I guess I will jump in with my two cents worth of comment. Take it for whatever you think it is worth.
First, let me say that I just "celebrated" my 81st birthday in June of this year. Perhaps, like
@Minder, I started out my electronics career by, at first, simply "playing" with vacuum tube electronics. This occurred in the early 1950s, after my mother contracted tuberculosis and was sent to be treated at Fitzsimons Army Hospital in Aurora CO.
My brother and I were shipped off to live with our father's parents, who had just retired from Maitland WV to Morristown TN. Dad had bought a house in Lake Charles LA, even though he was a B-47 crew member, and subject to temporary deployment anywhere in the USA or the world at any time. Thank you Cold War and SAC. So, it was just me and my brother living with our grandparents in 1950s Tennessee.
Grandfather was an electrician. He had bestowed upon him, by his fellow coal miners, the nickname "Hickey." A hickey is apparently an electrical component of unspecified nature, but I can imagine my grandfather saying, "Hand me that hickey so I can fix this." while working deep underground in the dark mine tunnels.
I was a curious child, fascinated by the "stuff" he had accumulated throughout his career, some of which he brought to his retirement home. Hickey became my first mentor, trying to teach me what he knew about electricity. He knew a LOT, but was not particularly good at explaining what he knew in a manner that a ten-year-old child could understand. Nevertheless, I soaked up as much as I could from Hickey while simultaneously borrowing books devoted to learning about electricity from Morristown's small lending library.
My favorite text was Alfred P. Morgan's "The Boy Electrician" which was first published around the turn of the century in the early 1900s. It is still available in PDF image form here on the Internet. I suggest you download a copy and compare what you know now with what the book describes. Here is a
link.
You seem to be looking for something to do, electronics related, while in retirement. I am "officially" retired. I have been collecting social security since I turned 65 a few years ago. I also have a small annuity income from a 401K TIAA-CREF account, that I started when I was employed by the University of Dayton, that I share with my wife. My wife also has a social security income because of her poor health, but that is scheduled to increase next year when she reaches 65 years of age. And her aged mother now lives with us, so there is help with expenses there.
My family is not wealthy, but we are not living in poverty. I don't earn enough income to pursue an electronics hobby as much as I would like to, but that was also true before I retired. Because I am also an FCC-licensed amateur radio operator, call sign AC8NS, there are unlimted opportunities available to spend an obscene amount of money on this hobby. Ham radio expenses know no bound, but I do what I can on a fixed income. I assume you are in a similar situation.
This is a loooong thread, and based on your responses it does not appear that anything people have posted here resonates with you yet. My post probably won't make any difference either. Bottom line with regard to electronics: if it involves electricity it is fundamentally electronic. You might have to go the quantum level to "see" this but we live in and on an electron "sea" that surrounds us every moment of our lives. It is fairly recently (last couple hundred years) that we have begun to understand "electronics" and only more recently that we have begun to understand the relationship between electronics and quantum mechanics.
The future looks bright for electronics, especially when you factor in the effects of artificial machine intelligence, which depends on electronics for its very existence. As for where humans fit into this new paradigm... no one knows. If you are looking for purpose, good luck with that. I suggest you do what ever feels "right" to you without expectations. That means exploit your innate curiosity without consideration of "what's in it for me?" As for what constitutes "real" electronics... that's up to you to find a definition that fits your view of reality. Most of us here are hobbyists who actually practice and work with electronics. We don't worry about whether we are "really" engaging in an electronics hobby or for some of us, like
@Delta Prime, we engaging in electronics as a profession. Like porn, we know electronics when we see it, even if others have a problem recognizing it.
As a closing remark, I should mention that electronics is supposed to be FUN! If you are "playing" with electronics and NOT having FUN, I would suggest you look elsewhere for happiness.
If, OTOH, you WANT to have some FUN, quit picking at the nits. Instead, pick up a 40 watt soldering iron, a one-pound spool of flux-core eutectic alloy solder (63% tin, 37% lead), a handful of "electronic components" and some prototyping, perforated, copper-clad circuit boards.
Or you can ditch the heat and use the little plastic "breadboard" prototyping thingies. These have rows of commonly-connected pins, spaced appropriately for dual-in-line-packaged (DIP) integrated circuits, but useful for discrete resistors, inductors, capacitors and other components such as diodes and transistors. Your imagination is the only limit to what you can do, but beware of poor and intermittent contacts when using those puppies.
They are okay for low-frequency (up to a few hundred kilohertz) projects. Also, the wire sizes they comfortably accept is very narrow: about AWG 22 to AWG 24 works fine, but larger or smaller not so much. For example, quarter-watt resistors are fine but half-watt and larger are not: you need to solder smaller gauge wires to their larger leads before using them on the breadboard.
Does anybody (a moderator perhaps?) have any idea where this thread is going?
1. Basic Unit of Information
