I saw an video recently on youtube where someone was complaining that hobbies have been ruined in recent years, he made his argument. I personally reject his argument. His argument is that influincers on either on Youtube or tiktoc have made it where people feel they have to spend a lot of money to get into any hobbies. While yes if you try to keep up with these influincers yes they will be expinsive, that how they make their money, but you can do hobbies resonably if you ignore the influincers. Such as one example was an influincer for collecting books and she would buy first release high price ones. Well you can still collect books resonably, I collect Sci-Fi books to read, I get them at resonable prices when I go to Sci-fi cons, I have a nice collection, and I don’t spend that much and I also get them autographed by the authers, true they are not the famous big names, but they are still GREAT stories to read, also I buy Menga, true if I bought them all in one massive batch it would raise the price, but I picked a few Menga I want to read, and slowly buy them when they come out, so it $15 to $20 a book at a time, and just let the collection grow over a few years. With video games he talked about how they buy up all the older games and hyper inflate the price, but you can still get good JRPGs for $50 to $60 some older some new releases, I have never payed more then $75 for a video game.
I will admit I have spent a lot on Ham radio as a hobbie, but you can still get into it cheap, there are ham clubs out there that if you join them and then after that get your tech level license some will even give you your first radio free. True it only a Baofeng, but as starter radio that good enouph, and even if you don’t get gifted a radio, those Baofeng radios are less then $40 for a dual band radio. And for HF you can get a Cheap Chines radio for HF for under $500. True I like my Yaesu radios so I will spend a bit more, but boy they are great radios, but also they are radios that will last so the money I put into getting the FT-710 and the FT-891 will be spent once and last me for many many years. Heck back in 2001 I bought a ICOM 2100H and I still use it in my car, so a good ham radio will last decades, so amatize that cost over all those years, and it will end up being cheap.
Or I might be looking to get into the hobbie of star gazing, my layout for the starting gear I got is $30, my dad gave me his old telescope because he was going to trash it, I just had to get it working, I was able to get the lense cap off, buy new eye pieces ($30 off of amazon for some no name ones) and just find out how to power it, well I already had a compatable power adaptor. And that is another way to get into hobbies that seem expeinsive cheaply, find estate sales, or friends/family that is going to get ride of stuff releated to the hobbie, and see if they will let you take it off their hands.
Another hobbie I like is Short wave radio, I have my late mom’s old Lafayette HA-63 short wave radio, it cost me nothing, back in the early 2000’s she loaned it to me (permintatly) and the only cost to me was buying 50″ of twin lead speaker wire that I built into an Attena for it.
So no I don’t think it to expensive to get into hobbies now. Now if you want to keep up with some internet influencer (who gets paid to sell the stuff they are showing off) of cource it will be over priced and overly expensive. But to keep it cheap or within reasonable prices, find clubs or groups in your area that are into the hobbie and looking for others to join, they can help you get up and running within your budget, without blowing the bank.
