Letting go of old hobbies

Something I’ve lamented the last year or so is it feels like I don’t have anything that I would consider a hobby. To me, a hobby is something that helps you unwind at the end of the day. Or, helps you relieve stress. It could do neither of those things, but it is something you consider fun and is outside of your normal day-to-day activities. I realized today I no longer think of tech as a hobby and I need to find something else.

This is not for the reasons you may be thinking.

There’s lots (I mean a lot) of folks that are coming to terms with abandoning tech as a hobby. The vast majority of these people are turned off from tech because of what it has become. They are no longer excited about tech because of the how big tech has destroyed the industry.

I get it.

This is not me. The reason I’m losing tech as a hobby is because I’m content with what I have.

I love Linux. I love self-hosting. I love homelabbing. I’ve reached a place now that all of those things fit my needs. I’m not a dev or a sysadmin. I don’t need to learn any of these tools for my job, a promotion, or to make the next big start-up. I exclusively do it for fun. Tech has little to no bearing on my work life. As a landscape contractor, 99.9% of our business comes from word of mouth. There are 3 of us in the company and we are all related. The only time I have to use a computer at work is to accept a credit card from a customer or program their smart controller. I have no reason to go deep on anything tech for my job or my place in the world.

I realized tech is no longer a hobby for me while trying to figure out some new projects to work on. Nothing is exciting because everything I have works exactly the way I want it to. I don’t need to distro-hop any more, I love Debian and have my desktop configured exactly the way I want it. My homelab is perfect. All the services I want, running the way I want them to. I don’t need to try Kubernetes. I don’t need Ceph. Everything I run is for max 5 people. Gigabit LAN is good enough for me. Hell, the only time I’m actually using a computer nowadays is to write posts for my blog and run backups.

This is why I can’t find new projects. Why disrupt what I have? I gain nothing except unnecessary complexity. The key here is what I have is enough.

Admitting this has been good for me. I feel like something has been lifted off my shoulders. I have been trying for so long to continue tech as a hobby and trying to force myself into finding joy in it. I thought because I couldn’t find new projects there was something wrong with me. But, there isn’t. I put on my movies in Jellyfin, write my notes in Nextcloud, read my news in FreshRSS, and hang with cool folks on my own GoToSocial instance. This is enough. I’m happy with it. I love my desktop so much I do everything I can to not disrupt it.

What about NixOS? I don’t need it.

What about Podman and Quadlets? No thanks, Docker Compose has been working great for me.

What about A.I. services? I have no use for them.

For the first time in my life I can say I’m content with my tech and its role in my life.

So, onto new horizons. What that is I have absolutely no idea. Yet, I think it is important for me to recognize that my fixation on tech is at the end. Some of this is age. Now that I’m well into my 40’s life is just different. Different things matter to me. The amount of time I spend on a computer matters. There is so much in life I still want and I’m not going to find it on a new distro or testing out that new social media network.

All this being said, I think people are allowed to change at any point in time for any reason. I don’t know where I heard it first, but this quote has stuck with me every day since I first heard it:

“Be who you need to be right now.”

In my 30’s while I was chasing a career change tech was vital to my life. In my 40’s, watching my kids become adults and dealing with health significant personal issues, tech is the last thing on my mind. I’m still happy with it. I still enjoy following others escapades. I love reading about other people’s projects and what they are learning. However, I’m done with following the news. I’m done following trends. I’m done finding new projects. If something comes by that catches my interest, I may peek at it.

But why disrupt what I have? Its mine and its perfect for me.

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