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Hobbies are not for making money. That's what a job is for. Hobbies are where you sink the money you have left from your job and all the other expenses are paid.
That said.
Hobbies for me include:
Hiking (lots of good trails nearby)
Making sounds on my Synth (I'm building a case right now)
TTRPGS (when you can wrangle enough folks)
Skirmish Games (mainly Gaslands)
Video games (slay the spire, and casual WoW)
A lot of people have a hobby that they can either recoup some costs of the hobby, or earn some beer money. Arts and crafts may have the occasional fair or flea market, or even an online store or ko-fi.
In my experience though, once you try to turn a hobby into a primary source of income, that becomes a job and is no longer as fun as it was as a hobby.
IMO as soon as a hobby produces any sort of money, it becomes a side gig. Maybe not a profitable side gig, but a side gig none the less.
Warning - do not make your creative/fun hobby the one that also makes you money. I've met several people who were into woodworking as a hobby, started doing it on commission for family, friends, referrals, etc, and it quickly became a job rather than a fun hobby. The timelines and demands that come with doing commissions killed it for them, they still occasionally do woodworking as gifts/favors, but very explicitly just for family and close friends without timelines, and only charge for materials
I am strongly considering hanging a shingle as a furniture maker. A few stars have to align first but it'll probably happen in 2025.
Your warning is valid. I was a project manager for a custom building/rapid prototyping shop before the pandemic, I'm used to customers, deadlines and budgets. Compared to what I'm doing now, I think I'd rather be in command of a workshop again.
The funds go in, the fun goes out.
Electronics projects mostly.
Mostly smart home PCBs and interconnect boards and 3D modelled housings. Examples:
I also have tons of new project ideas that I don't have time for.
My other hobbies
weightlifting, again completely dropped off due to every free moment renovating
Running a home server with replacement services for everything I need
Running (my motivation has been 0 recently...)
cooking. I try to do a few new recipes per month
gardening. With the renovation, I just grew a few courgettes, tomatoes, and squash this year
video games (more of a de-stresser nowadays than a hobby, most recently casual rocket league with friends is fun, hadn't played since 2018 or so)
I do woodworking as a hobby. It doesn't make money unless you invest in a full workshop and scale up production to the point where it would basically be a second job. Often the material costs alone are as much as it would cost to buy a completed item.
I'd still recommend it as a creative outlet though. There's something satisfying about seeing that coffee table in the lounge and thinking "yeah I made that!"
Fishing has been great for me. Gives ya a chance to learn what's around you by researching local waterways and what fish live in em. Then connect with them by studying their habits throughout the year and their diet. You plan your tackle box and rod set up around that and test your studies by trying to catch the dang things. And in the process of that you get some lovely, peaceful scenery and maybe a hike.
It's fairly cheap, too. The fishing gear on Ali Express is damn good for the price and while I can see arguments on spending on a quality rod and reel, I'll tell ya I prefer my $65 Pflueger President spinning reel, but I wouldn't have paid that much if I had used the $12 one I got on Ali Express first. You'll be replacing line, lures and hooks somewhat often when you start anyway so no reason to break the bank.
In the winter months, I do more model building and painting indoors. Gunpla don't have to be expensive and you can go all out on learning new techniques to erase mold lines and seamlessly join parts and that kinda technique learning keeps me engaged. Plus, when you're done, you have something you can put on display. I also give completed kits away to younger relatives when I get tired of it or I wanna try the kit again with new techniques.
As far as fitness, it's not quite a hobby, but I hop on a stationary bike and watch star trek. I fucking love Star Trek!
I crochet and I recently bought a 3d printer. My husband does woodworking and gardening and i help with those sometimes.
I'm an electronics hobbyist. I have a whole big tacklebox full of components, wires, microcontrollers etc, I'm an amateur radio operator, I build gaming PCs, etc. Kind of difficult to make money with this hobby, but it's often a good mind exercise and you can be creative building things. I also save myself money by fixing things around the house with my tools.
I'm a woodworker. I built a cutting board this weekend, a walnut/maple brick pattern. Turned out pretty good. Keeping a woodworking hobby from devolving into tool collecting can be a trick.
I'm a guitarist, have been since I was 11. Can be a fairly cheap way to burn some time, get an inexpensive guitar, a few picks, etc. Occasionally get to show off at a bonfire when someone breaks out an acoustic.
I grow a small vegetable garden, and I can some of what I produce. Pizza sauce and jelly mostly. Mint jelly is surprisingly nice to have around the house and it's not that difficult to make. And mint plants are eternal. The biggest struggle to growing mint is to keep it from escaping containment.
I don't care about making money with my hobbies, I do them to help me feel better and have some good time. As a whole we're all already way too focused on making money, at least that's what I think.
Great advice.
And in the walking vein, good shoes are essential. If you can’t afford new shoes then good insoles are the next best thing and almost as good. Any aftermarket insoles are better than what comes with any shoe (and I mean any, that’s the thing they all cheap out on). You can buy what fits your foot (flat, medium, high arch) and they make walking painless.
And in the walking vein, good shoes are essential. If you can’t afford new shoes then good insoles are the next best thing
100%. And I should have mentioned it as, back when I started to walk daily, I almost gave up because of the shit shoes I was using. They were hurting my feet and my back and they were reducing my endurance, like really. Investing in decent shoes (and orthopaedic insoles made for my feet) changed everything. I probably would never have started walking as much as I do without those. Money very well spend, in both case.
I am a filthy hobby hopper and I spend most of my disposable income on these.
I own an LGS, so my hobbies have become part of my job. Before i opened i built and painted miniatures, and played a lot of miniature games. I also played RPGs and MTG quite a bit.
Now, i guess my hobbies would be my old job, audio engineering.
I guess those letters mean something in English.
Local games shop, role-playing game, magic the gathering
Somehow still can't understand a few of those words. Yeah, I'm dumb.
A local game shop is a shop where you can go and purchase games, typically board games, card games (tcg, or trading card games, lcg, or living card games), miniature games, role-playing games (Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, Werewolf the Apocalypse, Vampire the Masquerade, and many many others) in which you assume the role of a character you create and roll dice to help randomize the successes and failures of your character. To go with the RPGs and miniature games I also sell dice.
Magic the Gathering is the first, largest, and oldest of the Trading Card Games (TCGs) where you buy packs of randomized cards and use those cards to build a deck to compete against other players. Other games in the genre as Pokémon TCG, YuGiOh!, Lorcana, Flesh and Blood, Weiß Schwarz, and Star Wars Unlimited.
Aren't they usually called FLGS (Friendly local game store)? Or is yours just decidedly unfriendly? :>
Both are used. The F is a recent addition and seems to throw a lot of people do most of the shops I know just use LGS. That said I am a grumpy old neurodivergent, so the F can be questionable (this is a joke, I mask for almost all customers).
Beekeeping, rowing, swimming, knitting, photography, gardening. I also do quite a bit of tech stuff, and some sewing and baking. None of it is for income, though I have been paid for a few photos.
Beekeeping is far and away the most absorbing and interesting hobby I've ever had. Where I live there are very active local associations that support learning and hold social events. The national association organises courses at all levels. A government department sends out bee inspectors to check for disease; great support and another learning opportunity.
If you want to, you can make good money from selling honey. It's a lot of hard work, but really enjoyable.
PC gaming, being bi sexual, eating hot chip, psychedelics, disc golf
Now playing Huarache Lights by Hot Chip
Fitness: cycles through the year, some combination of running, indoor climbing, rowing or dragonboat, backpacking
Creative: woodcarving, music, gardening
Moneymaker: nope, I am fortunate enough to have one job with good salary. I do not turn hobbies into side hustles.
Instead of moneymaking, the third category I look for is social. Many of my hobbies can be solo, so I want to make sure I'm doing something that has me out meeting new people. And that my socialization doesn't become predominantly meeting friends in bars.
3d printing. [email protected]
homebrewing [email protected]
baking [email protected]
drooling over big thighs [email protected]
I was with you up until big thighs. ...though I will say I don't mind them, I wouldn't call it a hobby.
Toats down with brewing, baking and 3d printing fo sho though.
My theory also is to have 3 hobbies but a different take: One that you can do at home when you have free time, I play guitar. One that gets you out of the house, I fly fish. One that gives you something to look forward to, I used to go on monthly backpacking trips but as I get older they're turning into fishing trips
I do:
Yoga
Gardening
Baking (sourdough)
Do occasionally draw or paint too.
I think you have to find something you actually enjoy. If you are good at swimming, triathlon is a great idea but the long distance ones do take a lot of training time.
I don't try to monetize hobbies anymore, it's a drag.
I'm heavily into sport kites. These are controllable kites with 2 or 4 lines. It's an outdoor activity that can get fairly physical depending on what you are up to. There's a very small community, mostly focused in coastal areas, but it exists all over the world.
Once you get some basic skills, most people shift toward flying to music as a ballet individually or with a group as a team. If you get good enough, there are travel opportunities where kite festivals pay for all or part of your travel expenses to perform at festivals. I've been all over the US and to 11 countries across the world to fly kites in my 18 years in the community.
Past that, there's also kite making that is a nice extension of the hobby. I build my own sport kites, and build them for others on occasion. There are open source sport kite plans out there, I've got a few on my website (https://watty.us), but there are even more at https://kareloh.com.
A good starting place to get into the hobby might be https://sportkite.org, or some Facebook groups like Sport Kite Pilots Lounge.
Boardgaming and RPGs kind of tie into my profession in design. I see my job as organizing information, so when I play games I’m just naturally working out ways to present the information for myself or other players as efficiently as possible. Or I’m writing/designing homebrew material because for some reason I get inspired sometimes.
My physical “hobby” is walking/exercise, though I have hard time calling that a hobby, it’s just something I do without thinking about it, it’d be like calling eating a hobby, it’s just something I do that seems important for my survival.
Adding to the interesting lists here: As a sport for me I found bouldering and climbing. I don't like sport but bouldering is not about sport but about getting up that stupid wall, and it feels amazing.
I have multiple hobbies, some require my brain (programming, electronics, engineering and stuff like that) Others not so much (music production/playing live sets, building dioramas, woodworking, metalworking, working on my motorcycle or cooking) And I can highly recommend to get hobbies that both require some concentration and creativity so you can have some balance :) Good luck!
Lifting weights, motorcycle, programming at home for fun and not profit.
Lifting weights is awesome. You can do it with friends, but I tend to go solo. It’s meditative and humbling. At the same time, it’s an absolute ego boost to start seeing your progress and comparing with others.
Motorcycling is a ton of fun, but quite expensive. Buying a bike is a gut punch, then all the over priced gear. You can be thrifty about it using Facebook marketplace but you’re gonna be out quite a bit of money.
I’m a software engineer at work, but I honestly enjoy programming. I have a discord bot or two that I wrote just for my discord channel with some buddies. I also run 4 raspberry pi’s at home that require occasional IT work to do their various tasks. It’s low risk and rewarding and helps keep me a little sharper at my day job.
I'm in the researching stage of my next hobbies: pigeon fancying/racing and ham radio. This spring is going to be a wild one at my place!
Engaging with the fediverse at the moment
3d printing, soap making, mantis keeping and board games when I can find people to play with.
Hobbies that are creative for me are cooking/baking/canning. Which reminds me, I need to get apples for apple butter.
I've been making mechanical keyboards "from scratch" for the last year or so. I leverage a lot of pre-built parts and existing tools of course, but I tweak the standard layouts to fit what I want to do, fabricate the plates and cases with my laser engraver and 3D printer, assemble everything, wire them up to the switches and the microcontroller (usually "dead bug" hand-wiring, but I have done a very basic PCB in KiCAD as well), and configure the firmware. It leverages a lot of my other interests, provides an opportunity to improve incrementally between projects, and results in a product that is legitimately pleasant to use.
Little bastards are piling up, though.
I'm currently in the process of building my first mechanical keyboard. I have a Lily58 mostly assembled, in the troubleshooting steps now. It's been a fun project so far.
I'd like to do a proper split as a project, but I don't properly touch-type, so there's a pretty large learning curve that I'm not particularly interested in overcoming. Before I accepted my truth, my second handwire was a permanent split that just bundled the matrix wires into a ratchet-ass cable. It works fine, but I just never used it, even enough to want to do a refined version.
Triathlon is 3 hobbies!
3d printing and role-playing. I print miniatures that my friends and I paint. Then we use them in our games.
Fairly consistently: 3D printing, wood working, amateur radio, RC cars, and cooking.
Also playing with: sewing, tablet weaving, lifting weights, and guitar.
I don't have any. I play videogames almost every day but it's just more out of routine than enjoyment, hell few days playing ranked matches ruins my mood and I quit before losing because fuck them, is ruining my night anyways.
For fitness running, walking and weightlifting. For creativity reading, writing, sketching. For money, software development.
I'd recommend keeping a semi regular (daily to weekly) diary above everything else. It's been invaluable to be able to check in with myself. It's also fun to work on your lettering.
i took up drawing this year and enjoy it a lot, i'm not good at it quite yet but it is cheap to start, fun, you can do it pretty much anywhere, and it's given me a nice confidence boost tbh because i was always convinced it was something i could never do. i like that i'm always learning something new with it too, and progressing in a visible way. i'm not looking at it with the aim of making money though, it's for fun & good for my brain. highly recommend.
games, specifically far cry 2, 3 & 4 and overwatch. And punk shows, getting beaten up in a mosh while very drunk is truly refreshing/entertaining
Hobby websites, microelectronics, amateur radio, guitar, and guitar pedals
