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For me, it's board games. I figured a few good board games could last a while. I'm sure you are (incorrectly) guessing the next step, that I just bought too many.
No, I bought Kingdom Death: Monster. And now I want the expansion packs, which combine to nearly $3000.
It’s a toss up between cooking and home networking for me.
Cooking because it started off as just finding neat recipes and giving them a shot to now experimenting with new techniques and harder to procure ingredients. My pantry looks like a mini spice market and keeping them fresh is its own hassle. Plus needing all the gear gets expensive!
I also got really into home networking during the start of the pandemic. I went from having a simple off the shelf mesh network to a full network rack in my basement serving some high end access points and cat6 drops in every room. Now I have a pretty secure iot stack that’s separate from my main vlan and one devoted to my work computer.
I have autism and ADHD, so all of them:
That's only my 30's which is the last 4 years. Hobbies for me are normally short and fierce obsessions when I start, they eventually slow down into a more 'normal' pasttime that I do sometimes to past the time.
Farming - family has been doing it for ~5 generations. I'd say we have put in about $10 M dollars over time (adjusted for inflation).
What's that dear? It's a way of life/occupation . . . are you sure? Seems like it must be a hobby given the return we've made on it over the years. Well, if you're sure.
My wife said that farming is technically an occupation and not a hobby. I still have my doubts given how much we have thrown away on it over the years, but I don't like to disagree with her (she's usually right).
In Clarksons Farm Jeremy made about 200£ before subsidies. So I can imagine how slim are these margins and how much you depend on subsidies.
This is something that's really hard for me. I'm against corn subsidies because I'm tired of everything having corn/corn syrup because it's so cheap. I think the subsidies should be based on something else that promotes variety, and also favors sustainable farming instead of monocropping with petroleum based fertilizer. I know it needs subsidized, because people are price sensitive, but it needs to be done differently.
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
Sex toys. My collection is worth more than my car.
Mechanical pencils. You can go from $6 Kuru Toga Advances to $60 rOtring 800s to $100+ imported Japan region exclusive Kuru Toga Dives
What is that sorcery?!
Clicked that link as fast as I could. I thought it would be cool, but didn't realise it would be that cool. Thank you
3d printing. I started out with a cheapish Chinese model, got annoyed by the lack of accuracy and bought a Prusa.
Then there’s the filaments, accessories, post processing stuff... I own a Dremel now for some reason!
And I’m constantly eyeing those resin 3d printers, telling myself the higher resolution is totally worth it…
The only thing saving my bank account is my low attention span and dozens of other interests :)
I am probably too late to this... But here goes.
Every damn time I get into something, I over do it.
I spent $13k on my kitchen stove, this one keeps giving, but that is $13,000.00 USD! Just for my kitchen stove. My range hood because it is required with my high output stove was $3k, and then let's talk makeup air to replace what is taken out by it.
Or what about woodworking? Yep, I wanted to do it, and still do. I have a half completed work bench, and some basic tools... That will be about $2k...
Let's buy a boat! Yep 29 years old, runs great... Break out another thousand...
But most recently, Plex... You know, let's get rid of subscriptions... Yeah, this year alone I have put $900 or so into that. Yep I sure saved money on canceling Netflix!
Music production. And IT in general.
But specifically the music production; started off as "I'll by FL Studio and muck around with it" to "I need ALL THE VSTs!". I've sunk like $2500 into it in the last two months (which is a hell of a lot of money to me), and I keep buying shit for it.
Am I any good at it? Fuck no. But it's not stopping me from keeping at it and buying shit I probably don't need :P
And the IT stuff consists of rack-mount servers and Pi's. I've sunk around $25k into it all over the last 12 years.
Hiking.
This.
You get some gear. It's nice, but heavy...then you realize there's so much lighter stuff out there.
$100/lbs later your congratulating yourself that your base weight is 15lbs until you add food and water, and you realize that your pack still is too heavy. You finally shave off another 2 lbs by buying all new luxury items at $30-$50 a pop, and getting a lighter stove.
Then winter comes, and that 4 season, dyneema tent looks mighty appealing. Not to mention you need a better rated sleeping bag (cause that hammock ain't gonna cut it) and a pad, a better puffy and fleece, crampons, maybe an ice pick, and another stove that works in the cold...
Edit. Damn it, I forgot I need new shoes...even if I wanted to brave it using my summer pair, those trail running shoes are destroyed over the course of 1 season.
Quilts ftw! So cozy. Not cheap.
Married to a quilter, can confirm both statements as facts!
Videogames. It has not been super expensive as I enjoy indie games the most, but still.
Pen and paper organization. This is recent. Due to a couple of mental disorders, I have problems remembering things and keeping organized. I was using a to-do list for my phone, but it was becoming less and less effective with time.
So I found a weekly planner online and I bought it telling myself that it was expensive, but it would be enough for a year and I wouldn't need anything else.
The planner has been great, by the way. Yet, when it arrived, I liked it so much that I had this classic feeling of not wanting to ruin it with my handwriting. I needed a good mechanical pencil! Erasable, yet stylized.
Then I thought the pages looked clean, but monotone. Stickers! What about my own creations? Thermal printer with sticker rolls! And so on and so on.
I am productive ...and addicted to stationery items.
Photography.
I started to really get into it back in 2015 with a Sony A6000 and a kit lens. Then you buy more, higher quality lenses. Then you buy better camera bodies with full frame sensor, then lenses that are full frame compatible. Then the various odds and end accessories. Then trips around the world to take pictures of things.
I have taken a break from photography recently, on account that having a kid doesn't allow me a lot of opportunity to edit my photos anymore. They say the best camera you have is the one that is on you. That has proven to be true while I try to be as present as possible around my daughter. I can quickly take out my phone, capture the moment and it will take care of most of the post processing edits that I can share with family later.
That was the first camera I got as well, and same story here. It's a hobby that gets expensive pretty quickly.
Photography ended up becoming a really expensive hobby for me. I started with a phone, and then realized I enjoyed doing wildlife photography, and you need a real camera with a decent zoom lens for that.
Art.
Gave up on buying and maintaining copics and just bought CSP. May have to switch to Krita at some point, but digital art is far more accessible than other mediums. Want a marker texture? The brushes for that are free, only real barrier is a graphics tabler.
Ketamine
Before you know it, you're spending 44 billion on a social media platform.