For those who aren’t familiar with the term, it means believing something that probably shouldn’t be believed, or being influenced to believe something that’s not necessarily in your best interests.
For those who aren’t familiar with the term, it means believing something that probably shouldn’t be believed, or being influenced to believe something that’s not necessarily in your best interests.
Not sure I got sucked into anything like conspiracy theories, but as far as “I swear this is my life now” I have quite a few. I have ADHD and with it comes the usual fleeting obsession with hobbies. It gets expensive and I always end up abandoning it for something else. Then I feel sad because I spent a ton of money that ultimately didn’t result in anything permanent.
When I was going hard with ham radio I dug a huge trench in my backyard and installed a grounding system connected to the house ground, now I barely use my radios. Same with the KX3 I bought. It’s an eye-wateringly expensive portable radio. My excuse was it was a reward for passing a difficult certification exam and I would use it all the time in the park near my house. That turned out not to be the case.
That sounds a bit like me. I haven’t gotten into anything terribly expensive, but I’ve come to terms with my pattern and now contend that my hobby is hobbies. I do something for a while, and then do something else. That being said, I’ve been between hobbies for a while now and am feeling a restless and bored. Now I just need to figure out what I want to try next.
I’ve tried homelabbing, ham radio, fountain pens, DIY electronics, Python…
Some stuff is more expensive then others. amateur radio is stupidly expensive in every conceivable way. It starts out with a cheap RTL-SDR dongle. You set it up and start scanning around VHF and UHF to see what’s out there. Some stuff catches your attention and soon enough you want to transmit as well as receive. You buy the license manual and get your ticket (honestly not hard if you’ve passed high school science class) and you buy a cheap questionably legal Baofeng walkie-talkie. So far the 'feng, the SDR dongle, and the license manual and FCC testing fee set you back maybe $80 all in. Not bad for a few weeks or months of entertainment.
Then you look at what a “real” rig costs, thinking that the absolute pinnacle must be maybe $2000, like a good gaming PC. Nope, turns out the cheapest radio you can buy that’s considered ‘good enough’, the venerable Icom IC 7300, is $1000, and it swiftly climbs from there. Then you need an antenna. Surely an inert hunk of aluminum is cheap? Nope, also hundreds of dollars. If you want to cut your own you’ll need an SWR meter, and those are also hundreds of dollars. Now you need coax to connect that antenna to the radio, a way to get that coax from the inside of your house to the outside, etc. It’s all $$$.
That’s not getting into the non monetary expenses like space for your shack and antennas and time to actually use the radio when the ionosphere is cooperating and people are actually on the air.
Compare that to my other major pastime, conlanging and worldbuilding. You already have everything you need, just something to write with and time to daydream. Maybe that’s why this is the one thing I’ve stuck with for 25 years now.