I use these analogies too, it’s like becoming a digital gardener.

100%

I do find it funny that I offer so many friends and family access to these services, and they generally just take the accounts and never use them.

Guessing Seinfeld is not among them

Learn a little docker and start self hosting stuff! Pihole is a great one to start with, but there are lots of other awesome projects out there:

https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted