Young people are turning to old-school hobbies to get off their phones

My hobby pastimes have been gradually describing an interesting arc, starting from essentially the oldest human passtimes and advancing forward through time. I really need to stop and revisit flintknapping though. Wild edibles are a bit of a dice roll, and manual firemaking is actually quite a workout. Weaving is almost infinite in depth, and has a particular attraction to programmers for its historical connections. Woodworking and pottery are big wins, for people who are technical but want to get out of their own head. To quote Gibson:

"If they think you're crude, go technical; if they think you're technical, go crude. I'm a very technical boy. So I decided to get as crude as possible."

You can get very technical indeed in some of humanity's oldest industries.

One thing I think about when the topic of the loneliness epidemic and social media addiction is that these things are real problems but they're also a little over visible to the obsessively online communities where they're discussed. There are still a shit load of kids out there playing sports and doing theatre or other highly social in person activities just like they've always done. Its not like everyone even though it seems like it if you hang out on twitch or online communities.

not anything new. people have been taking up “old timey” hobbies to get away from screens since the late 2000s. you’ll remember the hipster javascript baristas of portland taking up leatherworking and blacksmithing between launching meteorJS sites “made with <3”

I moved back to paper notes, watercolours and paperbacks novels. On paper (ha) it is much worse than a cloud-connected device with an undo function, but the experience is just better for me.

I love how you can act with those media in ways that were not planned by its makers. You can bend and tear pages, soften lines with your finger, combine text and doodles, put stickers in there. Flipping through pages is not like browsing through files. Books are physically loaned, work well outside, and are physically separate from the distraction machine. They get passed around, discussed, returned over coffee somewhere in town.

I see younger people taking on more traditional hobbies while continuing to be very active with their "phone hobbies". A balance of both seems really healthy. It definitely doesn't have to be one or the other.

> Some young hobbyists are not looking to escape their phones through their activity of choice, but are interested in how modern technology can enhance their experience.

That's definitely me; I dabble in ceramics and made myself a clay stamp with initials - drawn in Affinity Designer, turned into an STL in OpenSCAD and printed by my friend on his resin printer.