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)

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

Electronics projects mostly.

Mostly smart home PCBs and interconnect boards and 3D modelled housings. Examples:

• esp32-C3 dumb doorbell (just a doorbell that sends an MQTT message and sleeps the rest of the time). It works fatastic except that my Proximus ISP modem/router completely fucked up and so the network is no longer usable and I had to set it in bridge mode to a router it can’t reach. I want to release it, but haven’t had the time to water - resistance test it or make assembly instructions
• esp32-S3 voice assistant satellite attached to an IR blaster, I2S mic, and PCM5102 to control and send audio to my old Yamaha RX-496RDS to control it via IR and can play audio (local or Spotify) via music assistant. Pretty much an Alexa echo attached to my speaker system. PCB link which I am planning on releasing.
• My unfinished Flight Stick with custom electronics, fully custom 3D printable housing, etc… It is almost done, but needs like 2 more small iterations, but we moved and started doing a full-strip renovation, so my 3D printer is no longer set up because it is too dusty inside, and I don’t want to spend another $100 doing a PCB test iteration to use a better ADC with less components. Eventually as firmware practice, I want to rewrite the firmware in Rust or something. I also just looked at the Repo and the quick logo I drew up has been modified somehow without any commit. I know for a fact it was correct before. Very weird.

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’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 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!”

3d printing. !3dprinting@lemmy.world

homebrewing !homebrewing@sopuli.xyz

baking !bready@lemmy.world

drooling over big thighs !thiccmoe@ani.social

I am a filthy hobby hopper and I spend most of my disposable income on these.

• Tinkering with retro game handhelds and sometimes playing them
• Tinkering with bikes and sometimes riding them
• Tinkering with DIY watches and sometimes using them to tell time
• Also bird photography

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.

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’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.

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.

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.

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.

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!