> Although being the person that does the thing is something that I find a bit of a struggle with living in the UK. In general, I feel like there ends up being a bit of a pull down mentalility - "why are you spending time doing X side project", "why do you care about Y".

That's strange. If you're in a large enough city to have lots of other people you can potentially befriend, I would recommend trying to find open-minded groups of people - in Lyon, for example, people who are into electronic music or AcroYoga tend to be quite open-minded, so if you make friends with people in those communities, your long, heartfelt lecture on the relative merits of various UNIX-based operating systems, while it still might not be met with a standing ovation, will at least be listened to, in a "cool story friend, I may not share your passion for this subject but it's nice to know that you care about it" kinda way :)

Oh yeah - i'm definitely getting into a better spot now with befriending more open groups of people, it's just mostly an overall pattern I've noticed in the culture generally.

It's a difficult thing to describe and i'm sure it happens everywhere, but I find there's a lot less passion outside of someone's immediate scope.