Not sure if it’s due to a demographic crunch, but I’ve witnessed a number of hobbies that seem to be on a downward spiral, if not on life-support.
Hunting. Especially deer hunting. Younger folks don’t seem to be much into it nowadays.
Electronics. I’m referring to building cool circuits from simple schematics. I remember subscribing to Popular Electronics and Electronics Now as a pre-teen, and trying to build some of the projects while sitting in a plume of flux fumes. Do kids still do this?
Rollerblading. I remember when it was real popular back in the early 1990s. I now can’t remember the last time I’ve seen someone on rollerblades.
Metal Detecting. Used to frequently see folks w/ metal detectors in parks, looking for old coins. I still have my White’s Eagle Spectrum. Haven’t used it in 20 years.
Auto Repair. This is something my son and I are definitely in to. But none of his friends are. Related to this is building hot rods. Was huge in the 1950s and 1960s.
Collecting Beer Cans. Was really popular when I was a kid in the 1970s. Am guessing it’s dead now.
While some hobbies will undoubtedly just fade away, it will also be the case that young people will move towards “older” hobbies to some extent as they age so people are probably overestimating the crunch. Plus there will be a continuous infusion of newly retired people who will be in better health than previous generations, live longer and also be more technologically savvy which will allow them to explore more hobbies. AI in particular will be a great tool for people in the early stages of a new hobby.
Most aluminum cans are now recycled. Aluminum is the easiest thing to recycle. 96.7% of the aluminum in a can is recycled. It’s estimated that 70% of all aluminum cans are recycled in the world these days..
Rollerblading – I’ve seen college age folks rollerblading – maybe not this year, but in the past 5.
Electronics – I think a lot of this is ardruino/esp32/raspberry pi focused. There are school robotics competitions
This one has been touched on a couple of times in the thread. I’ve been thinking about it, and I suspect that there are three factors going on:
Cars have become tremendously more complex over the last 30-40 years, and are highly driven by electronic control systems. Being a shade-tree mechanic (beyond purely mechanical things like changing your own oil, brake work, etc.) seems to be a dying art, as a result.
Decades ago, a lot of high schools offered shop classes; I suspect that part of that was the recognition that a lot of students were not going to go on to college, but work in the trades or other jobs that didn’t require a college degree; as a result, many teenaged boys had the opportunity for education on doing things like working on cars. Today, most high schools are primarily geared towards preparing students for attending college, and it wouldn’t surprise me that “shop” isn’t much of a thing in many of them anymore.
As noted by several people already, “car culture” has been changing in the U.S. Decades ago, nearly every teenager (male and female) was eager to get their driver’s license as soon as possible, because it meant freedom and an ability to more easily go out and socialize with your friends, go out on dates, etc. And, as a side-effect of that, many young people also became interested in cars. Today, between the ability to have a robust social life online, and using things like ridesharing if you need to actually leave the house, having a driver’s license, and wanting a car, has declined dramatically: in 2022, only 1/4 of 16-year-olds had driver’s licenses, and only 60% of 18-year-olds did.
I think it’s also that cars are much better now. That means that they don’t break down all the time, which means that people don’t need to know how to fix them, which means that people are no longer interested in how they work.
Good point. Not only do cars, generally, not break down as often, they also don’t seem to need manual adjustments or tuning in the same way that they did decades ago.
Modern cars may look like ass, but you’re right that they’re much more reliable than they were in the 50s and 60s. It used to be that you’d expect a major mechanical problem at 30,000 miles, but now you wouldn’t expect one before 100,000. While muscle cars from previous decades aren’t what young kids are into, I do think there are still younger people who are into fixing/modifying their vehicles. Tricking out their vehicles with aftermarket parts to go faster or look cooler seems to be alive and well.
Apparently it was (and racism as well as anti-Semitism). So what these days? It didn’t work for him. He wanted to get rid of jazz and the Charleston. Now square dancing and the Charleston and square dancing are all hopelessly out of date.
And, back then, a car which hit 100,000 miles would have been assumed to be about ready to go to the scrapyard, unless it had been in possession of an owner who took scrupulous care of it (and had been very fortunate).
I own a 2012 Mustang with a manual transmission; I just rolled 144,000 miles on it. I am still on the original clutch, which would have been unheard of decades ago.
I’m an amateur radio operator and happened to attend Illinois’ and Chicagoland’s largest hamfest two days ago on Sunday morning. It was pretty grim: gray geeks, all guys, fewer than ever. I really struggled to stay for 2 hours. And we had ideal weather.
I mentioned the Carolina Squat earlier in the thread. It does look stupid and I don’t get it. But as a wise, ancient Chinese sorcerer once told me, “You were not put on this Earth to ‘get it!’”
I’m not arguing - I know that Henry Ford was notoriously anti-Semitic - but how would square dancing fit into that? Is it because more conservative elements of Judaism frown on mixed dancing?
I was under the impression that most places where you might reasonably expect to find something interesting with a metal detector are pretty picked over by now after decades of amateur sweepers. So likely kids might ask for a detector, get some starter model, find nothing but a few rusted screws and it quickly winds up in the closet.
