Running. Not as expensive as a lot of the things posted about here, but my shoes cost ~$150 and I have replaced them a couple times a year. I’m planning to get in to trail running soon (as opposed to running circles in my neighborhood, so now I want to add a running vest and a GPS watch, which is not cheap.
Considering that in theory all you need to run is your body and an open space, I feel like I have spent a lot of money.
EDIT: I forgot the ~$140 bone conducting headphones I bought! I for sure feel safer with them than my old headphones though, since I have been doing almost all of my running till now on the road.
It costs a chunk to run, but saves a lot in health bills - even in countries where healthcare is universal. Heart disease is both a killer and something that can incapacitate you, and any potential weight loss benefits aside, running is fantastic for heart health (provided you do it properly and with the approval of your medical professionals). Not to mention it also has focus, mental health, and sleep quality benefits. Plus if you really get into it, you’ll soon be training for some disturbingly long race and be too busy to do much of anything - especially shopping for pointless things you don’t need.
I’d say that most people can get started with decent wicking workout clothes (thrift them if you can and go for gaudy neons if you live in a place that’s dark most of the year), and a pair of decent running shoes on sale. Wireless headphones and a running belt (or just going for pants with zippered pockets to hold your phone) are small upgrades that also make it better if you have a bit of extra budget. Run like this for like a year, and then slowly upgrade with gadgets like running watches, CamelBak backpacks if you start doing long distances and feel like you need it. Also consider investing in slightly better clothing based on what you determine your needs are - colder climate thermals, merino, running shoes for specific pronation, and rolling tools to help you stretch.
Running can be as cheap as less than ~$100 a year or as expensive as you want it to be. It’s cheaper than the gym, CrossFit, at home workout equipment, yoga classes, etc. Not to shit on those things at all, in fact cross training helps you build strength and avoid injury. But nobody should ever feel discouraged by running due to costs, it pays off in spades.
And for new runners, run s l o w. Slower than you want. So slow you feel you’re not doing much and practically walking. Slow and long runs are the ones that make a real difference in building stamina, cardio health, and even decreasing your race times. You’re also less likely to get injured and prematurely get winded by using up all your energy in a sprint. Also, walking is fine. Even experienced runners walk during certain moments - usually for me, I’m doing it to get a burp out or something.
Health is actually half the reason I started running. I’ve lost ~50lbs over a couple years and want to lose more.
And I want to agree on SLOW. When I first started I did C25K and I was running my little 1 minute increments at like a 15 minute mile pace, then walking in between increments. But eventually I got to where I could run that 15 minute mile pace for 30 minutes at a time, and then I started working on speed. I’m down to almost being able to run a 10K in 35 minutes in a hilly environment, or being able to run for ~45 minutes at a slower pace. I tried many times in my 20s to start running and I always got discouraged because I’d try C25K, but do the running parts at a ~9 minute mile pace and it was killing me. Realizing I needed to start slow got me where I wanted to be.
As a warning to anyone reading: don’t start running to lose weight. Running burns calories and can increase your calorie maintenance, but it will also make you very hungry. Weight loss is mainly about CICO, and you can’t really outrun the fork. Since running can be very natural to humans as a form of movement, it also burns very few calories for the effort. I feel like weight training is a more fair calorie spender for the effort.
But running and taking care of myself does make me pick healthier options. Running helps me sleep, so I’m less tired and as a result, less hungry and prone to wanting unhealthy snacks. Fried greasy foods aren’t great fuel for runs, so I’ll naturally pick things like oatmeal, bananas, veggies etc. But be warned, many runners also love a post run beer so YMMV.
As someone who dealt with shin splints for years, a good running shoe is definitely worth it. Once I found shoes that fit my feet properly I never had to deal with them again.
Pro-tip: I highly recommend Altra Torin shoes for anyone like me, who has wide feet but narrow ankles (or as my family calls them, tennis racket feet)
I’ve actually been looking at Altra’s at the suggestion of a Youtuber I like. I should probably just bite the bullet and grab them. I have a super wide toebox and a normal width heel, so shoes are always weird for me. Up until now I’ve just stuck with New Balance, I just have to order them online because a 13 4E is hard to find in store
Agreed, I use them when I’m doing chores around the house if my wife isn’t doing stuff in the same room as me. Sound quality obviously isn’t superb but it is good enough for me and way better than I would expect.
Similarly, sim racing. Went from a Logitech G920 to a direct drive wheel base, VR headset, and fancy pedals. The temptation to save up for a triple or ultrawide monitor setup is real.
Oh boy, where do I even start. I guess we should first have a minute of silence for my wallet…
Fixing old computers
In high school, I agreed to take the decommisioned PCs home. They were in various states of not working, I diagnosed the problems, bought parts, upgraded and fixed them all. I now had a ton of relatively old but reliable computers. What’s the logical next step?
Home server room (homelab).
I live in a flat with a giant basement, so it’s full of these old PCs and servers. I needed a server rack, switches, cabling, the whole nine yards.
Photography
New lenses and filters constantly bought. Sometimes a new camera body. This is my most expensive hobby by far, but I take care of the lenses so they at least hold value, unlike the PCs :)
+1 for photography it’s addicting to buy new gear lol
I started with a relatively cheap Lumix g95 ($700) m43 camera thinking it would have everything I need. But for video I wanted slow mo. It had slow mo but the bit rate was horrendous. At the time I had no idea and none of the information online told you this at all. It was just a check mark ✓ High Frame rate and I had no idea how important bit rate was. Bought better lenses (approx 1200$) because I wanted depth of field and lower light performance. Which m43 just couldn’t provide, but I really wouldn’t have known how much it couldn’t provide it. I trudged on.
Upgraded to GH5 (800$ on offer up), same lenses but much better sensor, higher frame rates, 4k support, better video codex’s. Still had issues with low light and depth of field. Oh yeah and to top it off all Lumix cameras have terrible auto focus. Which is only amplified by my yearning to have lower depth of field, cause more of the picture is out of focus. Now I want to pull the cord and buy a full frame sony camera (2500$ + another $2500 in lenses). I still think GH5 is a great camera and got good use out of it
I have a collection of various Zeiss lenses, because my proffesional photographer friend told me he enjoys them. They’re amazing, but I refuse to even share how much I paid for them, since I’d probably cry :D I also have a few from various brands like Canon, Sigma, etc.
In terms of cameras, I always bought a new one, used it for a while, sold it and bought a new one. I settled on the Canon 1DX Mark III in the end, I think I’ll use this one until it dies.
That basement full of old pcs and servers… Checked some models against ebay?
I bought a pallet of “computers” from a local agricultural auction for £1 based on nothing but that one word description. Turns out one was a fully working PS/2 with monitor and keyboard. The keyboard alone sold for £80, and I made over £200 on the lot and got some great messages from the buyers who were really pleased to find one.
I never did, really. I don’t have anything special in there, just some Dell Optiplexes and HP stuff… I wanted to sell them but once I found out I’d maybe get 20€ a piece, I decided to keep them and try out new software on them, use them for parts, etc.
Tabletop Roleplaying Games.
I bought Mutant Year Zero in 2015 thinking “Ah, this will give me countless hours of play! I can make my own adventures and stuff!”
Now, my shelf is buckling after trying a hundred different games and supplements, and getting addicted to pretty books.
Currently, my favorite game of all time is Delta Green. Investigative horror mystery. Amazingly horrific scenarios (adventures) with True Detective season one level of masterful writing.
I love how TTRPGs are the model for having a quality product means people will buy it. It’s not difficult to pirate everything, and many systems are just flat out free. And yet I buy most of it.
But specifically the music production; started off as “I’ll by FL Studio and muck around with it” to “I need ALL THE VSTs!”. I’ve sunk like $2500 into it in the last two months (which is a hell of a lot of money to me), and I keep buying shit for it.
Am I any good at it? Fuck no. But it’s not stopping me from keeping at it and buying shit I probably don’t need :P
And the IT stuff consists of rack-mount servers and Pi’s. I’ve sunk around $25k into it all over the last 12 years.
Same. I started with the Akai MPC mini 2 and Ableton Live lite. Now I have a Yamaha P 515, a couple of Genelec 8341, a Sabaj a20d 2022 DAC, A MacBook Pro 2021 with Ableton Suite, Pianoteq 8 and Spitfire’s BBC Orchestra on it and I only sold 2 songs on Bandcamp for a total of 10 euros…But boy is it fun!
Man server racks are so overpriced. I wanted one for my home server but after seeing the cost for a couple pieces of metal, I said fuck that and just put it in a regular pc case. In retrospect I wish I had put it in a NUC and gotten an external drive bay for the NAS
I think the only cure for gear acquisition syndrome is experience. After a few years of buying everything in sight, I noticed that I really only used my FabFilter and Universal Audio plugins, with occasional instances of Soothe2 and MH Thump. When I changed computers, I didn’t reinstall 70% of my plugins.
After a few years of composing, I noticed I only really used my samples from East-West, ProjectSAM, and Cinesamples.
Getting back into PC gaming after buying my friends old 300 euro gaming PC. I’m looking to upgrade and every little bit faster is only a little bit extra, so a 100 euro upgrade turned to a 120 euro upgrade, then a 150 euro upgrade to… i don’t want to say how much i spent…
I make a cross between dioramas and video games. It started out as a test to see if I could make something and now I am all in. It’s all I want to work on. I have spent so much money on old lcd screens
One thing you can try out for storage is buying regular 2.5" solid state drives (the kind you install in a computer) and using a SATA to USB adapter to plug it in. It’s probably less durable than a proper external SSD, but gives you a path forward if you later want to install them into some kind of network storage server (or have a friend do it, if you’re not sure how).
I haven’t checked the prices very thoroughly, but you might be able to get the internal hard drives for cheaper as well. If you’re willing to go with magnetic drives (3.5" HDDs), you can get bulk storage for (relatively) dirt cheap, of course at the cost of having a noisy drive spinning up each time you open a file on it.
Book files are tiny though. Even very long books with a bunch of pictures are only usually a few megabytes in epub format. A $5 USB stick should fit thousands of books on it.
If you’re using PDF for books, then stop doing that :) PDFs have a bunch of limitations - the main ones being thay you can’t change the font size, and it can’t reflow the layout based on your screen size (i.e. format the book so a page exactly matches your screen size). They’re hard to read on mobile as a result.
I don’t have a ton of storage. My Raspberry pi400 which is my desktop has a 1TB and a 500GB SSD attached. I keep the Books folder synced with Google Drive along with my phone and Kindle Fire. My Book dir is: 58GB and has 18748 items (16970 files, 1777 folders). Gotta love zlib and Anna’s.
Homebrewing. I have made many a beer over 8 or 9 years. They get better with each batch, but along with it is another new piece of equipment to make the process easier or more efficient.
Gave up on buying and maintaining copics and just bought CSP. May have to switch to Krita at some point, but digital art is far more accessible than other mediums. Want a marker texture? The brushes for that are free, only real barrier is a graphics tabler.
You can buy a good screenless tablet from Huion for less than a hundred, and it’ll work with basically any laptop or desktop computer. Krita is free and has many of the same features as Procreate. =)
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