Hobbies and Fandoms That I Don’t Understand

Our hobbies define us. If I were to tell you that I was an avid wrestling figure collector, you might think I’m a socially inept man-baby. You wouldn’t be wrong. But if you were to tell me that you were a Trump supporter, I’d likely assume that you were a gun-touting, cult-loving xenophobe that didn’t do very well in high school. We like what we like.

As I enter my middle age years, I see many people taking a strong interest in things that I do not understand. This is larger than age, though. There are hobbies and phenomenon that have popped up over the course of the pandemic that has taken the world by storm among people of all ages. Here are the five that I have the hardest time understanding…

F1

Where did this popularity behind F1 come from? Initially, when I would see F1 posts dominating Reddit, I had just assumed that’s what those crazy Europeans were discussing until the Americans woke up. But the F1 began to bleed into other parts of my day-to-day life. People on Twitter that I had followed for years were suddenly talking about F1. Co-workers were standing around talking about that weekend’s big F1 race as if it were the latest episode of Game of Thrones. I popped into a sports bar as the local MLB team was playing and the NBA playoffs were on, but instead of watching that, the customers were glued to the TVs airing an F1 post-race ceremony. This wasn’t a thing until recently.

Here in America, ESPN owns the rights to telecast F1 events. In 2019, ESPN and F1 agreed to a 3-year/15 million dollar partnership that paid F1 roughly 5 million per year. On June 24th, 2022, ESPN renewed that contract but they’ll now be paying F1 nearly 90 million per year — and they weren’t even the highest bidder. That’s mind-blowing, especially for a sport that isn’t Americanized. There are no American F1 teams. There’s one race in America, but even that is a recent addition.

The rise in F1’s popularity here in the States has come out of nowhere. While I don’t fully understand the appeal, I do find it to be a lot more fascinating than something like NASCAR. Watching these state-of-the-art vehicles that are closer to spaceships than my Toyota CHR zoom around is far more interesting than watching a car with a Lowe’s logo on it drive around in a circle a few hundred times.

Trading Cards

In the late 90s, I was an avid card collector. My specialty was basketball cards, but I’d also collect football and comic book cards as well. I had a sick collection of rookies including Shaquille O’Neal, Grant Hill, Alonzo Morning, Kevin Garnett, and Bryant Reeves – the best of them all, obvi. It was a hobby that became an obsession. Imagine following the OJ Simpson trial intensely, not in the hope of justice, but to see how the outcome would affect the value of my OJ collection.

Those cards were my pride and joy, and I carried them with me wherever I went in a binder. My mother would run into the grocery store and I would sit out in the card gazing at my collection, page by page like I was Gollum or some shit. That sounds like a bad idea, and it was. My dumbass took that binder in school one day and it was stolen. This kid named Kirby stole them but always denied it. I was so heartbroken by that ordeal that it ended the card collecting chapter of my life.

In the last few years, card collecting has skyrocketed in popularity. There will be customers in Target or Walmart that have a cart full of cards as soon as the store opens its doors. Those boxes sell for hundreds of dollars on platforms such as eBay and StockX. People opening those packs of cards on social media are getting millions of views. It’s crazy. And even though I was a card fanatic 20+ years ago, I don’t understand the hype.

Do you know why I spent so much time and money on my card collection as a kid? Because it was the 90s, there wasn’t anything else to do. We didn’t have the internet, cell phones, or a plethora of video games at our fingertips. There were no VR worlds to escape to. We had Disney Adventure books and Saturday morning cartoons. That was it. Why would anyone pay $1,000 for a piece of cardboard with Lebron James dunking over Kevin Love when I can pull that up on my phone? I can even pull up a video of it on YouTube. When you really think about it, trading cards are nothing more than physical NFT’s.

Hot Wheel Collectors

Like any hobby, there’s a segment that takes it a step too far and makes it weird for everybody. For toy collectors, that’s Hot Wheels Guy. This isn’t necessarily the person that collects Hot Wheels — Hey, do you — this is more so directed at the guy that is harassing store associates to see what’s in the back and watching them stock the pegs while looking over their shoulder like a vulture. Your 3” steel gray ‘71 Chevelle isn’t that important, Hot Wheels Guy.

Truth be told, Hot Wheel collectors feel like the same type of people that get off on pictures of feet.

True Crime Podcasts

I can understand the appeal of a good mystery, but I don’t understand the rage behind true crime podcasts like Last Pod on the Left, Crime Junkie, and Morbid.

Each of these podcasts is hosted by wannabe comedians that mask their cringy standup material by exploiting other people’s tragedies and pain.

Before writing this, I went back and played an episode of one of the most popular true crime podcasts just to make sure that I still didn’t get the appeal. The identity of the Somerton Man is the news this week, so I went and found a podcast that covered that for my drive home. During the 35-minute commute, I yelled at the voices coming from my speaker no less than 4 times. It was like tuning into a football game where the commentary team discusses the slacks that they’re wearing and their views on Woody Allen films instead of calling the game. Be sure to add a long ass commercial for Audible every few minutes as well. I arrived home knowing less about the Somerton Man than I did beforehand.

You either start up a podcast hoping to learn more about Isreal Keyes and having the conversation divert into drunken adventures of the hosts every 3 minutes, or you have two hosts that are trying to make it sound like they’re having an organic conversation while struggling to read a Wikipedia entry. The sound of self-amused giggling and hackling make up the better part of the experience. Imagine being the friend or family member of one of these victims and hearing “It’s Crime Time, bitches” be the first thing that you hear.

It all feels very exploitive, and the only true crime is what listening to it does to your brain.