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.

There are plenty of people just "doing hobbies" on the internet too, but those people tend not to broadcast their activities as much as the ones who so the activities to earn their living. If you (say) play the violin and make videos of it for your friends, those won't be as slick as those of a violin-playing youtuber who needs the videos to get a million views each or they can't pay their mortgage.

There is a clear bias for OP to see "monetizers" on the internet. They are actively trying to be seen.

Yeah, monetizers are partaking in SEO to boost their ad-ridden blogs to the top, whereas anyone else who's writing a simple blogspot to document their hobby gets left to page 12 or 13 of the search results.

It's a delight when I come across a personal site that goes in depth about something, and has no ads or donation begging.

Looks like you have a good business idea about curating unknown quality blog posts ;)

Wasn't there a blog search search made specifically for this?

https://search.marginalia.nu/ comes to mind

This. I often share random music snippets and other fragments of creative output with my friends in various group chats. I think it scratches the itch of “being seen” while sidestepping hang-ups about posting creative work publicly.

Edit: and my friends generally do not suggest I monetize my creative hobbies :)

> 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.

Essentially this. I'm a software engineer in the U.S. And here are some of the places & situations I've been in where I've come across other software engineers (as discovered through simply chatting up random strangers)

- At anime conventions

- At a martial arts school

- At an art showing in a Middle Eastern-themed cafe

- At in-the-park social events

- At wine-and-cheese tastings

You find people where they spend their time. If you're visiting websites that cater to try-hard indie hustlers, you'll be surrounded there by try-hard indie hustlers.

On the flip side, if you're going out and _doing_ actual hobbies, you'll be surrounded by people who go out and do actual hobbies. Some of them might even share your same career choices.

This is basically right.

I'm a software professional. My hobbies are fountain pens, chess, and Go (the game, not the language). Going to a pen show I meet people from vastly different career paths, including those who make a living in the orbit of the hobby.

Of all the above, only martial art school counts as a hobby. Hobbies are defined as doing something (e.g. drawing, playing an instrument or a sport, fishing etc.), not just as passive consumption (e.g. going to conventions or events).

That's a far narrower view on hobbies than most people would define it as. "Mental" stimulation typically counts as leisure activity. To the extent that no one sniffs at the idea of saying "watching movies" is a hobby of theirs.

Appreciating/critiquing art at an art show--or attending a certain style of social event on a monthly basis--certainly requires more active participation than spending time in a theater.

And if you doubt what sort of time investment an anime fan would require in keeping up with their hobby, take a look at much material someone would have to keep up with in just a three-month period alone: https://myanimelist.net/anime/season

> To the extent that no one sniffs at the idea of saying "watching movies" is a hobby of theirs.

Interesting. I actually sniff at that idea :) For me, watching movies is a pasttime activity, similar to say scrolling your phone. A differentiation between pasttime activity and a hobby for me is that hobby requires some level of effort.

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

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

I can second all of this.

I feel like I'm seeing more people fall into the internet trap, wherein they slowly slide into a chronically offline lifestyle and lose touch with the real world.

Eventually, they surround themselves with more and more chronically online people who are in a similar bubble, making their situation feel common or normal.

As this all slowly consumes their time outside of work, they begin to unintentionally withdraw from real-world friends and activities. The constant strain of processing the worlds' news and social media drama leaves them too exhausted to go anywhere, but while at home the easiest thing they can do is reach for more social media comfort (I include HN in that social media definition, as we're here socializing in the comments).

It is possible to break the cycle, but it takes a bit of a push to get it started. Simply forcing yourself to reach out to old friends or go somewhere to socialize and pick up a new hobby is an easy first step. Or just set a goal to step outside for 30 minutes each day to do anything that isn't related to work or being online.

I've seen people who make quilts regularly get in-person pressure to turn it into a hustle. It's not the internet, it's people.

And they're everywhere.

Totally. My wife started baking as a hobby and almost everyone she spoke to said variations of "you could make a packet selling these".

So I made her website and she tried making a business out of it, ruined the hobby for her forever.

The best way to ruin a good hobby is to try to go pro. Sometimes I feel that way about coding.

And likewise I would say that the best way to ruin a passion is to call it a hobby.

People want to get out of the rate race because they understand that they are trading their valuable and unique time on earth to perpetuate a rather unsatisfying and miserable existence.

I think you may be projecting a bit. Nobody was categorizing all passions as hobbies and please go get a real job, etc. etc. Apologies if I misread that, but that’s how I understand your reply.

Regardless a lot of hobbies bring us joy as they’re free from the often brutal realities of our financial system and incentives. Once you cross that line it changes the perception of that interest for a lot of folks.

Definitely agree that pressure can come online or IRL but I don’t think it’s purely just people. There are many cultures, societies, communities, or heck just small friend groups where there is zero pressure to monetize. Eg I’ve been part of book clubs and movie clubs where we just talk about entertainment and art and never think of turning it into a podcast or YouTube series.

> I’ve been part of book clubs and movie clubs

Such hobbies are probably the hardest to monetize, short of doing paid reviews. So I'm not too surprised that clubs built around that are low pressure when compared to hobbies that produce physical artifacts.

Yah on the one hand people are probably more willing to hand over money if they get something tangible/physical in return. That said, if you find the right niche, pure bits are easier to scale. Almost 0 marginal cost to adding more podcast viewers but building (and shipping!) wooden furniture doesn’t scale the same way. ;)

“Going pro” is my hobby. I find it very enjoyable to do the math on what it takes to break even and then profit, how likely that is, and how it compares to other activities.

In the end nothing really compares to just doing my regular job in tech but it’s fun to dream of making a huge profit selling home made sauces or whatever.

Definitely.

The sports and hobby industries are huge for a reason. People do ALL KINDS of stuff all over the world for fun. Seriously, the diversity is enormous. If you feel like people aren't having hobbies then something is very very skewed in your perspective.

This is a good point. It does seem logical that people with offline hobbies might be less likely to treat them as a job, perhaps because there's less of an 'obvious' road to doing so. The folks I knew who went climbing definitely seemed like they were doing it for fun.

I would like to add that it seems the internet used to be a lot more hobby-centered before around 2009. I do miss that old internet, where people did fun and creative things just for the sake of fun and creativity.

I remember the fun, irreverent blog "Stuff White People Like", satirizing the recreational tastes of upper-middle class college-educated Americans. Then one day the author got a book deal and the blog ended abruptly.

That would have been around 2010 or so. Since then it has felt like the entire Internet, from Youtube and Twitch all the way down to Patreon and Gofundme, has turned into a big tip jar.

Hey, please leave money out of climbing (joking, there ain't any worth talking about yet, unless you do Honnold stuff and that's mostly due to NatGeo and North Face's money and Jimmy Chin's propagation of him and himself).

But seriously, I truly wish serious money would be left out of sports. Yes I know pros need that to train (and buy their yachts/ferraris in certain fields), but I would be extremely happy to see sports being performed on lower level just like first olympics were, but done by people out of pure passion for it, not chasing sponsors / desperately trying to get views. It just degrades whole idea.

Thus I completely ignore all major sports since once you look at it via that sort of lens, you can't go back and its a sad sight anytime. I know I am a minority with this, but hey its way more interesting to stay out of sheepish crowds anyway.

Even on the Internet it's not hard to find people doing hobbies for nothing. I might go to reddit to talk about comic books or some specialized forums to talk about gardening or even find (or run) a small website for an area of niche interest. Seems like OP also has a fairly narrow definition of "hobby".

What's the Twitter account?

> most people tend to find a way to monetize their activity

I don't think that's true, not even just for bias towards the US, and not even if we correct for bias towards just the subset of people who are on Twitter/ social media.

As to "monetize their activity", really we have to define what that is and isn't. Say someone does ice-skating and spends ~$1000/yr on it and posts things with affiliate links where they get a tiny amount of revenue, well is that "monetizing their activity" or not? Most would say it isn't. Not compared to old-school "monetizing" like teaching ice-skating classes for $20 cash to kids. And definitely not compared to sponsored Olympic hopefuls who need to get $30++K/yr from their teens, just to stay in the game.

In the last decade I started meeting lots of wannabe influencers and affiliates, most with small followings and near-zero revenues. Is that "monetizing"? I'd say no.

> on the internet, most people are looking to make big bucks

No they're not. Mystified at this claim. Lotta people talk about it, very few achieve it (again depends on how you define it, e.g. "enough to quit the day job and live comfortably purely off internet-based revenues"). Noone audits their claims, right? And they have huge incentives to make false or exaggerated claims.

I don't even think you can clearly define which subset of people is "on the internet" and which isn't; for example, realtors, car dealers, even yoga instructors, tree-surgeons and vets often have websites (and social media), are they doing business "on the internet"? Most would say not really.

I think hard data would help prove/disprove this claim. For example, how many full-time arbitrageurs (resellers) are there on eBay, Amazon zShops and couponing sites? as opposed to just doing it as a side-hustle?

I strongly suspect there's a severe bias towards influencers talking about stuff that doesn't happen (think: Douglas Adams novels), just like the majority of people who claim to be realtors (at the end of every boom cycle, hundreds of thousands of hopefuls get an RE license) have never sold a property, or come close to selling a property. I guess realty is the ultimate 0/1 outcome, and it's easy to ask a wannabe realtor for a list of properties they've sold, hence it's easy to verify 80+% of them have no sales.

I agree with thiago_fm that the OP needs to spend time off "the internet" (more specifically: the influencer side of social media), all the hype and bragging and people relentlessly talking about themselves and unverified claims will pollute your thought process and sense of calm and adequacy.

>Say someone does ice-skating and spends ~$1000/yr on it and posts things with affiliate links where they get a tiny amount of revenue, well is that "monetizing their activity" or not? Most would say it isn't.

I doubt that's true. I certainly would.

IIUC you would say that if someone spends ~$1000/yr on their ice-skating hobby and say makes $10 back on ice-skating-related affiliate links on SM posts, that that's not spending a net $990/yr on their hobby, it's "monetizing their activity"?

Curious to see other people's responses.

I think the term "monetize" has been debased to almost meaninglessness.

> Curious to see other people's responses.

I agree with the other guy. If you're trying to make money, you are monetizing, regardless of whether it's actually profitable.

Yes, that's what I'm saying. Monetization doesn't imply profitability. Though if they really are downsizing essentially no time or effort on it and bringing in essentially no revenue, they aren't heavily monetized.

But even just conceptually framing your hobbies as something that could bring in revenue can change how you approach things, and probably not for the better in terms of enjoyment or stress relief.

Well, 'monetizing', but not in any signficant way, certainly not paying for the whole thing.

By that token, Girl Scouts selling cookies is 'monetizing' their hobby. It would feel weird to retrospectively apply 'monetize' back into the early 20th century or beyond (prior to the advent of modern newspapers and advertising).

> But even just conceptually framing your hobbies as something that could bring in revenue can change how you approach things, and probably not for the better in terms of enjoyment or stress relief.

Totally agree. And yes framing is a large aspect to it. Like if people who buy lottery tickets every time they stop for gas reframed themselves as 'investors'. Seems unhealthy to have to reframe relaxation activities as 'potential revenue generation'.

>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's sad how in the US people are too busy paying medical bills that they don't have time to drink coffee anymore :(

More like they have no outside spaces to wander and interact with others. Just desolate suburbs connected by stroads.

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-...

This reminds me a bit of the academic career path. I don't think it'd be terrible to spend 5-10 years at level 2, provided that you knew you would make level 3 (or at least had very good odds). I think the bigger problem is the uncertainty - not only are you pretty damn unlikely to make level 3, but also the selection process is kinda opaque and you don't really have a good grasp on your own specific odds. Obviously that situation is orders of magnitude worse in music, but it's why I left "professional" academia after PhD.

This really resonated with me, thanks for sharing. This lines up very well with my perception of success being composed of preparedness and opportunity. To me, Level One represents the cultivation of skill; preparing, said another way. Level Two is in the pursuit of opportunity and Level Three is the capitalization of opportunity. But the funny thing about opportunity is that it's mostly external to you. For sure, you can be in places where opportunity is more likely or try to find people who are passing on opportunities you'd like to capitalize on but I feel the most potent and useful opportunities are the ones that exist outside of your power.

All that to say that I don't think Level Two is fully intractable. I think it depends a lot on the opportunity density. In our field, for example, going through Level Two to work at a desk job where you don't particularly care where you end up or what you're doing is not that bad at all. In fact, it's just plain ole job hunting. But for sure in creative skills like musicians or classical art or any other skills where there are a few elite that have made it into Level Three, it is much more challenging to find your way through Level Two. There just isn't enough opportunity that can hoist you out of it.

As a middle-aged fogey, I hadn’t heard of Rock Stardom for Dumbshits so thanks for the comment. I’d be interested to see how it compares to the The Manual (How to Have a Number One the Easy Way)¹ by Jimmy Cauty and Bill Drummond (the KLF aka the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu aka the Timelords). I only vaguely remember reading it in the early nineties so could probably do with a re-read.

Haven't read op's comment, just wanted to +1 The Manual. I'm not a musician but it was a very interesting and illuminating read with some unconventional ideas. I'd recommend it for any creative person. KLF are worth listening to also, even though I was already predisposed to liking them thanks to being a big fan of The Illuminatus! Trilogy books they were inspired by.

KLF - 3AM Eternal: https://youtu.be/HDsCeC6f0zc

Doctorin' The Tardis: https://youtu.be/DsAVx0u9Cw4

The Manual is a fun read for its own sake, but the "one simple trick" turned out to be: take the backing music from one song, sample enough of the vocals from another song to have parity with the first, and merge the two. Thus: "Doctorin' the Tardis" is a mash-up of that Gary Glitter "Rock and Roll" song and the Doctor Who theme. "Whitney [Houston] Joins the JAMs" is a similar experimental medley.

Seemed to work for Fatboy Slim, Prodigy and the rest of the late-90s British DJs too. Not sure it's still a winning formula these days.

If you like all things KLF and want an interesting read, try Bad Wisdom (its sequel, Wild Highway, was "120 Days of Sodom"-level unreadable in my opinion). You'll have to find it on Libgen.

Even the beatles spent a few years at level 2, playing in hamburg etc

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 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.

Yeah, this is a big annoyance to my wife. She does knitting, sewing, other fiber arts. When speaking to other non-crafty types, almost always the first thing they say is "you should sell your pieces!" or "can you make me X for $Y?" Her response is always a hard no. This is something she does for fun and to share with friends and family. It's not a job.

Similarly, I did programming as a hobby growing up. I turned it into a career, and now it's the last thing I want to do in my spare time. This was actually kind of a difficulty, I had to go find new things to do for fun. Now I do woodworking and guitar and spend very little time on computers at home!

My mom has the same problem. She got into wood carving, found she's really talented at it, has done some pieces on commission and gets paid extremely well when she does. But to her it's a hobby and not a job. My dad kind of knows this but still keeps suggesting she do things like keep social media accounts, etc., and to do things that would maximize her "business". Why he keeps doing this, I dunno. He's an engineer type so I think he also just gets satisfaction out of optimizing things. My mom would however like to just do it whenever she feels like it and only do so much commission work that she would be able to take her time on it and take vacations without being on the hook, and of course to still actually enjoy the craft without being concerned about making money or constantly improving efficiency (which is counter to artistry).

> Similarly, I did programming as a hobby growing up. I turned it into a career, and now it's the last thing I want to do in my spare time.

Yeah, it's hard to keep up. When I was a junior programmer making my own stuff and putting it on Github was really exciting. Now it's challenging to get the motivation to do it as a hobby even if I know I've got a good idea I want to work on. Once you get to senior level as a software engineer, a lot of the joy kind of disappears. Since seniors are looked to in order to solve the really hard problems, as well as clean up the worst messes, our brains just get exposed to the worst sides of programming and I think part of us realizes how much code is simply wasteful.

My sister in law does this stuff as a business. It’s a weird look to be honest. As family I know more than most. She grinds in a sweat shop room in her house. Never cooks, cleans, or helps with raising her kid unless it’s selling apparel for a sports league, scouts, etc. It’s different though, she’s addicted to the attention of it all and being a “small business owner”. Once I asked her some details on the operations and she’s earning the equivalent of $2/hr on her time invested and she’s been at it for like 15+ years, it’s weird.

Some folks really enjoy food, though. They might spend a lot of time learning new recipes, spend 12 hours smoking a piece of meat, make things from scratch, make more than they could ever eat (and give away to friends)... seek out new restaurants, hell, even travel for the cuisine. Ditto entertainment-- movie buffs and the like.

You might also disqualify hobbies you don't consider a hobby. If I go for a run every saturday morning, is running a hobby? Or am I just a fitness freak? I think sometimes what folks do 'for fun' is either dismissed, or considered something you kind of have to do / should do anyway.

> Some folks really enjoy food, though. They might spend a lot of time learning new recipes, spend 12 hours smoking a piece of meat, make things from scratch, make more than they could ever eat (and give away to friends)... seek out new restaurants, hell, even travel for the cuisine. Ditto entertainment-- movie buffs and the like.

Yes, I absolutely agree. I wasn't referring to those people, but I can understand how it would have come off that way.

What I'm saying is that if one doesn't engage with an experience, it's really hard to call said thing a hobby. Binge watching shows, for instance, is only participatory in that the person pays an entrance fee and that they keep their eyes pointed at the screen. Same for eating; eating lots of good food doesn't equate to being a hobby but is more of a mere activity or an interest. But learning recipes, learning to smoke meat, etc., now we're talking about engaging in an activity rather than passively accepting sensory stimuli.

> You might also disqualify hobbies you don't consider a hobby. If I go for a run every saturday morning, is running a hobby? Or am I just a fitness freak? I think sometimes what folks do 'for fun' is either dismissed, or considered something you kind of have to do / should do anyway.

It's also in the eye of the beholder. I can't really tell an individual what is or isn't their hobby. Sensibly, not everything a human being does can be a hobby, and I think engaging in an activity with some kind of feedback loop is a sign of a hobby. Investing in that activity is also a sign of a hobby. Running can certainly be a hobby IMO because it takes an investment of time and effort, and people who run or perform exercise are usually paying at least some attention to their performance. Running merely because one thinks they have to run, on the other hand, doesn't seem like much of a hobby, but a change in mindset could instantaneously change said running from a chore to a hobby.

It also might just be used as a compliment. “Wow, I love this cake so much I would pay money for it”. Not my favorite complement but I see it used that way.

They're all hobbies, just with varying levels of passivity. I think a lifestyle of absolute inaction leaves people dissatisfied and unhealthy, but it's very readily rationalized much the way addicts do, now infused with bs Marie Kondo lingo like "it sparks joy". Not that I have anything good to say about hustle culture.

Passivity is antithetical to whether something is a hobby. I don't think the vast majority of people who participate in the common culture of film, TV, food, social media, and travel consider those things to be their hobbies. And rightfully so, because all they are doing is paying for temporary access to something they aren't actually engaging with. If, on the other hand, a person watches movies in order to analyze and critique them, they are entering hobbydom as they are engaging with the subject rather than turning their brain off.

> Passivity is antithetical to whether something is a hobby.

Maybe it should be, but I don't think that reflects what the broader culture believes. Add to the fact, you can't reliably determine the threshold at which something is active enough.

That's a very complex statement because I think what a reasonable person, when asked in the proper setting, would say is that those things aren't hobbies. But if you were to ask some Joe or Jane in sunglasses and shorts whether they're hobbies, they'll probably respond "sure, why not?" Both groups are aspects of the broader culture, so it's really difficult to truly say what the broader culture believes about this and whose position is actually valid.

> Add to the fact, you can't reliably determine the threshold at which something is active enough.

Yeah, it's ultimately up to the individual to determine whether something is a hobby. There are some standards we can have around the shared utility of that word, though. Pretty much anything can have a capacity for being a hobby, though some can be more dubious than others.

> 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.

That's a really interesting point I never considered. I guess people with no interest in an area would certainly be more likely to see the financial side of things rather than the actual... well hobby part. Also gonna admit I've been guilty of that myself, and have only quite recently realised that it may have been a tad overbearing.

It's also a generic compliment, a way of saying that whatever you've created is nice enough that a stranger would pay for it.

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 kayak on a local lake and never considered strapping a camera to my head: I'm there to enjoy nature and get some exercise, not pad a YouTube channel.

What does "Kayak on the internet" mean in this context (with the capital 'K')? Do you mean the canoe-like boat? Why does kayaking require a camera? Or do you mean the online travel site kayak.com, which doesn't make sense.

Yes, kayaking like a boat. "Why does kayaking require a camera?" It doesn't, unless you want to post pictures and videos of yourself kayaking on the internet.

One can kayak as a hobby, or one can run a youtube channel about kayaking as a hobby. In which case one is no longer kayaking as a hobby, one is running a small entertainment business about kayaking as hobby.

I think what they mean is that to "Kayak on the internet" is to post yourself evidence of Kayaking on the internet. Such things would require a camera (if you want a good visual component) to show off your Kayaking adventures

They're talking about broadcasting/performing the hobby on social media, as many social media-native hobbyists do.

The barrier to sharing your running experiences on LetsRun.com are quite low and very few folks on the boards are hustling for money.

On the other hand, it’s an godless cesspool that transforms it’s denizens into the worst versions of themselves. So there’s some give and take

No it isn't. You kayak in real life and share experiences. It doesn't always have to be video. There's a subreddit for practically everything.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Kayaking

I've been into keyboard layouts until I finally settled on my local maxima of comfort more so than speed.

https://www.reddit.com/r/KeyboardLayouts/

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).

>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.

I do woodworking as a hobby (and restore old woodworking machines as an actual side hustle to fund my addiction to buying cherry lumber). This is why I absolutely do not turn down requests for furniture or other woodworking projects. I just price them so absurdly high that the return is ridiculous, or that people just politely decline. For example, I was recently asked to make a shelf for an acquaintance. I priced the single floating shelf at $930. That's about $30 worth of materials, and three to five hours worth of work depending on what finish I choose. That 5 hours of my free time absolutely is worth $900 to me.

As an aside, if anyone is looking for a very vintage, single phase 7.5hp, 24" jointer, I have one for sale.

Fellow woodworking hobbyist here. One of the legit (9-fingered) woodworkers at the store I frequent has looked at some of my work and urged me to sell some pieces. My response was "as soon as I start selling things this changes from a hobby to a job." He suggested that I should sell woodworking projects the way he used to sell cocaine; "just enough to cover your own habit."

> As an aside, if anyone is looking for a very vintage, single phase 7.5hp, 24" jointer, I have one for sale.

Man this is the kind of thing you have to include a location for ;)

Oh, now I'm going to gush about this thing. I've been restoring old machinery for decades, but this is one of the best pieces of old Ohio machinery I've ever had my hands on.

It's a beautiful machine. It's a JT Towsley 24" jointer - the best I can guess is that it's from 1930-35 or so; there isn't a lot of information about that company anywhere.

It's somewhere around 2300 lbs - everything is solid cast iron (subsequently, I have retrofit some heavy casters because it was so unbelievably hard to move without them). It used to be 3 phase direct drive, but the shop I got it from gutted the old motor and set it as a belt and pulley drive to a smaller motor on the base. I swapped the little motor with a new Leeson 7.5hp. I painted it and replaced all of the bearings for safety sake (with new - old stock - American made bearings that matched the originals, btw), but other than that everything was in amazing shape. It has a massive 4 blade cutterhead with huge new blades the man that owned it put on it. This thing is amazing.

It sat in the corner of a cabinet making shop up the road from me for something like 80 years, until the owner died. His wife was going to have the local junker haul it out. It was the cabinetmaker's pride and joy. It had surface rust and needed to be repainted/all the bearings replaced, but otherwise it was like a brand new machine.

It currently lives in Illinois at a buddy's house while he waits for his own jointer to come in- it's his daily driver right now. But this thing is worth the drive to pick up. I've only ever seen one this size and quality in person, and I've never seen one for sale on the public market. I know I'm biased because I'm selling it, but it's just such a bad-ass old piece of iron.

I considered putting a helical head on it, and I contacted a couple of companies for quotes on custom heads. They're pretty reasonable (for what you get), but the companies are like 6-8 months out on custom orders and byrd won't even respond.

Anyway. This thing is amazing. I love old machinery, and this piece is super cool. The thought that went into making something that big also very easy to adjust and work with is just amazing.

Sounds awesome. I've only ever used 8" jointers. Does it take a long time to spin up? Bet that needs a lot of dust collection power, too. By sheer coincidence, in the editor's note of the current issue of Popular Woodworking, the editor is talking about his work restoring a Towsley 24" jointer, and will be publishing articles about the restoration process over the next year.

It only takes a few seconds to spin up with the larger motor on it. As far as dust collection - the tables are open, so I had originally fit a wedge underneath with a 4" port on the outfeed side, but according to my friend, it's not necessary and he just has a 4" open pipe on the floor near the outfeed side that he sweeps up once a month or so.

That's a wild coincidence! Was that the October edition? I would like to see those articles. This was a project, and I can tell you that learning from someone else would've been super helpful when moving that much cast iron around.

The hardest part was re-leveling and ensuring the tables were co-planar when re-assembling it. You have 8 level screws, and something like 60 set screws for the blades. It was a fiddly process!

December issue. He might be happy to have your insight! Haha. Here's a photo: https://imgur.com/ptulUq1

That's awesome, thank you. I may have to re-up my subscription!

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.

Just wanted to comment, that sounds awesome! I would love to see random blogs/youtube videos about it.

What is so special (to you) about the MCA DiscoVision laserdisc? There has to be a good story here.

No OP but I have a personal fascination with this tech as well.

It was one of those technologies that was way ahead of its time. They just could not get the density on the disk such that it would make sense longer term but given people still had records, they fit into these collections as-in given their similar form factor. They sported better picture quality and (debatably) better audio.

They also were natively able to produce an analog signal (RCA video and component out) as format is not actually totally digital.

They are just super cool piece of tech from a blip in history but they did set the stage for all our compact disk formats we use today.

I do wonder what it is about the technological blip that catches people attention. I have a strange fascination with old hardware that's still in production somewhere and I find I'm not the only one. I couldn't tell you why, however.

It was the very first attempt to use optical discs as a storage medium. The team went from fuzzy idea to working product in under ten years.

It ushered in the wave of technological change to come. The first prototypes for CD were DiscoVision discs! http://www.blam1.com/discovision/Pioneer_PCM.htm

What really excites me is that it's the world's most obscure treasure hunt.

Titles with an odd number of sides had a random one chosen at the pressing plant to even it out which was then lacquered over. Removing the lacquer with isopropyl alcohol sometimes reveals a side from a title which was never released.

This YouTuber covers an example here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQZGe3r4VqQ

Is your collection or restoration work publicly available?

It will be. My ultimate goal is to share everything on: https://discovision.info

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.

> "going pro" is literally the reason why this community exists.

I'm just here for the free coffee.

yea, i just like reading articles about people falling 15,000 feet from the sky.

yea, apparently not having a spleen is helpful if you are falling 15,000 feet from the sky. considering this operation for myself.

Money is also nice

I've worked for some companies that had draconian IP assignment contracts. The worst was General Motors. It basically said that if I invented anything that they might possibly use in business, then it belonged to them. This was back when they made locomotives and kitchen appliances as well as cars. They had their fingers in almost every possible industry.

Part of my response was to keep potentially profitable ideas inside my head until after I left to work somewhere else. Even today, I hesitate to do any hobby that an employer might want to confiscate.

Fortunately, most places I've worked since GM are only interested in stuff related to the business that they do. If you program on the side, they see that as you are keeping up with new technology and training yourself - which is a very good thing. Almost every interview I'm in has some form of the question "how do you keep up to date?" I'm always older than the interviewers and they really want to know how to keep up with stuff. It is hard.

I posted this link yesterday in a thread about "work for hire" and intellectual property assignment contracts:

https://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=153046

That kind of explains the general attitude around here of when someone introduces a new experimental tool or alternative, and the comments are full of "you should be using x, y, z because it's the industry standard and that is what scales!"

That’s because it generates interesting discussion beyond just replying to everything with “nice post bro, keep it up.” Now we get to discuss the pros and cons of the options.

I'm not sure it does.

Yeah HN is a bubble within the tech bubble that's highly focused, among other things, on making money.

> 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.

>Boomers got their college education paid by the GI bill

Anyone know how to look up what percentage of college attendees used the GI bill over the years? It seems like in our age of big data, this presumably public information wouldn't be so hard to get an answer for. Since the overwhelming majority of baby boomers never attended college, I could see the fraction using the GI bill going either way.

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.

True, location and culture definitely seem to have an effect here. San Francisco and Silicon Valley are the land of startups and people looking to get rich quick, so I guess it shouldn't be surprising that more people there would be focused on that side of things.

That reminds me how much I hate running into people from San Francisco

so much more fun to be moderately tech wealthy in an entertainment hub

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.

>The average person wants to turn their hobby into a day job because the average person's day job sucks

I have a metahobby: I collect hobbies. Invariably someone will tell me I should try to make money from one of them and my response is always "I HAVE a JOB, and I like it. I do this for fun. But thank you."

Also, a lot of people don't realize the skills of {HOBBY_X} and the skills of {SELLING_HOBBY_X} are usually quite different and few people possess proficiency and interest in both.

It sounds like people might be using “you should make money” as a compliment.

> 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.

Or if you have kids.

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.

> Going into a bike shop, I couldn't just purchase the cheapest bike.

There is a term called "gear acquisition syndrome" (GAS). When I got into biking, I was the one thinking that I wanted the carbon fiber bike. It was so expensive that I feared it would get stolen, so I hardly rode it. The cheap junk bike I had before that was one I rode everywhere: stores, movies, to the park. I didn't worry that the $300 bike would get stolen. The $3k bike? It went to work and back. When my coworkers would do group rides, I'd go with them. It went nowhere else. I was scared it would get stolen, or the bike lock would damage it - the lock & chain weighed more than the bike.

>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.

Agreed, a lot of hobbies have these "gearheads" or "hardcore" people and they can be quite intimidating for a beginner.

That bike salesperson is (probably deliberately) steering you away from the secondary market. Bikes hold value decently well in the current moment, so selling your cheap hybrid in a few years and picking up a local dentist's second hand race machine is totally viable.

>That bike salesperson is (probably deliberately) steering you away from the secondary market.

This interaction happened many years ago. I wish I could give that person that much credit about being so savvy about the secondary market, but I think it's really just a question of cost sensitivity. A person who really wants a cheap bike is going to Walmart (my conversation happened before Amazon existed) or another big-box store. Anybody who goes into a bike store either a) didn't realize bikes would be more expensive there or b) less cost sensitive compared to somebody who would never consider going to a bike shop in the first place.

The point being, by selling a lifestyle choice instead of a bike, they were trying to upsell me.

Which is exactly what I've seen with so many things on social media sites. It isn't just a hobby, it's a lifestyle.

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 read that falconry is extremely popular amongst the Qatar population. It kind of makes sense, as they're all pretty much rich or at least living on easy mode.

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.

"Passive Income" is the root of all of our economic troubles. People who are getting "Passive Income", are by definition not working and producing output for the economy.

In order to gain passive income, you must leech off someone else's work product. So in addition to not working yourself, you reduce the incentive for others to work by taking what could have been their wages.

The obsession with "Passive Income" is what is killing the United States and western economies. Capitalism only works when bad investing is punished and the investors contribute value to society by selecting productive and useful occupations for the labor force. In the current system, investors instead act primarily as leeches/parasites that are killing off the labor force.

There are too many governmental laws "protecting investors" that need to be eliminated, because they allow idiots to remain members of the investor class. If you are too dumb to recognize a ponzi scheme, then you don't need to be controlling society's capital and should be relegated to working class.

The idea of investing in the stock market as a whole and the creation of regulations that have made that viable are killing off the labor force in general.

I'm not convinced. Passive income is a form of arbitrage. It means there is an inefficiency in the market and that person is fulfilling it. It's pretty rare that continues indefinitely without any effort. There may be a lot of people trying for passive income but the ones who actually achieve it are very rare. Even being a landlord can be a lot of work.

Things like fractional reserve banking, the stock market, these are actually all a way to increase liquidity. A forcing function so that people do not sit on cash and instead let it flow back through the economy. Hardly parasitic/leeching, it's actually fueling the engine of our economy.

Broad (stock) index investing is pretty much passive income. So far, the indices (SP500 etc.) have been performing pretty well and the strategy panned out. It may change in the future though.

>>"Passive Income" is the root of all of our economic troubles. People who are getting "Passive Income", are by definition not working and producing output for the economy.

You bet they are not.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking

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

> Painting is constant problem solving.

Turn off your brain and paint away. Doesn't have to be a Rembrandt but something interesting may come out and most important you enter flow state. I'm a prolific painter and there's a bit of problem solving involved but that usually solves itself by working on other pieces and solutions ensue by themselves when you return to problematic works. Always works out for me. I never work on one piece at a time but 10 or 20 without any outside pressure. The more you do spend time 'doing' the better you get without being frustrated/stuck thinking about it. Good luck

The problem with flow state is that there's no growth in it. It can be productive if you're already very good, but learning a skill, esp. learning something very hard like realistic painting, means years of problem-solving, overcoming obstacles and straight up banging head against a wall ("what I'm painting does not look the way I want it to look, and I'm out of ideas on how to make it better").

What I would do: Dry learn a few new techniques then shut off the brain. Fun practice in flow state then revise a few sessions later. You may have misused some of the techniques but nailed a few and may as well have come with an original hybrid. It is imperative to have fun and dial down on pressure otherwise it gives rise to frustration which is valuable in itself when self critiquing but it is also an enemy to productivity. I apply the same philosophy with learning instruments and it works quite well. Is it slower than other approaches? Maybe, but my goals are to first have fun then to get better. Also it is a productive disconnect from programming and work. But also keep in mind that this works for me and may not work for you. But in order to find out you have to give it a try. Good luck:)

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".

This is two pronged 1. the attention economy with the internet 2. reflective of a lack of social and economic safety net. The Western world had a strong safety net which allowed for the pursuing of hobbies and the time to do so. Now I see the US especially becoming like my youth in India (and China) where hobbies are fleeting and you need to grind and make it monetarily and career wise. So working a high pressure job like a FAANG rarely leaves time to pursue a hobby. Without a strong safety net and a feeling of security people do not feel like they have the time and resources to devote to a hobby. Also does not help that our free time has been hijacked by the internet and social media so we are almost lobotomized.

> Also does not help that our free time has been hijacked by the internet and social media so we are almost lobotomized.

I feel this might be the biggest factor. Hobbies were one of major ways to deal with boredom and mundaneness of life. Nowadays, there's endless content online, shows, video games, restaurants, concerts, travel destinations, gadgets that people can consume and basically never feel bored.

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.

This is why our house does not have a garage - I love woodworking and if I had a garage, it would probably end up with tools and wood costing more than the house did. Before significantly downsizing in the move to this state, I had been eyeing some guitar kits (like from Martin Guitars) to build my own. I wasn't sure if I wanted to get into luthiering.

https://www.mi.edu/education/guitar-luthier-can-become-one/

I have an older edition of this book: https://www.amazon.com/Making-Archtop-Guitar-Robert-Benedett...

I love cooking, but I found that I disliked cooking for 1. Not long after my last relationship ended, I stopped baking and cooking anything other than basic food. I had more than 200 cookbooks. After the downsizing, I shrank my collection to about 10.

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.

Yeah, that's a good point. The folks posting about it on Twitter/Reddit/YouTube/Instagram are usually the ones who want to go pro with their work, whereas a lot of others are probably only sharing their works with those close to them rather than marketing it to the entire internet.

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)

Nice! Jazz bassist here. One thing about I like about jazz is that no matter how much time I put into it there is always some way to improve and some way to get better at it. Even the folks that I play with that are substantially more gifted at jazz vocabulary are consistently working to hone their craft.

I really should seek out others to play with but it just doesn't seem like there's enough hours in the day to practice for myself, let alone to organize jam sessions

Finding time to practice is tough! I am fortunate that I work 30 hours per week and can make time to practice for at least 30 minutes to an hour on most days. When time is tight I do things like practice electric bass in the kitchen while I am waiting for water to boil / food to cool / etc.

When I worked 40 hours per week often I didn't have energy to practice most days.

> I'm a serial hobbyist.

Same. I blame my brain's need to chase the dopamine rush.

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

If your net worth is less than $5,000,000 and you are currently working for a paycheck, setting up an alternative income stream that can someday hopefully replace your W2 income is one of the best things you can do for your long term financial security.

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.

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.