If you inherited woodworking tools from your grandfather, I'm assuming that either your grandfather or father taught you some woodworking skills?
I grew up on the computer since I was a preteen. My dad moved 2000 miles away when I was 11. Every job I've ever had since I was 14 was web/software related and I am nearly 39. I feel like I have no practical skills outside of computers and the idea of building things with my hands or using power tools just fills me with anxiety. I wish I knew how to break out of the mindset.
I've always recommended hobbies that meet the following criteria
1. Don't require you to interact with screens
2. Require your full attention (e.g. if you were listening to a podcast while doing it, you wouldn't remember a single thing they were talking about)
3. Has a social aspect, but is also possible to do on your own
4. Preferably physical
5. Preferably has some level of "controllable danger/risk", e.g. mountain biking is good because you can walk down hard stuff or stay on easy trails, vs. road biking you don't control the risk of getting injured / killed by a driver.
Some that fall into this category are climbing, skiing, mountain biking, surfing, windsurfing.
There's the other category that this post about woodworking scratches: building things and developing new skills and mastery doing so. However, these don't often come with an easily-accessible, accepting community; it's usually just you alone in a garage. Given how important social connection is, and how isolating a lot of tech jobs can be, this is a void that a lot of us on this orange website need to actively pursue.
If you're in any "tech city", there's definitely a climbing gym nearby. Climbers are almost always amicable, and for the socially anxious, it's a great pretense to interact with someone (because they have to be on the other end of the rope anyway). The amount of capital outlay to get started is low (e.g. shoes, belay device, and a harness will cost <$300 total if you get nice stuff, albeit sticking with the non-expert shoes!), and you can pretty much start having fun right away (vs skiing takes at least a season to get confident enough to truly start having fun and not "surviving").
Great criteria! I strongly recommend sailing also as a hobby meeting these criteria- although wind surfing is a type of sailing. Zero equipment or money is required because most people that race sailboats are always looking for crew, and are happy to take on a novice that is excited to learn.
I think people often turn away from sailing because it's seen as an expensive elitist thing for wealthy people, but the truth is the polar opposite of that- most people in the sailing community are working class and often have either small dinghies or older boats you can get for a few hundred dollars and easily maintain yourself. I paid $800 for my first working sailboat, and the first yacht club I joined had a literal garden shed full of rusty hand tools for a "clubhouse."
> happy to take on a novice that is excited to learn.
Agree. With zero background in wind-sports I joined a crew. The yacht owner mostly just wanted someone that would turn up reliably - we had one guy who was terrible on the boat but he was reliably there. Good mixture of backgrounds of the crew.
I really enjoyed being part of a team sport.
The main cost was committing to one day a week. I got cheap gear (jacket, gloves) and currently I use a summer wetsuit to stay warm and dry (cold water in our Banks Peninsula harbours).
Suggested by previous comment. But they are not team sports. I am a developer and those sports are good and social but they are focused on your own personal skills.
The tricky part for team sports is coordination with other folks. I can bike out my backyard and hit a 90 min XC loop to clear my head without needing to agree with anyone else on time. I also only have to coordinate with one other person for climbing (or often 0, if there's already a critical mass of folks I know who are there as often as I am).
I do agree that the specific dynamics of team sports are desirable (e.g. figuring out how to socially get along in pursuit of a common goal vs. a bunch of individuals going about their own pursuit...together), and often the social force towards not letting one's team down by ghosting or not practicing can be a motivating factor for a lot of folks on this site who might need that to ensure they keep showing up each week.
I fly light aircraft and that's exactly what I think.
One thing I may add is commitment and responsibility, as in, if you are careless, people may die, including yourself. In most software work, with all these tests and reviews and backups, you don't have that, for very good reasons, but it kind of feels like what you are doing is inconsequential.
Yes, that is certainly a key part of it. My dad built the house I grew up in by himself in his spare time while also working full time, and taught me basic woodworking as a kid.
But he taught me crude woodworking like framing in houses- almost none of the tools or skills translate into fine woodworking required for building things like furniture or boats. Until the last year I didn't know how to cut with the grain, what a planer was for, etc.
What my dad really taught me was the confidence that I can learn what I need as I go, to do almost anything. I'm not afraid to start big projects where I have zero idea how to do any of the steps required at first, and am expecting to learn them one at a time as I go. My dad would regularly jump into things like buying a car with a blown engine and expecting to rebuild it without any clue where to start- and then follow books and advice, and do it successfully the first time. So I learned to also do that.
YouTube has been a huge boon- anyone can learn almost anything for free, without needing someone to teach them first. Also tech like 3D printers allows people to get into making things without the physical skills previously needed.
Don’t let that be a brake on your enjoyment though.
I always liked cars and I do have an affinity for tinkering. But I didn’t know anything about fabrication. I got me a welder and many YouTube videos and hours later I was making stainless exhausts. It was a very enjoyable experience. Just stumbling through is most of the fun.
Awesome. I usually have luck with things like this, but seem to have no gift for welding. I could never get a clean bead from my cheap welder, and ended up even taking a community college welding class... the instructor could lay a clean bead with my welder, but I couldn't and eventually decided to just pay professionals to weld for me when my hobbies require it. I still can't tell what I was doing wrong. I even made an exhaust system for my car, but the welds were so bad it leaked a lot.
Nowadays, I'll set everything up, cut/buy the metal, etc. and usually for under $100 have someone come over and do the actual welding for me.
That’s how I felt at first. I got started with a tig. I guess the advantage I had was that I had seen someone really good weld with a tig many times so I kinda knew what it should look like both result and motion wise, but they never taught me any settings, technique or anything at all otherwise.
Keeping the tungsten from touching the bead is harder than it looks.
The thing with welding is that it doesn’t give you any time to figure things out in the moment. Sort of like tennis in that way. You hit it wrong and you gotta go get the ball. Start wrong with welding and gotta get the angle grinder and restart.
Just chiming in to say your link led me to the document. The introduction is fantastic. I'm in the middle of an enormous woodworking undertaking and I am gonna have to hit pause and read this book. Completely nerd-sniped; other lurkers beware this rabbit hole.
I taken up on running and ultra trail running 5 years ago. I also started learning woodworking 2 years agi, using hand tools mostly as I can only practice in my living room.
I didn't have any experience in any of these before and I was not particularly athletic. You only need to find something you want to try, and if you like it try to commit to it for a couple of years.
In my example, I started running when I signed up for a 10k race as a team event when I joined my company, and realized the racing experience was actually enjoyable (regardless of my performance). And for woodworking, I signed up for a 6 weeks course to make a simple box at my local recreation center, and ended up making a couple of furniture or decorative pieces that are not fancy at all but still a lot more interesting than IKEA stuff.
As others have mentioned, try. Youtube has a literal endless wealth of knowledge of how to do any task. I learned how to machine metal after 5 months of background youtube videos on manual machining. Youtube Apprenticeship.
I had no interest in cars mechanically growing up. I still don't really. But when the repair shop told me they couldn't replace my alternator for two weeks, I went to the parts store, put on the YouTube video for the replacement of that specific part on my specific van year range, rolled up my sleeves and got to work. It easily took me twice as long as someone with any amount of experience doing the same job, and I ran into challenges like having to pry the radiator far enough out of the way without damaging it to give enough room to wiggle the alternator out. Having to zip tie a long stick onto a wrench to extend the reach to get one particularly obnoxious bolt out.
I've also replaced the starter and replaced the default head unit with something modern that includes GPS. Most of it was intimidating to get started, but none of it was what I would call difficult. There's too many very specific guides around showing you exactly what you need to do. And developers are used to following guides and running into inconsistent documentation and troubleshooting from there. Most of them would be right at home stumbling their way through auto repair.
Last year I epoxied my garage floor and got very good results thanks to my YouTube studies. My YouTube internship has also lead to me re-modelling my entire kitchen. I designed everything in sketchup and am in the middle of building the custom cabinets. I'll end up mixing and pouring concrete countertops myself as well. I've repaired my dishwasher twice and my dryer three times by looking up symptoms online and ordering the most likely parts and just digging in. Every time there have been videos with the specific model and the specific problem that I can follow along with.
Again, none of this is what I would consider to be difficult relative to some of the technical problems I've had to face at work. It's all very well documented processes and combined with the ability to troubleshoot and the budget to not have to fight your tools all the time and most things seem to be very achievable by non-experts. I still don't consider myself to be "handy". But I know I can fix pretty much anything in my house or on my vehicle with enough tutorials and time.
This seems like the real answer here... you have to actually try, and not make excuses why it's impossible to even try. Lots of somewhat abrasive replies say you need a ton of money, time, and space that most people don't have to do hobbies- but those are easy excuses, and are simply not true.
Having the right tools can make the experiences far, far better. But it's often not a requirement. I can imagine the prospect of cutting dozens of rabbets by hand using a rabbet plane might keep some people away. If they had the space and money for a router table or table saw setup to cut dados they might stick with it and create more things. It's the same with programming. There are tons of developers who learned when there weren't good tools or documentation and became deep experts. As the tools got easier and easier to learn, the bar for who could participate dropped as well. So we have a lot of productive developers today who couldn't have really participated in "old school" software development at all. Ultimately I agree with you though. A willingness to try is 80% of the challenge it seems.
I started out with no physical skills and only ever have worked in software. However, I took a pottery class and loved it. Classes also start you out on a schedule which is a great way to make sure you actually invest in your new hobby. Similarly you can take classes in most tech shops as well.
Start small. Maybe just a little model kit. You can get incredibly cheap model kits these days. Get used to the idea that you can start with "bits" and end with "things", and you have agency over that process.
Just try it. With this age of Youtube, the barrier to entry is extremely low. You don't need a full shop of tools, just patience and the willingness to learn.
Yeah, both my parents have/had practical skills, like woodworking and gardening, and completely failed to pass them on.
Part of it is that they pushed me towards skills they thought would help me more, like computers... my dad liked to brag he had one of the first computers on the block, and that he put me in front of the computer as soon as I could sit up. They pushed me towards getting good grades instead of knowing how to work with physical objects.
Part of it is interest, like I wanted to do my own thing instead of my parents' things, once I had the choice. That's partly because my parents just weren't very kind or patient teachers, they were hypercritical, exacting perfectionists. Partly because my friends weren't working with physical objects much, so it didn't seem like a good way to connect with my peers.
But yeah, my parents were extremely present and they still did not pass on their knowledge.
Don't dwell on it too much. I thought the same thing when I was younger - had no interest in my parent's hobbies - but eventually they came back around as I got older and I realized I actually knew more about plants & plumbing than I thought.
I grew up on the computer since I was a preteen. My dad moved 2000 miles away when I was 11. Every job I've ever had since I was 14 was web/software related and I am nearly 39. I feel like I have no practical skills outside of computers and the idea of building things with my hands or using power tools just fills me with anxiety. I wish I knew how to break out of the mindset.