[martincmartin]

the weekends are a pretty good picture of how we'd behave at retirement.

Interesting, thanks for the insight. I've also heard that, your teenage hobbies are another source of where you might find your passion in retirement. What did you do for fun as a teenager, and how does that compare to what you do during your breaks?

[rtomayko]

Interesting to see this as I’ve never heard returning to adolescent interests being common but that’s exactly the path I followed after leaving tech. I tried getting into sound engineering because I loved recording with rented 4 track recorders and early software DAWs in my late teen years. It didn’t stick and I ended up going back further to when I found an old Honda Trail 70 in a barn when I was a kid and rode around absolutely everywhere in my local area just to explore.

I recently found the adventure riding community and built up a Husky 701 for multi-day (hopefully multi-week in the future) on/off road trips. It’s not unlike a small open source project but more physically active. I’m early 40s now and plan to explore on a bike into my 60s.

I also recently bought a ranch in Colorado. This isn’t from my childhood but turned out to hit all the right notes for me. Ranchin’ is almost impossible to make a profit at but I’ve met a bunch of people now who can’t stop doing it and I understand why. It’s a never ending stream of natural projects, big and small, that engage every part of you mentally and physically. Again here, not unlike a (larger) software project.

I went into tech because I thought I liked hacking, turns out I just like work, especially on systems you can iterate on every day and see improvement.

As for tech, I haven’t written a line of code in years and rarely use the internet except for practical things like maps and basic information. I still browse HN occasionally. Not sure why as there’s not a lot of content relevant to my current interests. It still has a little of whatever I loved about tech in the 2000-2015 era, which seems entirely gone from the wider internet now.

[themdonuts]

Actually that might make sense. I started "wood working" when I was 10yo and later helping with construction stuff. This was not child labor, but I would spend a lot of time at my grandparents. Thanks to crappy tv channels and no internet, kids would be super creative to find stuff to do.

My DIY face then went into sleep mode for many years and came back when I started taking breaks from work.

What you said might be spot on.

[fho]

> Thanks to crappy tv channels and no internet

I think you have that the wrong way around. That should be:

> "Thanks" to modern distractions like binge watching and doom scrolling people lose their creativity and drive to do anything but further please their addictions.

(somewhat /s)