I live in the Dallas-Ft. Worth area and recently started helping a good friend of mine and his wife who have a small side business selling vintage toys and comic books at small conventions. I had stopped going to most Conventions for a while. A couple of years back the guy who ran the major ones in this area sold to Fan Expo and it wasn't as fun as it once was. I am loving going to the small conventions because you get to interact with legit fans and talk about sci-fi/fantasy or comic books.
I used to have it on my bucket list to one day go to the San Diego con or the annual Star Trek convention in Vegas but they seem to (like so many others) have stopped catering to actual fans and are more interested in the woke garbage. Panels about more diversity/women in gaming or how evil nerd culture is doesn't cut it for me.
Kind of reminds me of my beloved Sci-Fi channel. It came out when I was 10 or 11 and I loved it because as a sci-fi nerd, it seemed to be a channel for people who liked sci-fi. Now like so many other nerd sites it has turned into the usual fake geek hangout. I stopped going on the syfy channel website when the lady reviewing Brightburn complained about white supremacy and the evil white male nonsense.
I kinda wanted to go to ones when I was younger, but even then I just couldn't justify the cost of travel, food, lodging and time for the bigger ones. Nevermind the increasing corporate nature of them.
The urge to go went away entirely as I moved away from being a weeb and saw how obnoxious a lot of these fandoms are. They're just too obnoxiously into things for me. Extends past weebshit into tabletop, vidya, and TV, of course.
I think a lot of this feeling is just a function of interests shifting. I'm just not obsessed with any sort of mass media anymore, and thus not part of the audience cons are geared to. Though I'm sure part of it is a smattering of sour grapes because I've never really had the time or luxury to go to one.
Definitely yes, I do a lot more things with my time now compared to back then and I'd say my life satisfaction is 100% better compared to when I was a consoomer.
Not to say I don't spend spare time playing games or watching garbage, I do, just a much healthier amount. It isn't to the level of obsession like it was back then.