Yes. I haven’t read the book but there was an excellent documentary about the author and his research .
Bellringing.
Dominoes is a popular pub game in the UK.
(or it was when I was last a pub regular, which is now ~30 years ago 
!!!!!!)
There’s a bowling center a couple of miles from my home, and we’ve driven by on some nights when they couldn’t have squeezed another car in the parking lot. They have a bar too, but that’s never been a destination unto itself. It’s patrons are mostly bowlers. I don’t know who all of those people are, but there a lot of them. That said, there used to be several bowling alleys in our area, and now there are only two.
Someone mentioned civic organizations that have fallen by the wayside. Lions, Jaycees, Kiwanis, Rotary and women’s civic clubs have died or are on life support.. Not so long ago there were lots of chapters in our area. Younger people just don’t have the time or inclination to be involved.
Volunteerism in general is on the wane. I have a parttime job at a museum, and we have lots of volunteers, but they are all middle-aged or older. I doubt we have any under 50, and most are in their 70s and 80s.
One exception may be volunteer fire fighters. That seems to attract some younger folks, but not nearly enough. Most “volunteer” fire departments around here have paid staff.
In my probably limited experience, that was always the case with museum volunteers.
At one hospital I’m familiar with, the volunteers were either retirement age or high school age. Nothing in between.
Oh yeah. Like every teen who thought that they wanted to go to med school, I also volunteered at a hospital 40+ years ago. These days, at least around here, high school students are required to do volunteer hours in order to graduate. That may also explain some of it.
I think what’s happened is that many hobbies were largely about hunting and research. It wasn’t really about having the items/doing the actions, it was about obtaining them, getting good deals, and looking them up, seeing what you actually had, and seeing what they’re worth/how rare they were. Or in what sort of kit-bash home engineered solutions you could come up with.
The internet killed those aspects dead. All of it can be done in no time without much effort.
I mean something like homebrewing was a lot more attractive in say 1994 when you had to essentially build most anything yourself beyond the most basic gear, and many styles of beer weren’t commercially available. So you had to look up the history of how Czech lagers were made and devise gear and a process for making them. Which was fun.
Now you can buy the genuine article at most beer stores as well as multiple craft brewed versions. And there’s probably a recipe with brewfather settings that’ll get you 95% of the way there without much effort on your part. No more finagling with home depot parts and ten gallon coolers or repurposing components from other uses.
Some people may just want to make the beer. But I bet most enjoyed the research and building aspects of the hobby more than the actual brew day process.
For me those obstacles discouraged me from pursuing hobbies. I’m glad that part of it is easier now.
I don’t know… for me the journey was where it has always been, not the outcome. I’ve rarely done hobbies strictly for the final outcome or the final process.
I don’t see as much passion in younger adults for vintage muscle cars.
A 1970 Dodge is now 55 years old. Finding OEM parts is getting very difficult.
The after market crap is all made in China.
I recently saw Derek on Vice Grip Garage spend several hours on a difficult fuel pump replacement. It required extensive disassembly to reach the fuel pump.
That wonderful piece of after market crap didn’t work. Requiring another frustrating tear down of the car.
The 
frustration of obtaining parts is enough to discourage many home hobbyists.
The knowledge base is also shrinking. Your average mechanic at a Ford dealership doesn’t work on carburetors or drum brakes. They’ve been obsolete for over 35 years.
I think America’s love affair with collecting and restoring cars will dwindle even more with the next generation of drivers.
I imagine it’s mostly because previous generations were interested in those vintage muscle cars because they had grown up seeing them, or driven them (or wanted to drive them) as adults, when those cars were new or at least recent models. In my case, I grew up seeing them, and had Hot Wheels or Monogram model kids of many of them.
To a car fan who’s in their 20s or early 30s, the muscle cars of the late '60s and early '70s are ancient history, and have little relevance to most of them. A 1970 Dodge is as relevant to them as a 1935 or 1940 Dodge would have been to me: it predated me by three decades.
I’m thinking that maybe audiophiles (especially fans of “classic rock”) are a vanishing breed. I have the (perhaps mistaken) impression that listening to music on bluetooth earbuds is “good enough” for the current generation.
The glut of SDE(super deluxe edition) box sets in recent years seems to me like an attempt to cash in before fans of the genre die out.
I also think that the audiophiles of that era can no longer hear. I’m 100% in that camp. I’m a performing artist that has to come to terms with tinnitus. It sucks!!!
Yep. All those old cars, stamps, etc will go down in value at some point when no one cares about them but museums.
There’s still plenty of effort and time spent hunting and researching stuff on your chosen hobby. Easier and quicker than in the past, yes, but nowhere near killed dead. I see newbies (and not so newbies) asking even “how to get” and “where to find” type questions all the time. “How to” is healthy as ever, especially with the insufficient / bogus info infiltrating the net.
Now with the enshittifcation of Google etc., the easy and quick part is on the wane, too.
And probably even more with the next generation of non-drivers:
When my husband and i lived in the same town as my parents, we joined a bridge group run by a friend of my mother’s. When she learned, she said, “i never invited you to my bridge group because i assumed you would want to play with people you age.” We pointed out that few people our age played bridge.
My favorite hobby is square dancing, which is definitely in demographic crash mode. And the “leaders” of the activity feel like they’ve done something wrong and can somehow fix it. But i am pretty certain that square dancing was just a fad in the 1950s, (a fad with sticking power) and the decline isn’t any m the fault of anyone or anything “doing it wrong”, just part of the normal ebb and flow of hobbies. Still, it makes me sad.
Do you think it was supplanted by country line dancing which itself has waned?
I dunno, i haven’t followed the ebb and flow of other dance forms. Maybe?
The next generation of cars will be EVs, so there’s a lot less to tinker with anyway.