Dang this thread gives me mixed feelings. We need some more young blood in this hobby, its great we have such knowledgeable and experienced people. I fear with only 18% being under 50 we are going to loose so much in not a long amount of time. I worry in 10 maybe 15 years we won't have many resources left.
Three of the activities I planned to be heavily involved in when I retire (about 5 years now) have literally died out, and the last one got so expensive and heavily regulated I can't do it anymore.
I used to go to a nightclub in LA that did roaring 20's music with a real band - and bring out the few survivors of that era as guests of honor. Then the 20's music ended, the 30's music ended. They still do WW2 on Memorial day & new years but its mostly 50's be-bop now, because there are actual living relics of that music era.
There is another club that "re-enacts" Disco. I no doubt look at them the same way they look at my Cowboys stuff. I'm not going to re-enact anything I had to actually live through. I can wait until I'm in actual hell for that, provided I notice the difference between that and Los Angeles.
The USCGAUX went into some stealth mode during COVID and no longer recruits. Last district meeting I went to they seemed happy that 22 people joined when only 17 quit. Not counting the 41 who died. Or they maybe half or more of them who could not do anything but the radio at this point.
I got into muzzleloading in 2019 at age 62. There is literally nobody else around me who does it, when I go to the range everybody else stops shooting and just takes pictures. But there is nobody for ME to learn from.
I got some expensive special equipment to let me reload black powder shotgun shells as they have to be shortened and roll crimped after just one use - only to discover my range is perfectly happy to let me pick up hundreds of once fired cases as nobody wants them. So now its one reload and away they go. And I still have far more than I need.
Less than 10% of the shooting on the ranges here is anything other than 9mm or .223. I am one out of maybe a dozen who reloads anything, and I have seen ONE other person using black powder. In anything.
