make homebrew software for an old Nintendo console
pick up cross stitching or weaving
make an independent film with a friend; use stuff from your kitchen as props
find a borderline functional instrument at your local thrift store
write a 1 page short story in pen
it's not enough anymore to merely criticize this bad time we're having
In the past few years I’ve done serveral of the things on your list in earnest and they are all easier to do today (specifically technical things) than they were 25 years ago (except maybe writing with a pen).
Edit to add: if I have to join another messaging platform for a single, specific group I’m going to move to the woods and require written correspondence. It’s automated phone service level of frustration.
Edit: Also people were having more kids back then and earlier in life, so they had less time for hobbies and "finding one's self", they'd be busy with their kids and work.
The bored DINKS with free time looking for hobbies is a relatively recent phenomenon in western societies (10-15 years).
With this logic, nobody also "needs" to buy a Ford F-250 Super Duty, a MacBook Pro M5, an RTX 5090, a recreational boat, drink Starbucks daily, etc if your definition of "needs" is just limited to day survival meaning just providing food and shelter but nothing more, and yet people buy them anyway, because it's entertainment, not because they need them to survive.
People will still want escapism and entertainment ESPECIALLY when their lives suck, like in times of economic depression, be it cigarettes, booze, junk food, porn, games, gambling, movies and TV shows, etc, even if you think people don't "need" them. This is how people function. It's scientifically documented.
Its disingenuous to describe those new expenses without considering those that largely have been replaced.
It used to be normal to pay for cable TV which was outrageously expensive. They used to go to movie theatres on a regular basis, and collect physical media for movies and music and games and tv. Etc.
Lol but I went to a flea market the other day with $100 thinking that was going to go far — I managed to buy one jacket for $80. So… I dunno.
The ability to be a small time artist, musician, etc and live in the 90s depended on the combined effects of technology and local organisations. You could play on pirate radio, you could go on benefits without too much hassle, you could stay at a squat, you could make your own physical products cheaply, there were lots of venues to play at, you could sell your products for cash and keep it.
The internet makes the distribution of music files cheap and easy, but combined with the increased technologising of society, the rest of the infrastructure that made the 90s a time where culture felt like it was on an e-rush with everyone else have fallen apart.
I notice that all the advertising examples you listed are about spending time and not money, I'm wondering if there's something there?
You're right. The economy is... fucked. The "great wealth transfer" will be vacuumed up quickly, and it'll get worse.
World of Warcraft (of all things) had this kind of issue with stats and damage numbers getting into the absurd range, so they did a stat crunch. We need a global stat crunch.
Rinse and repeat.
You think 19th century workers had time for 8h of hobbies per day? Let me have what you've been smoking because that's some good stuff.
>when people's leisure time is being eaten up by their commute and other responsibilities
You think 19th century people had no/less responsibilities?
How out of touch do you have to be to see yourself as more oppressed than 19th century workers, when you have abundant food in the supermarkets you don't have to farm, door to door food delivery, online solvable bureaucracy, cars, planes, ambulances and emergency rooms with MRIs, CT scanners and cures for most diseases, OSHA, social security, longest life expectancy ever in the history of mankind, residential heating and cooling at your fingertips, etc. stuff even kings in the 19th century didn't have, a society where you can live a life where you never have to leave your house if you don't want to, yet somehow you think workers had a more leisurely life back then. WHAT?!
> 15 hours work.
Put yourself in the position of an employer trying to start/run a business today. Are your customers gonna pay you extra so you can pay your workers for their private chores and commute?
- An older neighbor counseling the has-things-relatively-great-but-unhappy-anyway protagonist in Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road
If you do things for money, you optimize not for fun, but for return of (time) investment. Which is only fun if you have other issues.
I guess platforms like TikTok might better be thought of as "want to peep in on what a bunch of people do for money now?" which makes it feel (paradoxically, since it is a performance) a bit invasive and unseemly.
The early dialup and BBS world was magic and it pulls everything completely off of the standard channels.
I was trying to do Enigma with a captive portal wifi setup and a (heavily stylized) terminal in a browser. Figured a pi zero w2 might do the job on solar.
The idea was occasional fidonet pickup, some door games, and probably disabled file base. I could seed a few on friends and family porches in the neighborhood, and just see if anyone uses them.
It (enigma) was proving to be a real pain though, and I decided to shelve it for a bit.
The Hackaday one: https://hackaday.com/2026/05/04/esp32-hosts-solarpunk-messag...
I recently retired. I've programmed for 50 years, both for work and for fun. My son asked: so what's your project? I had to think about it, and I've decided to learn GPU programming - something completely new to me.
With AI as a tutor, this will be massively easier than at any time in the past. In some ways, the state of AI now is reminiscent of the state of the internet 25 years ago.
Or, on the internet, stop spending your valuable time on bottom-feeder content like medium articles, facebook, twitter/bluesky, rant blogs, news websites etc.
So 99% of posts on Hackernews, got it.
Thanks for checking it out. There's currently over 30K blogs in the feed and we try to diversify it as much as possible. We welcome anyone to contribute more blogs, video channels and comics here:
https://github.com/kagisearch/smallweb#%EF%B8%8F-guidelines-...
I mean look at cities, removing parks, benches, trying to make it impossible to even stand without paying for existing. The countryside is all bought up, every inch of grass owned and people itching to tell you to get the fuck off their property. Can't do anything anywhere anymore.
You'd have to go somewhere incredibly remote to find any boldness left, like international waters or the Australian outback. The civilized world is just bureaucracy with extra steps.
You’re missing out if you think that. People come from all over the world to hike, bikepack, or van-dwell American wilderness. Since Covid there has been a big boom in ”weekender” routes that Americans can do in their own neck of the woods. And if there’s so much reward in the USA, think about what rewards await in other countries that have even less of a culture of territorialness and privatization.
It’s amazing how good just fermenting juice from the supermarket with a bit of added sugar can be.
It teaches patience and the blip blop of an airlock is a terrifically calming way to mark the passage of time.
The internet was special because it was a place to share those weird, human endeavors.
I can do all I want in the solitude of my home but I want to share it! The internet is where you can find people with common interests that you can't find in people you know IRL. That was the escape. Finally you feel less alone, a stranger on the other side of the world feels the same way!
That's what was optimized. We were herded into centralized algorithmic bubbles, optimized for creation and consumption but not for sharing. Sharing has some care in it, a common need for something, a connection between two or more people. The internet has been optimized for consumption. Everyone is consuming in the same place, repeating the same jokes, and it all moves too fast to even recognize the same usernames you might see.
It all moves too fast, there's little incentive for platform owners to make a place where people actually connect at the speed of human socializing because if you're busy connecting, you're not seeing the next ad.
Also I'd just like to add, reddit killed the classic forum. Many are gone, some are holding on by a thread. You can't just "avoid the bad parts" because the bad parts consumed the good parts.
And I'm aware that these are different activities, but I don't think they should be as far apart emotionally as they end up being?
For example the last discussion I had we talked about how I was exploring connecting the impact of actions in the small scale to the large scale, for example how designing a particular construct or vehicle, would change how efficiently a player would be able to mine and that would then impact how much that particular player made from mining in that area
This creates all sorts of interesting questions and even just that discussion was engaging
Tinkering with retro consoles has also been very satisfying. I would say more than half of the consoles in my home are modded in some way or another. My kids love it.
Then of course there’s film photography. Talk about a great way to force yourself to be intentional and patient. You can buy any dinky camera and a nifty 50 for like $100, it’ll work just fine. Just get out there and shoot and send off your rolls to be processed. Even just getting one or two good shots out of a roll feels fantastic. Every single photo you take matters and is memorable. It’s refreshing.
B: "You are still perfectly capable of having fun in life"
I don't really get how B follows from A. B is true, but A wasn't implying not-B.
Nothing about what I did was impressive. I’m a novice at best. But I haven’t felt so fulfilled in such a long time. I had a serious moment of thinking, “I wish I could quit my career and just repair electronics for people.”
Yes, 99.99(however many 9s)% of the internet is walled-garden advertising garbage.
But, you can exist in the remaining space and bring your friends along!
I run my website and my blog like I've always done (since 1994), I run mailing lists for a few topics (some date back to 1991) and subscribe to many others. Zero corporate involvement, no ads, no monopolist in control. Just peer to peer real people. I run my email server so I can communicate without depending on the monopolists. There are still hobby forums for specialty topics, or start your own! I even still read Usenet weekly. And so on...
The fun parts of the Internet used to be all of it, now it is a niche, but it's still there for you. Keep it alive!
Maybe the day is getting closer when anything and everything internet-related is so drenched in uncanny artifice and extractionary intention that people will yearn for imperfect, multidimensional reality, and feel like the best thing they can do with their time is walk through the park with a friend.
Ironically, it was the Jacquard Loom that made redundant a generation of highly-skilled, mostly female, weavers.
Of course, any human can choose to take up this hobby manually, but we will never again compete in the job market with machines that are accurate, blindingly fast, and so far haven’t demanded the right to vote
https://youtu.be/IvHaL2BxqvM?t=151
We can still do that.
The Internet used to be really good at random, unscripted collaboration. But the winner-takes-all nature of modern social media means that if you do not optimize your presentation for maximum engagement, you will not even be noticed.
Even people who would've greatly enjoyed what you have to tell them will instead be fed a mix of generic engagement slop, sort-of relevant influencer videos, vaguely targeted ads and political propaganda.
It sometimes still is, albeit only on niche sites like tumblr, which created Goncharov (1973) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goncharov_(meme)