I think insurance is one of the things that raises the cost of SCA activities and makes it more difficult to find sites, but doesn't explain the aging pattern.
Who pays for the insurance, and who fills out the necessary paperwork? I find that young people struggle more with bureaucracy, even if they have the money. Struggle here could mean physically or mentally, but also just lack of interest in doing it.
Even in a college group, the insurance and paperwork are generally taken care of by people already active in and committed to the organization; they're not a concern for newcomers.
I went to a humanist meeting once. It featured a pseudoscientific presentation on why a very specific learning disability made people functionally incapable of being truly atheistic (I went with somebody who had that learning disability, who was an atheist, and who was very-not-amused). The only other thing I remember was an older gentleman, who was dying, who asked if anybody had any advice on dealing with death as an atheist. (I had advice, but opted not to give it; it'd be like somebody who has never had alcohol trying to counsel an alcoholic on how to overcome alcoholism. I'm not there. Probably never will be, as my curiosity about whether or not quantum immortality is valid is pretty strong, and I can't be disappointed by the answer.)
Also the two of us were the youngest by twenty years.
This was when the internet was still mostly "email", mind; the few subcultures on the internet at the time were quite unusual.
So I don't think the question is what happened to the humanist community today. The question is what happened to the humanist community around 1980, when, apparently, they stopped getting any new members. And, personally, I think the answer is fairly obvious. An increasingly mobile society. I've observed a similar phenomenon with a number of other social groups; Rotary Clubs, Loyal Order of the Moose, the Masonic Order of the Temple. All seem to have suffered greatly over a forty year span, which has recently, seemingly, finally ended.
See also the Hash House Harriers. There are still some kennels that have lots of younger members (San Diego area for example) but most are aging. Its probably true that some of the reason for the hash decline is related to the fact that most places now frown (to put it mildly) on drunken driving and, for that matter, drunken shenanigans in public, but I don't think that's the only reason.
It seems to me that the general culture of "safetyism" that has spread across the world over the last quarter century or so has a lot to do with it. I suspect that's likely a contributing factor to the SCA decline too. I know that various hashes had to significantly alter their generally disorganized organizations to be allowed to buy the government mandated insurance that any group sporting event/organization with more than some trivial number of members required (this was the case I know in France, it may be the case elsewhere). This mandatory insurance this is symptomatic of a general societal trend to reduce risk and I think that hurts the more anarchic sorts of organization that explicitly embrace risky activities and/or rule bending and a "don't get caught" mindset. It is also related to the "safe spaces/triggering speech" sorts of thing that young people are now exposed too in schools and universities. It does seem to me that in general fewer young people today are willing to step out of the general mainstream than they used to when I was growing up (and when you were a decade or three before me)
I'm reminded of a series of posts last year about the history of _World of Warcraft_ https://www.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/riq4fq/games_world_of_warcraft_part_1_beta_and_vanilla/ - which was incredibly huge back in the 2000s, and is still around and has a large playerbase, and so is *old*, as games go, and ancient as far as *persistent* game worlds go. What comes through clearly is that we don't know how to create persistent game worlds which are alive and satisfying for many players over a long time. The joy of a persistent game world is that stuff builds up and players progress in power and events happen, but that is also its curse: there's built in inflation, power creep problems, old events hang around and must be maintained, old players must be balanced against accessibility to new players... Most games simply avoid all this by not being persistent, and resetting; WoW can't, and demonstrates that there's no clear solutions to any of these. You can't just wave your wand and reset the world to the beginning to create green fields for newbies, because that will justifiably piss off all the experienced players who have been there for literally decades.
You can, as WoW did, continue the game for those who want it and simultaneously create a copy that is starting at the beginning for people who would like that.
You can, yes, but isn't that impressively inadequate a solution? 15 years of improving what is arguably the greatest MMORPG in computer history, by one of the most accomplished game studios, and the best solution they could come up with to solve the problem of their immortal perfected digital world 'rotting' in some hard-to-define way was... to literally dust off an old version's assets to port to the current code base, recreate the old design as much as possible, and reboot the persistent game world from a blank slate. (And players loved it and it won awards!) And now there's two of them, and the new one is going to start 'aging'; what are they going to do when Classic catches up, or in another 15 years? Fork off a third one?
Hard not to feel that this can't be optimal and that we don't know how to build persistent games (in Carse's terminology, infinite games). It doesn't seem to be a problem elsewhere - imagine how absurd it would be if someone proposed to just throw out the past 15 years of economics research, say, because there's too many papers for grad students to read and they're kinda bored and finding it hard to catch up so we should make it easier on them...
I don't know about "optimal," but restarting every fifteen years might be desirable. Every time someone reads an old book for the first time he is replicating the experience of past readers, starting at zero. Abandoning WoW Classic after the second round, depriving new players of the opportunity to play it, doesn't make a lot more sense than burning novels after the initial readers have finished them.
Our other main subculture (aside from the SCA) is Early Music. Which has very much the same greying problem: there are young aspiring professionals, but most of the serious amateurs we run into at concerts or workshops are over 60.
In part this is because the hobby often falls by the wayside during child-rearing years, and people come back to it as empty-nesters or retirees. But that should have been the case forty years ago too, yet there were a lot more young and (I think) middle-aged people in it then. Why haven't college-age people continued joining the hobby?
A possible explanation in the case of the SCA is that today's college students are raised to be afraid of almost everything, including anything "weird". At least, that's the sense a lot of us old fogeys get; I don't know whether there's _objective evidence_ that today's college students are more risk-averse or conventional than those of previous generations. Anyway, once a "weird" group like the SCA loses its foothold on a college campus, it's extremely difficult to reestablish it. Early music doesn't have the same problem, since it has a natural home in an academic department.
"One reason to participate in a hobby is to find a mate", I hate this comment though I know it's true. As a hobbyist it genuinely annoys me how many people in the group are more interested in each other than the hobby itself hence bring the level of the group down as they won't commit the time and money to gain expertise in the hobby skillset itself. I.e. everything becomes a dating group and then dies because the genuine hobbyist are eventually forced out and have to find another hobby.
Last group I had to exit was a mountain hiking group that eventually had to dissolve because of the number of women that showed up in heels, complained the hikes were too technical, and then the guys trying to "save them" would vote future hikes less hard to appease them until we were basically doing park walks on sidewalks. Seen something similar with a technical diving group I was in. It's the main reasons most groups on meetup.com fail as well, people, often founders, "meet people".
Genuinely a giant believer nowadays in banning women and homosexuals from hobby groups; they can start their own dating groups and quit opportunistically undermining others in bad faith. I get relationships happen, that doesn't excuse showing up to a mountain hike in heels.
One counter argument is that interest in a hobby is a filter. Two people who share that interest are likely to have more in common than a random pair of people. A second argument is that, if the hobby is important to you, you will want to end up with a spouse who can share it.
It seems to me that the solution to the problem you encountered is a strong enough commitment to whatever the hobby is about so that women won't show up in high heels for a hike, in the SCA context won't show up at a medieval event in modern clothing.
I will cheerfully admit that my college-age involvement in the SCA was largely "to find a mate". Specifically, the SCA provided socially-acceptable opportunities for flirting (an art at which I was extremely new) that I would have been too shy to try otherwise. College-age people _aren't_ committed yet to any particular hobby -- they're experimenting, developing their own identities and interests -- and one shouldn't expect that as a prerequisite to participation.
As David points out, the SCA also served as a useful filter. If you walk into a randomly chosen SCA home, you typically find a lot of clutter, a lot of half-finished thing-making projects, and thousands of books, fiction and nonfiction, on a wide variety of subjects. You're likely to find not only musical recordings but musical instruments; not only clothes but a sewing machine and perhaps a loom, spinning wheel, or drop-spindle; not only plates and silverware but cooking implements and ingredients; not only furniture but woodworking tools; not only pottery but perhaps a potter's wheel. SCA people, no matter their socioeconomic or educational level, tend to read widely, learn new skills, and do things hands-on.
The SCA isn't unique in this, of course: other subcultures might have provided similar filters, and I could easily have ended up with a mate who wasn't interested in the Middle Ages -- perhaps through shared interests in computer science, music, science fiction, theatre, cooking, or hiking in the mountains -- but I would have been unlikely to end up with a mate who wasn't interested in reading widely, learning new skills, and doing things hands-on.
The problem is you need both. A group of dedicated people keen on the activity in question and a broader group that kind of likes the activity but also likes the idea of finding a date while doing said activity. Groups that exclude the broader group fail fast because they become very cliquey. I've seen this in all sorts of place from university climbing clubs to running groups to book clubs. But as you say if the group ends up catering to the broad mass without pushing the actual activity then they become worthless and also fail
Another explanation - related to your "only game in town" explanation -- is the internet. It is now possible to find people all over the world with similar interests, and in fact much narrower interests. 30 years ago, a woodworker might join a local woodworking club whose members did all sorts of woodworking. But now, a woodworker can find a much more specialized group online of segmented-bowl turners, or slab-table builders. As Adam Smith noted, the division of labor is limited by the extend of the market, and we now have a much greater online "market" and thus much greater specialization.
There is a benefit to real in-person interactions, but it is partially offset by the benefits of finding people who are interested in exactly the type of activity your are interested in. The local woodturner might not care to listen to all the boring talk about dovetail joints and router lifts -- he just wants to talk about lathe tools. But 30 years ago, that might have been the price he paid to find a few other wood turners, but now they are available online. At the margins, fewer people will join in-person groups, and those people will disproportionately be younger people.
The good news for in-person groups is that the introduction of the internet is a one-time change. So if this explanation is correct, the situation should stabilize at lower levels rather than being an on-going decline.
I think his explanation is that the people who may have gotten into SCA because of a subset of what the SCA offers (for instance wearing authentic costumes, as opposed to something combat-related) are able to find their release online. Previously, large groups would continue and even grow because they were the locus of activity in the larger field. With the internet, these loci are distributed and can be extremely narrow to someone's actual interest.
Older people are the ones that chose the mixed group and have developed relationships and other reasons to stay in it. Younger people found their outlets before getting attached to something, and therefore have no reason to seek out something that isn't quite what they wanted.
I think insurance is one of the things that raises the cost of SCA activities and makes it more difficult to find sites, but doesn't explain the aging pattern.
Who pays for the insurance, and who fills out the necessary paperwork? I find that young people struggle more with bureaucracy, even if they have the money. Struggle here could mean physically or mentally, but also just lack of interest in doing it.
Even in a college group, the insurance and paperwork are generally taken care of by people already active in and committed to the organization; they're not a concern for newcomers.
I went to a humanist meeting once. It featured a pseudoscientific presentation on why a very specific learning disability made people functionally incapable of being truly atheistic (I went with somebody who had that learning disability, who was an atheist, and who was very-not-amused). The only other thing I remember was an older gentleman, who was dying, who asked if anybody had any advice on dealing with death as an atheist. (I had advice, but opted not to give it; it'd be like somebody who has never had alcohol trying to counsel an alcoholic on how to overcome alcoholism. I'm not there. Probably never will be, as my curiosity about whether or not quantum immortality is valid is pretty strong, and I can't be disappointed by the answer.)
Also the two of us were the youngest by twenty years.
This was when the internet was still mostly "email", mind; the few subcultures on the internet at the time were quite unusual.
So I don't think the question is what happened to the humanist community today. The question is what happened to the humanist community around 1980, when, apparently, they stopped getting any new members. And, personally, I think the answer is fairly obvious. An increasingly mobile society. I've observed a similar phenomenon with a number of other social groups; Rotary Clubs, Loyal Order of the Moose, the Masonic Order of the Temple. All seem to have suffered greatly over a forty year span, which has recently, seemingly, finally ended.
See also the Hash House Harriers. There are still some kennels that have lots of younger members (San Diego area for example) but most are aging. Its probably true that some of the reason for the hash decline is related to the fact that most places now frown (to put it mildly) on drunken driving and, for that matter, drunken shenanigans in public, but I don't think that's the only reason.
It seems to me that the general culture of "safetyism" that has spread across the world over the last quarter century or so has a lot to do with it. I suspect that's likely a contributing factor to the SCA decline too. I know that various hashes had to significantly alter their generally disorganized organizations to be allowed to buy the government mandated insurance that any group sporting event/organization with more than some trivial number of members required (this was the case I know in France, it may be the case elsewhere). This mandatory insurance this is symptomatic of a general societal trend to reduce risk and I think that hurts the more anarchic sorts of organization that explicitly embrace risky activities and/or rule bending and a "don't get caught" mindset. It is also related to the "safe spaces/triggering speech" sorts of thing that young people are now exposed too in schools and universities. It does seem to me that in general fewer young people today are willing to step out of the general mainstream than they used to when I was growing up (and when you were a decade or three before me)
All subcultures die, except those which become cultures. Turning a subculture into an institution is a separate skill.
I'm reminded of a series of posts last year about the history of _World of Warcraft_ https://www.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/riq4fq/games_world_of_warcraft_part_1_beta_and_vanilla/ - which was incredibly huge back in the 2000s, and is still around and has a large playerbase, and so is *old*, as games go, and ancient as far as *persistent* game worlds go. What comes through clearly is that we don't know how to create persistent game worlds which are alive and satisfying for many players over a long time. The joy of a persistent game world is that stuff builds up and players progress in power and events happen, but that is also its curse: there's built in inflation, power creep problems, old events hang around and must be maintained, old players must be balanced against accessibility to new players... Most games simply avoid all this by not being persistent, and resetting; WoW can't, and demonstrates that there's no clear solutions to any of these. You can't just wave your wand and reset the world to the beginning to create green fields for newbies, because that will justifiably piss off all the experienced players who have been there for literally decades.
You can, as WoW did, continue the game for those who want it and simultaneously create a copy that is starting at the beginning for people who would like that.
You can, yes, but isn't that impressively inadequate a solution? 15 years of improving what is arguably the greatest MMORPG in computer history, by one of the most accomplished game studios, and the best solution they could come up with to solve the problem of their immortal perfected digital world 'rotting' in some hard-to-define way was... to literally dust off an old version's assets to port to the current code base, recreate the old design as much as possible, and reboot the persistent game world from a blank slate. (And players loved it and it won awards!) And now there's two of them, and the new one is going to start 'aging'; what are they going to do when Classic catches up, or in another 15 years? Fork off a third one?
Hard not to feel that this can't be optimal and that we don't know how to build persistent games (in Carse's terminology, infinite games). It doesn't seem to be a problem elsewhere - imagine how absurd it would be if someone proposed to just throw out the past 15 years of economics research, say, because there's too many papers for grad students to read and they're kinda bored and finding it hard to catch up so we should make it easier on them...
I don't know about "optimal," but restarting every fifteen years might be desirable. Every time someone reads an old book for the first time he is replicating the experience of past readers, starting at zero. Abandoning WoW Classic after the second round, depriving new players of the opportunity to play it, doesn't make a lot more sense than burning novels after the initial readers have finished them.
Our other main subculture (aside from the SCA) is Early Music. Which has very much the same greying problem: there are young aspiring professionals, but most of the serious amateurs we run into at concerts or workshops are over 60.
In part this is because the hobby often falls by the wayside during child-rearing years, and people come back to it as empty-nesters or retirees. But that should have been the case forty years ago too, yet there were a lot more young and (I think) middle-aged people in it then. Why haven't college-age people continued joining the hobby?
A possible explanation in the case of the SCA is that today's college students are raised to be afraid of almost everything, including anything "weird". At least, that's the sense a lot of us old fogeys get; I don't know whether there's _objective evidence_ that today's college students are more risk-averse or conventional than those of previous generations. Anyway, once a "weird" group like the SCA loses its foothold on a college campus, it's extremely difficult to reestablish it. Early music doesn't have the same problem, since it has a natural home in an academic department.
My impression is that college students still join LARP groups, although I could easily be wrong.
"One reason to participate in a hobby is to find a mate", I hate this comment though I know it's true. As a hobbyist it genuinely annoys me how many people in the group are more interested in each other than the hobby itself hence bring the level of the group down as they won't commit the time and money to gain expertise in the hobby skillset itself. I.e. everything becomes a dating group and then dies because the genuine hobbyist are eventually forced out and have to find another hobby.
Last group I had to exit was a mountain hiking group that eventually had to dissolve because of the number of women that showed up in heels, complained the hikes were too technical, and then the guys trying to "save them" would vote future hikes less hard to appease them until we were basically doing park walks on sidewalks. Seen something similar with a technical diving group I was in. It's the main reasons most groups on meetup.com fail as well, people, often founders, "meet people".
Genuinely a giant believer nowadays in banning women and homosexuals from hobby groups; they can start their own dating groups and quit opportunistically undermining others in bad faith. I get relationships happen, that doesn't excuse showing up to a mountain hike in heels.
One counter argument is that interest in a hobby is a filter. Two people who share that interest are likely to have more in common than a random pair of people. A second argument is that, if the hobby is important to you, you will want to end up with a spouse who can share it.
It seems to me that the solution to the problem you encountered is a strong enough commitment to whatever the hobby is about so that women won't show up in high heels for a hike, in the SCA context won't show up at a medieval event in modern clothing.
I will cheerfully admit that my college-age involvement in the SCA was largely "to find a mate". Specifically, the SCA provided socially-acceptable opportunities for flirting (an art at which I was extremely new) that I would have been too shy to try otherwise. College-age people _aren't_ committed yet to any particular hobby -- they're experimenting, developing their own identities and interests -- and one shouldn't expect that as a prerequisite to participation.
As David points out, the SCA also served as a useful filter. If you walk into a randomly chosen SCA home, you typically find a lot of clutter, a lot of half-finished thing-making projects, and thousands of books, fiction and nonfiction, on a wide variety of subjects. You're likely to find not only musical recordings but musical instruments; not only clothes but a sewing machine and perhaps a loom, spinning wheel, or drop-spindle; not only plates and silverware but cooking implements and ingredients; not only furniture but woodworking tools; not only pottery but perhaps a potter's wheel. SCA people, no matter their socioeconomic or educational level, tend to read widely, learn new skills, and do things hands-on.
The SCA isn't unique in this, of course: other subcultures might have provided similar filters, and I could easily have ended up with a mate who wasn't interested in the Middle Ages -- perhaps through shared interests in computer science, music, science fiction, theatre, cooking, or hiking in the mountains -- but I would have been unlikely to end up with a mate who wasn't interested in reading widely, learning new skills, and doing things hands-on.
The problem is you need both. A group of dedicated people keen on the activity in question and a broader group that kind of likes the activity but also likes the idea of finding a date while doing said activity. Groups that exclude the broader group fail fast because they become very cliquey. I've seen this in all sorts of place from university climbing clubs to running groups to book clubs. But as you say if the group ends up catering to the broad mass without pushing the actual activity then they become worthless and also fail
See Arnold Kling's post "narrower, deeper, older" from 6.5 years ago, part of a running theme he occasionally explores
https://www.arnoldkling.com/blog/narrower-deeper-older/
Another explanation - related to your "only game in town" explanation -- is the internet. It is now possible to find people all over the world with similar interests, and in fact much narrower interests. 30 years ago, a woodworker might join a local woodworking club whose members did all sorts of woodworking. But now, a woodworker can find a much more specialized group online of segmented-bowl turners, or slab-table builders. As Adam Smith noted, the division of labor is limited by the extend of the market, and we now have a much greater online "market" and thus much greater specialization.
There is a benefit to real in-person interactions, but it is partially offset by the benefits of finding people who are interested in exactly the type of activity your are interested in. The local woodturner might not care to listen to all the boring talk about dovetail joints and router lifts -- he just wants to talk about lathe tools. But 30 years ago, that might have been the price he paid to find a few other wood turners, but now they are available online. At the margins, fewer people will join in-person groups, and those people will disproportionately be younger people.
The good news for in-person groups is that the introduction of the internet is a one-time change. So if this explanation is correct, the situation should stabilize at lower levels rather than being an on-going decline.
The SCA is an in person group, although there is some online interaction on Facebook and Discord, and yet it tilts old not young.
I think his explanation is that the people who may have gotten into SCA because of a subset of what the SCA offers (for instance wearing authentic costumes, as opposed to something combat-related) are able to find their release online. Previously, large groups would continue and even grow because they were the locus of activity in the larger field. With the internet, these loci are distributed and can be extremely narrow to someone's actual interest.
Older people are the ones that chose the mixed group and have developed relationships and other reasons to stay in it. Younger people found their outlets before getting attached to something, and therefore have no reason to seek out something that isn't quite what they wanted.
How has the age distribution changed over time?
He described that in the post.