Episode: 4198
Title: HPR4198: Are hobbies pathological?
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4198/hpr4198.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 21:12:40

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4198 for Wednesday the 4th of September 2024.
Today's show is entitled, Our Hobby's Pathological.
It is part of the series how I got into tech.
It is hosted by Lee and is about 13 minutes long.
It carries an explicit flag.
The summary is, personal reflections on hobbies, obsessive interests and mental health.
Hello, I'm Lee.
As you might expect, I'm going to talk today about some technical interests.
This episode also I'll be discussing a question that's been on my mind since at least my adolescence.
This question is whether there is something inherently pathological about hobbies, particularly
technical hobbies or games that either repetitive or involve elaborate fantasy.
I'll sit up front, I think the answer to this is naeanced and depends on context.
So to ground the discussion, I'll just try to talk from personal experience.
When we're children we play with toys and we invent games based on imagination.
This is regarded as normal part of development.
And it's plausible to think that someone denied the opportunity to do this, would develop
a number of mental and emotional deficits that would not have occurred otherwise.
These occupations seem to occur either spontaneously or learned, and while some are solitary
others are social.
One of my childhood hobbies was electronics.
Over the years I had to electronics kits called, if I recall correctly, 151 and 115
one respectively.
With these you could use the same set of components to make all sorts of circuits, including
audio oscillators, flashing lights, light detectors, and radio transmitters or receivers.
I'm not sure what motivated me, but my father, who was an engineer by profession, shared
this interest, and some of the projects he had built himself included a light gun, a functioning
calculator of an LED segment display, and a game of pong that could be played on the television.
While I assume to miss out on the initial revolution that brought arcade games into the home,
as soon as General Purpose Microcomputers became affordable, my father invested in one.
So for the next decade we had Atari's, first in Atari 800XL, then in Atari ST520FM.
I used this mainly for gaming and learning to program.
Once we had a Doc Matrix printer I was also able to use the computer to do homework,
most notably for writing essays.
In fact, one of my GCSE English essays was actually a physical and functional description
of the printer itself, including diagrams.
It was only in the 90s that we moved on to the type of computer still around today.
For while we had a DOS-based PC, and I forget the exact model, but this was soon replaced
with a Windows PC, namely the IBM, Ambra Sprinter with a 386 processor.
The school holidays were a time to indulge in my obsession with computers.
A rather unique festive tradition for our family occurred during the Christmas holidays
each year, at that time I had already surpassed my dad's skills on the computer, so together
with my dad we constructed a movie database from the TV guide containing the numerous films
that would be aired on television over Christmas.
We print this out, and my dad could then record them on VHS.
One of the memories, one Halloween half turn, I remember writing a text-based adventure
game, which we and one of my sisters then played.
At this stage, it's unclear whether my interest in computers could be judged as healthier
or not.
I was certainly not the type of person to go out in the evening, particularly to parties
or discos, and was rarely invited to such events anyway.
When it came to socialising outside of school hours, this would mainly consist of visiting
some friend's house to watch a video, playing their computer rather than mine, or sometimes
go to the cinema.
It was not until my early 20s that I would be officially diagnosed as autistic, by which
time a lot of the personal problems that would plague me for our adulthood had already
set in.
In my teenage years, the centre of my social world was the computer in my task school,
which is where I would prefer to spend my breaks in between lessons.
The school started off with a collection of BBC Micro's and a school-wide network of
clunky computers branded RM Nimbus, RM standing for research machines.
These were eventually replaced to everyone's relief by suite of 486's, running Microsoft
Windows for Workgroups 3.11.
There was also a server running Windows NT.
The technology workshop located in a separate building on the other hand had a network of
Apple Macintoshes, and my best friend was a Mac guy rather than a Windows guy.
We used to edit the school magazine on these Macs.
Some of the cooler kids would write some quite sophisticated games, particularly on the BBC's
that were still fun to use even when they were well passed the sell-by date.
Someone also wrote a simple chat program that ran over the network on Windows, which
was a lot of fun in the days before IRC and WhatsApp were a thing.
At this point in time, video game piracy was rampant, despite discouragement from
our computing teacher.
Some of the more memorable games we played at Skullwall Wolfmanstein 3D and Doom.
Doom could be played on the network, and the school even had an unofficial Doom tournament
at one point.
I've already mentioned holiday traditions.
Every new year that you've laid into the early hours of the new year, a small group
from my friends would meet at one of our houses, a network of PCs together to pirate
software, and as you would expect with a group of adolescent boys, explore the tedious
side of the then newly emerging internet.
In the mid-90s I had a job programming and working with relational databases at a fairly
well-known company.
While they were initially quite impressed with me, my lack of social skills gradually
became more of a problem, and was docked by undiagnosed depression and anxiety, before
during and after my time there.
Then I went to university and took on a new hobby, this was role-playing, from the traditional
games like advanced dungeons and dragons to more contemporary sci-fi and dystopian games
like Dark Conspiracy.
I have to say this felt quite healthy to me, it got me out of my room and while I did
occasion places, like the Student Union and the local pubs and nightclubs, where the
main occupation was drinking alcohol, I found role-playing a much more comfortable setting
to socialise with both male and female students.
Things did get a bit weird when I started live-action role-playing during my second year.
I would walk around a forest in Hampshire, dressed in token-esque garb, and so I did
not have to pay the fee, I would always be the monster, some main job was to get killed
by players, wielding rubber swords, while wearing various outfits, about half a dozen
times on the given Sunday.
I was also briefly secretary of the gaming society, but this was cut short, when my mental
health struggles took over and put a premature end to my student days.
During my subsequent life as a mental patient, for the most part released into the community
rather than having to stay in the hospital, my primary activity given copious time spent
by myself would be hacking around on computers, programming, playing games, pursuing interests
like digital photography and using the types of devices that would in subsequent decades
evolve into mobile phones.
I had a little pocket computer, the brand and model for which escapes me, which I could
plug digital media called memory sticks into, that would store a few albums each, so I
could listen to them on the way home from my day centres.
At that time this was quite impressive compared to the portable CD player, and it did not
skip if the bus or train went over a bump.
This device even had a stylus, but would not recognise standard text, so you had to learn
a special written alphabet, not too different from the normal English alphabet, in order
to enter data.
While I couldn't work at that time, I did join a local scheme where you can share your
skills with a community of other people who also had skills to share.
We'd get a printed directory of all the members, and what skills they were sharing posted
to us periodically.
I would go to people's houses and help them out with their laptops, printers and PCs.
Around that time I also got heavily into Apple Max and got myself a power book.
This became a centre where I co-ordinated my digital photos music and camcorder movies.
It was not so good for gaming, so I still relied on the Windows PC to play games.
In those years my hobby became somewhat unhealthy in terms of the amount of tech junk that
I was accruing.
It would be some decades before I got this under control and was able to keep only what
I needed, and have just a well organised and manageable quantity of spare parts.
I started getting interested in retro computing, and in addition to running emulators, to
consume old 8 and 16 bit computers from eBay, to relive my days of playing pixily games
listening to mod files and generally hacking about.
It felt to me that by the early 2000s the ecosystem for technical creativity lacked a certain
something compared to previous decades.
I think this was only really reversed for me in the 2010s around when Apple opened their
app store and let anyone from moderate fee publish their own apps.
More recently platforms like The Raspberry Pi and Arduino also gave me that feeling that
once again anyone can create something rather than it being the purview of corporations.
I think that was really lacking at the time, which partly motivated my interest in older
computers, where programming and creating on them was very accessible and almost their
reasoned extra.
Linux was again something I always had an interest in and had even run it in the 90s to get
more familiar with Unix in anticipation of going to university.
In the early 2000s I was dual booting into Red Hat, being able to install compatible drivers
for whichever hardware I was using for me had always been the thing that had stopped
me using Linux all the time.
It's not been until the last 10 years this has pretty much now been resolved.
Linux is another one of those things that in quotes made computer fun again.
While I was mentioned I was gathering a lot of kit, the advent of online secondhand
marketplaces such as eBay sparked in your opportunity.
This was to refurbish and sell old computers.
I did at one point try to do this as a business, but lacked a certain amount of confidence
in the value of my products, even though I worked on them meticulously and in retrospect
I think that what I had to sell was pretty good.
I never made a profit and gave it up as a business instead it just became a hobby once more.
Eventually I began working again in technical fields such as IT and later software development,
so all that time hacking about with stuff was not a complete waste of time.
I taught myself quite a lot, my main challenge was to make up for the last years I'd been
outside of the tech industry.
Being helped me with this, and I've described my postgraduate studies in the previous
episode of this community podcast.
So while I fit almost every stereotype of the obsessive geek lost in a technical world
of his own, I do not think my hobbies have been completely lacking in purpose and value.
I think at times they've been unhealthy elements to my interest in technology.
I think nerdy hobbies can bolster someone's well-being, particularly if they have personal
struggles.
I would agree that when the obsession takes over to the detriment of real-life necessities
and relationships at that point it might be considered an unhealthy addiction.
I've not really mentioned that gaming and creative pastime, such as game design, coding,
music and video making, are way of connecting with other people, especially in today's
age of online sharing collaboration.
As I've mentioned in the previous episode, I've made at least one potential lifelong
friend, now my neighbour, simply because we shared an interest in creating computer-based
clocks.
Another thing I've not mentioned is that these interests are traditionally the reserve
of males, as partly evidenced by the demographic of contributors to this community podcast,
and now much more accessible regardless of gender.
This takes some of the sting out of the tale of the argument that says that only sad-lony
men have such hobbies.
Gender has changed, and what was once seen in a negative light may now be widely considered
more cooler or at least acceptable.
So I've talked about hacking and technology as a hobby, whether this is necessarily
good or bad for those of us who live on the fringes of what we call normal.
My opinion is that while there may be correlation with certain pathological conditions, there's
not to say it causes them, and there is a reason to believe it might actually help.
As I said at the start, I think the situation is nuanced, but I'll leave you to make
your own judgments.
I hope this has been of interest, and thanks for listening.
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