. Basically just hobby things..

I hope you can find joy in a hobby too.

That's the tow line here. Really everyone I know who turned a hobby or a side hustle into a job now hates it or nearly bankrupted themselves.

I hate what I do but the money is excellent. I have a hobby and side hussle which is not related. It's a match made in heaven. Ying and yang in perfect harmony. Never the two shall mix.

This seems like an availability bias - you’ll tend to see the content from people publicly posting about their hobbies whereas the random amateur photographer who doesn’t post their photos anywhere will be invisible to you. The latter category is probably 97% of human endeavor at the personal level.

They do! Maybe you're on a bubble? HN is a terrible bubble to be in on that regard

You should read https://bemorewithless.com/the-story-of-the-mexican-fisherma... (on of several instances of the story out there)

I think the reason is that productivity/wages have been falling. People want to maintain quality of life and so must dedicate a larger percentage of their time to income generation. This is, I think, directly a result of the declining economic situation.

I'd say financial situation is a lot of that. The idea that success == financial success is also big. Also, anything where you're building something will have more of this pressure. Not so much with traditional hobbies like gardening, bowling, etc.

I'm a serial hobbyist. Two of the newest ones are 3d printing (making objects for around the house with an Ender3) and piano (played guitar before but never learned theory, about six months ago I began to climb the mountain that is jazz improvisation)

HN USER hobbies are usually spending Time on HN and working on a part time $$ project.

Yup. I play guitar in a sleazy rock band, make wood and linocuts, potter in the garden, visit European cities for long weekends, go to the gym, read books.

None of these things I want to monetize or hustle. Sounds incredibly tiring.

I ride bikes and drink wine. I sometimes play video games and like to watch movies.

I have several skills but it would be handy to have a hobby that require talent (though bike riding isn’t exactly a talentless skill, believe me).

Kind of a crazy assumption to make of an entire population of people. Idk how you could even stretch such a claim. You’re stereotyping an entire cohort of people based on a very, very small percentage of people.

I've been working in this industry for 15 years. We're at our most dysfunctional yet.

Working in a company is a massive PITA. In a lot of western countries society is so polarised that every interaction with another human being is a risk of hearing some inane bullshit or being crucified for thinking differently.

Even the hiring process is a complete ridiculous farce.

When you get hired that agile crap is pushed down everybody's throat and, while many comply without complaining much, I'm sure they're all dead inside.

It's no wonder to me that more people than ever want to escape the rat race, especially in software.

We realise the power of automation and what we can aim for and we want a slice of the cake, so we don't have to be part of all this BS any longer.

Unless you work in tech, finance or medical everyone is broke. So everything is looked at as a possible way to make some extra money because their current job doesn't pay a livable wage.

I’ve seen this sort of comment on hacker news a few times recently. I’m curious where it comes from.

I live in Chicago, am largely not in the “tech scene” and don’t know anyone like this.

I know a ton of people with hobbies who aren’t trying to make it their work, they’re everywhere. I bet you do too but those people are just not talking about it

I don't recall where but Adorno specifically wrote about how the concept of a hobby is in itself toxic and enabling the very logic you are criticizing

A lot of people dont realize that once you start making money from something it becomes a job. Because they have never done it before. Its a learned thing.

Big city life is too busy, too hard, and too volatile to have a space and time for a decent hobby. But people still manage to have it occasionally.

Be more discriminating of who you receive input from. The vast majority of what people have to say is worthless if not actively detrimental noise.

I’ve got loads of activities I enjoy doing that I’m too terrible at to make money doing, so I’ve got a bunch.

Never ruin a perfectly good hobby by making it a job.

Yes, there's a reason for that. People hate being employees and would like to take more ownership over their income / livelihood.

I'm not necessarily criticising, rather just observing - in capitalist economies, money truly is a proxy for time itself, which is arguably the most valuable thing any human ever gets.

In an era where the middle class is rapidly shrinking, decades of reckless monetary policy are producing generationally-high inflation, and people's lifestyles are deflating, I think a lot of people are either trying to outrun the treadmill of inflation out of desperation, clinging to the fleeting lifestyle of cheap gas, cheap air travel, cheap housing, cheap cars, etc.

This is why minimalism offers so much happiness, and room to start practicing hobbies for hobbies' sake again.

Desire is the root of suffering.

My favourite hobbies I am confident will never turn into my side hustle: Hiking, Watching movies, playing videogames with friends

My hobbies are skiing, biking, playing soccer. I don't think anyone is expecting me to go pro in any of those fields :)

I don’t see why the ideas should be opposite.

There have been many things I have been paid to do.

I would have done them nonetheless.

I do bike tours, it is a hobby and i love it. I bike, read, see some history, eat good things.

No plans to go pro :)

Middle class is shrinking; people in tighter economic situations can't afford hobbies?

> Hell, if you create anything, everyone will seemingly tell you how much money you should be making from it, and encourage you to monetise it in some way or another.... So is there a reason for that?

short answer: The type of capitalism we're in. Everything that can be monetized eventually will be.

additional context: Housing prices. People who want to be able to buy a house at current prices need to try to monetize everything they can. In the mid-late-80s I lived in silicon valley. I was resigned to never being able to buy a house there given the prices. Then in the early 90s I was transferred to another area where houses were much cheaper. We were able to buy a house immediately. I also noticed that the people in the office I worked in left right at 5PM. This never happened in Silicon Valley. People were in general just much more relaxed. Fast forward almost 30 years and house prices in many metro areas are unaffordable for people trying to buy. It's like the Silicon Valley housing effect is (just about) everywhere. And people aren't as relaxed here as they used to be because they've gotta hustle to be able to afford housing (either renting or buying).

See what normal people are doing.

See what low income people do.

Look away from seeing what internet and techies are doing.

I have lots of hobbies: painting miniatures, video production, making music...

I see this sort of hobby -> income path in my hobbies as well, but its entirely based on the online content I consume, and the fact that content production is a hobby and getting good at content creation makes it a moneymaking opportunity that I believe is really hard to pass up.

I paint wargaming miniatures to play tabletop games and every content creator I've followed over the past ten years either stopped producing content as a hobby or now has a Patreon and hides at least a portion of their work behind a paywall.

Then, when I go to a wargaming tournament, here are all the people who enjoy the hobby of painting and playing wargames instead of the hobby [or maybe, profession] of producing content.

So it seems very much a bias of the content I consume, and when I dip my toe into other hobbies [say, hiking, or RVing] I see the prevalence of money making content production there too.

Alternatively, people finally have more fulfilling jobs

Reading HN is my hobby!

The "hustle culture" has destroyed relaxation, taking hobbies with them. People try to "monetize" all sorts of garbage which is why we have so many YouTube channels, TikToks and Instagram "influencers". They've been force-fed the Protestant Work Ethic and have fallen into the pit of believing it to be true.

> Has the financial situation forced everyone into always looking for a side hustle or way to 'escape the rat race'?

Yes. In my conversations with people in their 20s, they have no kind of job security that older people have (I'm in my 60s). As a result, most are quite jaded about what kind of future they will have and for many of them the idea of house with family (spouse & children) is economically impossible. Turning everything into a side-job or side-hustle is what they think is necessary for survival. Employee wages since 1980 have barely kept up with inflation, unskilled workers have fallen far behind. Executive wages have captured all of the increases in productivity since 1980.

https://www.epi.org/blog/wages-for-the-top-1-skyrocketed-160...

This chart shows the gap starting in 1973: https://i.imgur.com/XX8cjIC.jpeg

The year of the Oil Embargo. People of my generation remember this as "when our mothers had to get a job outside the house". My parent's generation remembers that year as when they had to start pumping gas for themselves (almost all gas stations were "full service" prior to the Oil Embargo). In accounting & business law classes, that was the year that several court cases ruled that "directors have a fiduciary duty to shareholders".

> According to Weber (1904, 1905), it was John Calvin who introduced the theological doctrines which combined with those of Martin Luther to form a significant new attitude toward work. Calvin was a French theologian whose concept of predestination was revolutionary. Central to Calvinist belief was the Elect, those persons chosen by God to inherit eternal life. All other people were damned and nothing could change that since God was unchanging. While it was impossible to know for certain whether a person was one of the Elect, one could have a sense of it based on his own personal encounters with God. Outwardly the only evidence was in the person's daily life and deeds, and success in one's worldly endeavors was a sign of possible inclusion as one of the Elect. A person who was indifferent and displayed idleness was most certainly one of the damned, but a person who was active, austere, and hard-working gave evidence to himself and to others that he was one of God's chosen ones (Tilgher, 1930).

> Calvin taught that all men must work, even the rich, because to work was the will of God. It was the duty of men to serve as God's instruments here on earth, to reshape the world in the fashion of the Kingdom of God, and to become a part of the continuing process of His creation (Braude, 1975). Men were not to lust after wealth, possessions, or easy living, but were to reinvest the profits of their labor into financing further ventures. Earnings were thus to be reinvested over and over again, ad infinitum, or to the end of time (Lipset, 1990). Using profits to help others rise from a lessor level of subsistence violated God's will since persons could only demonstrate that they were among the Elect through their own labor (Lipset, 1990).

> Selection of an occupation and pursuing it to achieve the greatest profit possible was considered by Calvinists to be a religious duty. Not only condoning, but encouraging the pursuit of unlimited profit was a radical departure from the Christian beliefs of the middle ages. In addition, unlike Luther, Calvin considered it appropriate to seek an occupation which would provide the greatest earnings possible. If that meant abandoning the family trade or profession, the change was not only allowed, but it was considered to be one's religious duty (Tilgher, 1930).

http://workethic.coe.uga.edu/hpro.html

The principle behind predestination was that before you were born, God decided whether you were going to Heaven or not. The "Elect" would be going to Heaven. Those who were not "elected" were damned (in the Biblical sense) to Hell. If you were lazy and screwed off (uh oh! that's me!), you would lose your place in the Elect, thus becoming damned (in the Biblical sense).

> The phrase was initially coined in 1904–1905 by Max Weber in his book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Weber asserted that Protestant ethics and values, along with the Calvinist doctrines of asceticism and predestination, enabled the rise and spread of capitalism. It is one of the most influential and cited books in sociology, although the thesis presented has been controversial since its release.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestant_work_ethic

He embedded Protestantism in his theory because he wanted some reason why the countries of Northern Europe (like England, Netherlands & Germany) were wealthier than the countries of Southern Europe (like Italy & Spain).

You see the Protestant Work Ethic all over the place in America. Such as in the utter hatred for social safety nets by one political side - because those people are already damned to Hell and it is violating God's Will by preventing them from starving to death. Another place you see it is in the total lack of vacations. Even people who get paid time off refuse to take it because they're scared.

For hobbies, I read books and play music. While it is possible to make some money, I won't. I do it for my own pleasure. Trying to turn them into something like blogs or YouTube channels would be too much effort. Then it becomes a job. And then I would need some totally different hobby to relax.

There is a parable usually titled "the businessman and the fisherman". It is a beautiful parable of the conflict between the Protestant Work Ethic and personal goals (I picked the first result from a google search). It starts:

> One day a fisherman was lying on a beautiful beach, with his fishing pole propped up in the sand and his solitary line cast out into the sparkling blue surf. He was enjoying the warmth of the afternoon sun and the prospect of catching a fish.

> About that time, a businessman came walking down the beach, trying to relieve some of the stress of his workday. He noticed the fisherman sitting on the beach and decided to find out why this fisherman was fishing instead of working harder to make a living for himself and his family. "You aren't going to catch many fish that way," said the businessman to the fisherman.

> "You should be working rather than lying on the beach!"

https://thestorytellers.com/the-businessman-and-the-fisherma...

I won't spoil the ending, but I think the vast majority of readers of HN have encountered this parable before.