Edit: so it turns out that every hobby can be expensive if you do it long enough.
Also I love how you talk about your hobby as some addicts.
Electronics / microcontrollers.
Took just a few months to go from, “I can make a wifi connected weather station for like $20 in components!?” to “oscilloscopes cost how much?”
Self-hosting apps / homelab
Getting used enterprise gear is not prohibitively expensive, but the electric bills balloon very quickly.
Knitting. Super cheap to start, you can pick up a set of needles and some acrylic yarn for under $20. But when you start getting into nice yarns and bigger pieces, you are spending hundreds of dollars on yarn alone for a blanket or a sweater. And you want nice needles in all sizes as well as all types (double pointed, regular and circular)… more hundreds of dollars.
Moral of the story is if a friend knits you something with nice yarn, please appreciate it. Lots of effort and thought went into it.
Coffee.
I blame James Hoffman entirely.
Within a year I went from:
Drinking instant coffee at home, but really enjoying “proper coffee”
To
Buying a cafetiere (~£15) + preground coffee
To
Buying a Nespresso (~£60 on offer) + pods
To
Buying a budget espresso machine (~£120) + preground coffee
To
Wasting my money on a cheap manual coffee grinder (~£50) + beans
To
Immediately replacing it with an entry level Sage grinder (~£170)
To
Buying an entry Level “proper” espresso machine (~£700)
It took me a good 2-3 weeks of practicing and dialling in before pulling a good shot of coffee that I’d actually want to drink, but by that point it was also about learning a new skill, learning how different aspects of the process affect the end result and learning how to make all sorts of different espresso-based drinks.
My girlfriend thought I was nuts at first, but a year or so later even she agrees it was worth the investment. I still for the life of me can’t get the hang of latte art though.
The problem is now though that I’m a waaaay more critical of coffee from coffee shops, because I spent a long time making bad coffee whilst learning!
Mechanical keyboards. The next one is my endgame, I swear. Just one more groupbuy for those keycaps. It never truly ends.
Growing cannabis (legal here in Canada)
…anyone can grow weed. Growing GOOD weed is an art.
Running.
Was supposed to be the cheapest way to get exercise. You can do it right from your front door, no gym subscriptions, no specialized equipment (some people will tell you you don’t even need shoes), and it’s far and away the best time-value exercise I’ve ever found. You can get away with like 20 minutes 3-4 times a week and be doing great.
Well, turns out I love running and I love distance running so I’m now putting up enough miles to need new shoes 2-3 times a year, a nice Garmin smart watch and heart rate monitor to track my progress, sign-ups for several long-distance races each year, shorts, socks, you get the picture.
Could I do it cheaper? Yeah. But at the end of the day it’s a hobby and I like it
You realize it’s an addiction when you intend to do 5k. Realize after that Strava didn’t work properly on your watch and then you end up doing a second 5k because the first 5k didn’t count.
Finish marathon
Legs on fire
Garmin says you only ran 25.6 miles
Have to run another half mile at race pace (so you don’t ruin your stats) to make sure you get credit for a marathon
Dang. Congrats on your sweet tangents! Every race I run, ESPECIALLY that kinda distance, my watch is always going to be a bit over.
I was running for a couple of years , and my knee started to give me problems.
I went to an orthopedic Dr, and his advice was to take up swimming and if I wanted to keep running that I should hold on to his business card because someone needed to pay for his kids’ college.
I stopped running soon after and avoided surgery for a decade, but it still caught up with me. Knees are definitely cheap with for-profit healthcare.
This is why shoes these days are super engineered cushions essentially. Don’t skimp on shoes if you’re young and reading this, buy the good shit because it’s good (and usually it’s more expensive). $200 now saves thousands in replacements and tons of pain along the way.
I felt the same way about running until I started getting into triathlons. Watch out for that trap; races are at least $200 each, and road bikes ain’t cheap!
I’m just getting into cycling and I’m super lucky to have gotten my dad’s old tri bike for free. He had it all kitted out and it’s pretty well perfect for me. It was in pristine shape until I wrecked it a couple times. One of them requiring 24 stitches.
So I guess that’s the most expensive hobby I’ve had - not in terms of financial cost, but definitely in terms of blood drawn!
Protip if you’re not used to race bikes: they can be a lot twitchier than you might be used to!
I already have a lovely gravel bike that I am comfortable making my Last Bike Ever ™. I mean the frame is great but I’ve been looking at upgrading the group set… It’s cheaper if I do the work myself!
I fucking love trail running gear and I’m not afraid to admit it
Oh yeah, forgot about that one. You thought you just needed one pair of shoes? Well, no I need a different pair for trail running and road running. And it gets cold here and I like to run in the winter so that’s a whole other set of clothing I gotta have. And let’s don’t even get started talking about how the grocery bill gets hiked up during the training cycle…
Still cheaper than my cycling hobby!
The races are so expensive! I can’t justify signing into one yet, I’m ready to run a half marathon but I’ll wait until I can run a nice full marathon since it’s almost the same price
They can be wildly expensive, and some truly aren’t worth it. I almost always opt to donate the shirt I get because frankly I’m a little picky about my gear and they’re rarely good quality, but even beyond that I’ve run a few where the race coordinators just haven’t got a clue how to host a race and I really start to question why I even paid to register at all.
Fortunately I’ve found an amazing local company that hosts trail runs and is managed by a former ultramarathoner and they’re the best races I’ve been a part of. I also feel good about paying a local small business.
Good luck making it to your first marathon 😀
Every so often you read something where someone perfectly summarised your own thoughts and experiences.
I bought myself a raspberry pi for my birthday a few years ago.
I now have thousands of dollars in hardware sitting in a server rack in my office. Whoops.
This is not the first post where I feel it but I love it so much that we have a lot of people on Lemmy that can talk about things not related to computers!
Except the selfhost crowd here.
Lol that was going to be mine… from using an old laptop as an xbmc->Plex server to running a thread ripper UnRaid server with 48TB and 2TB cache
There is large thread for this somewhere down.
Yes but that’s only good. I’m a computer guy too, but I couldn’t talk much about anything else, and I want to read about other topics too, besides this
For me it is maybe camping.
I just tested my new sleeping bag - under 0.5kg rated to -5°C. And realised that I bought/ replaced lots of gear to higher quality gear over few years.
Board games. Things get expensive once you start collecting
But you don’t understand, I totally need that 30$ Oceania expansion for my Wingspan that I will play maybe twice a year
Oooh right - I totally forgot about that expansion! I should finally unbox it and prepare it to be played just in case…
My board game group usually buys games more often than we have time to meet and play, so it just comes with this hobby I guess. A friend told me all the time about the stack of three games he had bought and never played and that we still need to play them and then informed me today, that he has just bought Council of Shadows…
The stack of shame of never-played games is real… Everyone ends up defaulting to the same selection of tried and true games of the group because nobody wants to learn a new thing when you can just get to playing immediately, it’s very unfortunate
European expansion is worth it! I like the round end goals!
I swear I’ve tried to enjoy the European expansion but some of the birds require you to pull some Hannibal Barca 4d chess shit to use them properly
Here are some pubs where you can borrow games and play them there.
But it is usually tradeoff - good game selection and bad beer, or bad games and great beer.
For me it was D&D: all those fucking books, dice and lead figurines.
deleted by creator
I had to create a “if you add one, you sell one” rule after running out of shelf space.
Coffee. I’m in a coffee producing country. It could be as cheap as grabbing a bag from the coffee institute (really good and cheap), a cloth filter and call it a day. Instead, I’m on my second espresso machine, fourth grinder, second portafilter set, and have all the doodads to make it just how I like it.
I am starting to become more interested in coffee, but even so I don’t think I want to put this much effort into my coffee. Coffee gives me energy, so it can’t be too difficult.
Started like that for me. Used to buy shitty coffee cups from the gas station. Upgraded to a moka pof, then to french press, chemex, v60, aeropress, and landed on espresso about two years back. Slippery slope
Same with tea…Once you get to loose tea , the step to importing tea is not very far.
Oh the import tax and shipping :(Fortunately here are few shops that import themselves.
But you reminded me that I need new kettle to my new house.
My pleasure. Don’t foget to buy more tea than you have storage.
Just get more storage.
Yup! Used to drink cheap black tea, went to the UK and bought Yorkshire gold. Ain’t no way I’m going back to the cheap stuff.
Spiffing Brit made me improve my tea game, curse his charismatic influencing!
Exactly! I was fine drinking Bigelow and Twinnings before!
So the other day my brother came visiting and brought with him a new portafilter for my run of the mill espresso machine. We messed around with setting the grinder, measuring the exact amount of coffee, and so on and we did get a decent cup of coffee. Thing is, I can live with my old bad coffee, my peasant taste buds don’t really tell the difference, so I’d rather spend my dough on the other 99 things that deplete the bank account. But to you, who make a passion out of brewing coffee, more power to you!
Oh I started that way too. I’m not as deep into the rabbithole as I could be, but I’ve gotten far enough I know how to make a good enough cup of joe (which by all accounts of people whom I’ve made coffee for, is pretty damn good). I’ve had to balance that hobby with my other hobbies, and well… It turned out to be my cheapest hobby, sadly.
Don’t listen to the others. What you are doing is good. I, too, am obsessed with a decent cup.
Just yesterday, I was out with my wife and we went to a coffee shop. I got a superlative cappuccino and picked up a pretty expensive bag of beans meant for espresso. So good.
When I was younger, I could never afford this sort of thing, but as I get older I can’t really enjoy a lot of other things and don’t need to spend much to live other than basic expenses. :)
Man, lucky you got coffee shops around that serve food coffee, I got 2 shops in the whole of my city that serve decent, not good, coffee.
It’s a big city so there’s a few. I don’t get out much, though. :)
I needed a new saucepan.
I’ve now replaced half my kitchen.
Fountain pens - I started with a 30 euro Parker but it seems like just one is never enough.
Reading. Bear with me…you start by getting a cheap physical or digital copy of the book. Then you fall in love with the book/author. Then you have to buy all the books by that author…but not the cheap editions…the fancy editions! You need to display these babies! And oh! They sell cool collectors items that would be perfect for the book shelf! Rinse and repeat for so…so many books. Sigh.
Sounds like your hobby isn’t actually reading, but collecting books
Only half of that is actually about reading. The rest is just showing off.
You leave my Way of Kings leatherbound and Year of Sanderson boxes alone!
You start at the library… then you read a series they only have the first 2 of and fall in love.
So you need to buy the third one somewhere… then you have a choice to make, do you really buy JUST the third of a series? May as well just buy the box set…
You sound like my friend. She owns multiple editions of the same books because there was a fancy cover but then the books had matching covers with related books but oh look they made an illustrated edition!
My wife and I have a room with an entire wall full of books, more in numerous bookcases around the house, and a couple boxes of books that aren’t on shelves. They’re mostly bought second hand on eBay, dirt cheap. Reading is cheap. Collecting pristine/fancy copies is expensive.
