My hacking life started many years ago, for me it means understanding systems, with that knowledge comes the knowledge of how can they then be exploited.
I'm more interested with how the exploit works, than using the exploit itself. I would not be a good penetration tester, there is just too many repetitions part of the daily job.
I remember being a teenager, and hacking my friend's websites, and being hacked in return. You learn a lot when you're hacked about the tools that exist, XSS is a common trap, as there is nothing better than to see a big alert popping up, telling you 'Sucka !'.
Finding an exploit, this is fun. This is a challenge, side channels attack are my favorite type of attacks. Because they are weird. I like weird, I'm weird. gets function with buffer overflow, is so an easy introduction to assembly, and how processes work.
I also love the speed run community for this, not the repetition and the grind, but the analysis required to understand how to exploit a system. Trying to break the system enough to abuse it, but not too much that it breaks the game.
I recommend to try understanding how something works in details. Like how WiFi works. How WEP, WPA works. How the network works, ARP, Mac addresses. How bitcoins works, I've re-implemented sha256 square for that pupose. Then there are CTF (capture the flag), these are challenges that gives you something to hack. LiveOverflow over on youtube has great and accessible content on that.
You don't have to hack computers, hacking is just repurposing things that were not supposed to be repurposed. I would adventure to say, that hacking also is prototyping.