I’m pretty sick of my content addiction, like watching youtube or netflix all the time. I would rather be spending my time otherwise so figured fun things are the best to start. Do you have tips for fun things to do? Or how I could search for them?
Some I came up with myself:
- Learning some magic tricks
- Learning some origami
- Thrift shopping
Everything is welcome!
Edit: thank you for the huge response!
Learn an instrument.
I practice the skin flute daily.
The pink oboe.
The music penis
The o-bone
I’ll list some hobbies at the end but for me, I struggled feeling motivated after work to do anything but eat and be entertained. It got pretty bad until I decided I needed to figure out something different. I thought I was just missing hobbies but even as I picked some hobbies up (usually on weekends) I wouldn’t do them during the week.
Most of my issues revolved around stress (from work), turns out.
I still struggle with this so don’t expect a magic solution, but what I found was that my job was actually a lot more stressful than I thought. To the point where I’d wake up in the night thinking about work problems that for sure weren’t a big deal and that for sure wouldn’t be solved half asleep. So now I try and be more productive at work to make sure I avoid deadlines getting tight, and towards the end of the day I make sure my tasks are simple, if possible. I also try and take lots of breaks and I check in with myself “am I relaxed right now?” “would a break make me more productive” - and I unfortunately found that media isn’t a good break for me at work. Somehow the stress stays, while also adding in cravings for more dopamine-inducing activities. Good breaks for me include walking, actively listening to music, daydreaming, planning stuff (holidays, dinner, my upcoming evening, weekend), reading (pretty much anything), and learning new stuff (I’m studying Spanish and chess right now, recently learned all of my PLL algorithms on a Rubik’s Cube). I’m a software engineer for context.
The largest stress benefit for me has been biking to work. Yeah, I almost get ran over sometimes which is scary (even with bike paths 90% of my route, you still gotta cross roads, and even with a walk sign cars still won’t see you), but driving during rush hour is stressful (there are studies on this but I’m too lazy to link any). Biking is just fun. I even bike in winter (studded tires and poggies/bar mits). Since not everyone has the luxury of biking, exercising immediately after work is something to consider. It for sure helps me separate work from home. There’s plenty of studies on exercise lowering stress.
And if your job isn’t too stressful, there’s another issues with not committing to hobbies… For me, it was that I was/am addicted to media. Once I get started with some dinner and YouTube, it’s hard not to lose a couple hours. Best advice for easing out of it is audiobooks make it easy after eating to do chores/walk/not get more food. But other than audiobooks, avoid consuming media while eating. Also avoid media served by an algorithm. It’s so easy to watch a great video, and refresh the recommendations to look for another. Then you’re watching sub-par videos just hoping for a good one… Wasting tons of time. I use an extension to hide video recommendations. I can still search, and browse my subscriptions, but it saves me a lot of time (extension is called unhook I believe).
My username is actually centered around the idea that the more passive an activity, the less valuable it is to you. I personally want more active hobbies in my life. It is weird to me that so many fulfilling hobbies exist, but I regularly waste evenings on YouTube…
If you can have low stress and minimal cravings for YT/Netflix, here’s some hobbies:
- Get a dog (huge commitment, consider a cat if you’re too busy) but mine forces me on 3 walks a day, and I’ve love training her
- Learn something on your bucket list (I mentioned Rubik’s cubes, chess, and Spanish already), cooking has been mentioned by others
- I enjoy free diving (diving with goggles, but you hold your breath instead of scuba). I enjoy training my breath hold, and everyone thinks I drowned when I first go underwater at a lake or something (I can only dive for around 40 seconds but that impresses people (this includes swimming)). I can also dive pretty deep which is fun. It’s also a bit surreal to be deep underwater with good vision and be comfortable
- I recently dipped my toes into making music, I have a guitar, trombone, and someday I’d like to learn piano
- Having/riding a motorcycle is a great hobby. Seems like it wouldn’t be, but in summer I’m often looking for excuses to go ride.
- Bike commuting is great fun. Get some saddle bags to pick up groceries and enjoy the weather when you run out of eggs
- Mountain biking was the easiest hobby for me to dive completely into. Spent loads of money, built my current hardtail part by part. I’m even thinking about traveling south to bike in the winter cause I miss it so much. I live in a place with good trails close to home. Easy for me to go riding before or after work.
- Camping, Fishing, Backpacking, Hiking, Snowshoeing, Back-country skiing/snowboarding, all great fun. Make great weekend trips too. Go explore your state
- Check out letterboxing. It’s a bit like geocaching but no GPS, just clues/puzzles. My letterboxing journal always makes people ask questions
- My wife and I like getting hotels in small towns nearby (within 2 hours). We’ll walk the town, get food, and have a lot of free time to read or play board games, or other adult activities
- Read. I try and read a book a month. I find that reading before bed helps me sleep WAY better. If I go to bed early and stay up late reading, I think I sleep better than if I went to bed somewhere in the middle without reading.
- Write. I love writing. Sometimes don’t know what to write about, but even typing out how I’m feeling today and what I’d like to get done - and then deleting it - lifts my mood
- I’m into software, I run a homelab. Huge time suck. I love it.
- Video games. Might seem super passive, but I think I actually play less than I want to. For sure different than watching YouTube. Some games are challenging even. I have a huge backlog. Tons of fun to play with friends. My wife and I just started Baulders Gate 3 together
- Exercise can be great. I love running in good weather. Some friends of mine got big into cycling. My wife likes the gym. My favorite workouts are to run to the college track and then do body-weight exercises there (and practice my handstands) before running back. I also enjoy Yoga, but do a lot less than I’d like
- Board games/Card games - I enjoy Magic, but the company has made it hard to be a fan (same for DND). Flesh and Blood has been fun, but I haven’t played a lot of it. On the board game side; Starwars the deckbuilding game, chess, dominion, and cosmic encounters are all good. You’d be surprised how many people want to play board games. In the few game nights I’ve hosted we barely got to play anyone’s games they brought.
Adventure is out there. Don’t waste your youth. Some of these might not seem like ideal after work hobbies, but most are totally doable in an evening.
Forgot to mention that slow-living or whatever you want to call it is valuable. Just spend a while doing nothing. Thinking. Chatting with a friend. Be bored. You’ll probably knock out some chores, and get really motivated to do something big (humans do not like being bored)
Edit: gonna put more hobbies I think of here
- Skateboarding/longboarding, roller blading - pretty meditative once you get into the flow
- kayaking, paddle boarding, canoeing - as a kid I went on a week long 100 mile canoe trip that I think heavily impacted my life. I’ve always wanted to do something similar again, but not been able to make it work yet
- I tried paragliding, but it wasn’t as fun as mountain biking for me so I dropped it
- I’ve had a lot of fun making dumb games and publishing them for the web, hosting that on GitHub, and using netlify to make it into a website. I bought some domain names for family members so that’s where I put them. I want to spend more time with Godot to get better at making games
- Engage in the communities of the hobbies you enjoy - you’ll learn and make connections and share your own insights
Thanks for the amazing lists of other things to do. I’ve got to agree that any form of exercise is the best alternative! Are you up for sharing your dumb games with us? I’d love to have a go!
Kinda hesitant to share because the URL’s are the names of my family members (kinda a gift to them, kinda me just holding on to the domain names in case they want them someday). But they’re definitely not impressive. One of them I’d like to spend some time to make more fun, but as it is now, it’s mostly a gimmick (zombies walk towards you and you walk away - 2d, score is just how many seconds you can avoid getting touched). Pretty rewarding weekend project though, and you can easily show it off
Ah, that’s understandable, we don’t want Uncle Jim doxxed over the zombie game.
This is amaziiiing. Such a great response! Thank you, I recognize a lot! I will go running right after finishing this comment ;) Will also definitely try the audio books to get unhooked while eating.
Happy to share! And glad you found value in it
Thank you for taking the time to write this up. It’s very inspiring and I have some ideas to try
Thanks for sharing, I think a lot of people can relate to feeling unmotivated to do their hobbies after work. I read a blog post recently (struggling to find the link) that paradoxically feeling too tired for hobbies after work can be a vicious cycle, and you’re better off trying the hobbies anyway to increase your motivation for doing them. That’s really helped me with a game I’m working on. When I can’t work on it for a while, I lose motivation. But once I make some small progress each day, I feel motivated to keep working on it.
I can definitely relate to this. It seems like even a little time with a hobby has a large impact on my evening. Sometimes I’ll do something a little hard like studying Spanish for a few minutes, which leads to guitar and then chess and then I feel more accomplished come bed time. Some how makes me feel more recovered from work
Go for daily walks in nature.
Do yoga
Play a recreational sport that interests you
Read (I guess that’s still consumption)
Write
Volunteer for a cause you care about
I’m with the opinion that one should always read more than one writes. And they all kith and kin to reading out loud, speaking, memorizing text, and listening. All things one doesn’t need a teacher to direct.
Here are my hobbies/interests that simultaneously get me off Social Media/Content Streams while giving me something to talk about/post about/watch about when I’m back. I may also have podcasts or youtube on in the background if the activity permits
Group A, the “touch grass” activities:
- go on a walk
- do some cleaning/organizing
- spend time with people irl
That last one requires a lot of effort and rarely has immediate payoffs if you don’t already have a friend group bigger that one or two friends, but it’s so important and requires putting time into it and developing social skills. In fact, 2+3 both benefit from learning skills and shortcuts and habits; therefore they require just as much time and energy as any hobby.
Group B, the “what I do for fun”
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“hacking” — pentesting computers and VMs, whether on HackTheBox, TryHackMe, Vulnhub, or someones one-off github-hosted machine; and of course so many online CTFs
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“tinkering” — I like messing with the physical part of electronics too. Or mechanical devices. Or anything that I can dissect and modify
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active listening to music — taking the time to listen and be carried away by music, maybe even start to analyze it. I know it’s still technically “consuming content,” but I consider it to stimulate a different part of the brain than, say, watching a random youtuber bring himself one mukbang closer to an embolism.
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playing music — the world’s shittest bassist. I’m not trying to be good, just have fun and improve my ear and dexterity and musical intuition
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foreign language learning — good for the brain, good for someone who wants to travel good for jobs and making genuine human connections. Not fluent in anything besides english yet, but I’m always acquiring new vocabulary words when I can
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Creative writing — Most of what I do anymore is just drafting elaborate shitposts to post online later, but I’ve been known to crank out parts of short stories and terrible poetry
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Activism — I won’t say where, when, who, nor why, but that doesn’t matter. The important part is that there are few things in life more fulfilling than coming home after a long day of doing outreach/aid/[redacted]/fundraising for a community and/or cause you care about.
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coding — of freaking course I’m also learning to program. You thought I was done with the electronics, but of course I had to sneak this in. You expect me to learn binary exploitation without having a strong understanding of programming? You expect me to do DIY hardware projects without coding the firmware? You’ve been absolutely HAD.
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Worshipping the dark goddess [redacted] at the temple of [redacted] — a healthy spiritual aspect to your life has far reaching benefits that scientific medicine and psychology are only just beginning to scratch the surface of. Of course you don’t have to start with worshipping [redacted], it can be as simple as cultivating a healthy appreciation for the beauty in every aspect of the natural world around you and the mystique of existence itself. Then later you can move onto the [redacted] sacrifices to make [redacted] [redacted] so [redacted] may once again [redacted] the earth.
Group C, the “dangerously close to consuming content” group, but still technically separate activities/skills
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Armchair philosophy — we all do it, but I’m the only one who was smart/lazy enough to list it as a hobby. Unfortunately this does ocassionally learning about others’ philosophy and the topics you’re bullshitting about, which is why I say it’s “dangerously close”
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Media analysis — see previous… Okay, I got my degree in Literature + Language, I really enjoy deep analyses of media, and sometimes make my own. The act itself doesn’t require consuming anything more than you already have, but if you haven’t consumed any media in awhile…
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reading — okay, I know, this is literally just back to consuming content, but… You don’t learn how to do any of the above without some reading. It helps you learn a language if you read a story in your target language. it’s the format most philosophy was originally recorded in. It’s the medium writers have to learn to be good at their craft. It’s what format most electronic/software documentation is in. It’s how music was recorded for centuries before audio media. It’s also just a fun activity that engages different parts of the brain and trains your imagination even when it’s “just” fiction.
Activism — I won’t say where, when, who, nor why, but that doesn’t matter. The important part is that there are few things in life more fulfilling than coming home after a long day of doing outreach/aid/[redacted]/fundraising for a community and/or cause you care about.
Respect for keeping the active in activism. I know too many people who share Facebook memes and feel like they’ve done enough.
Aside from the Shub-Niggurath worship (I’m more of an Azathoth person, myself), I agree with most things here. I’d just add to the list, group B I guess:
- aquatic animal husbandry and aquascaping (freshwater preferably, saltwater if you are really masochistic and have money to burn on corals and expensive equipment)
- model railroading
I feel these are more ‘apex’ hobbies, wherein you need a bit of everything (chemistry, electronics, an artistic sense, lots of patience) and they will occupy most of your time. You’d think electronics and aquaria are not the closest things, but just you wait until you feel the need to build an LED lamp with simulated day/night cycles and moonlight, controlled by an arduino.
The barrier to entry is fairly low - there are starter sets available and I’ve found that hobby shops of this sort are usually staffed by very knowledgeable people, eager to help newcomers. And, you can go as deep as you want and still have fun. You will also learn an absolute fuckton of things about what you choose to model with your hobby.
An honorable mention for homebrewing, which I don’t even regard as a hobby at this point, but more of a necessity, like cooking.
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You’re cool af. I love the idea of cultivating microbiomes.
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I’m so fucking transparent I may as well be invisible. I do indeed have Lovecraft on the brain, that was a fantastic read on your part.
Right back at you, fellow hobby and eldricht horror appreciator!
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Armchair philosophy — we all do it, but I’m the only one who was smart/lazy enough to list it as a hobby.
Lmao
I like cooking, I get a lot from it, like the feeling of fulfillment etc
Turning cooking from a chore that needs to happen to something you enjoy is the best. Also makes you spend less eating out and to eat healthier. I live to Eat. Not Eat to live
Here in Poland dining out is more expensive than cooking, many people here have a hard time wrapping their head around the idea that cooking for yourself or your family isn’t considered the default in some countries, but the myth it’s “healthier” transplanted itself here perfectly through the pop culture, to the point according to my wife i can’t make burgers for dinner or wrap a salad in a tortilla because it’s unhealthy fast-food, no such problem with pizza though
Pretend to be a racoon. Trespass, go through the trash for things to eat or play with, crawl on rooftops and under the streets through storm drains.
The Coon!
make a list of everyone that you would want to attend their funeral/wedding. and everyone that you would want to attend yours. come up with a realistic timeframe for yourself of how often you should connect with them, and set aside times in your schedule devoted to it. keep in touch.
Underrated.
This is honestly genius, and something I need to get much better at doing.
I built a homelab.
Basically you buy some old enterprise server hardware (or, if you are smart unlike me, you build low-power machines from scratch!) and then you can run your own services.
Some fun stuff includes:
- Plex or Jellyfin or Emby - stream your own video library
- HomeAssistant - Control and automate all the smart things with little to no cloud connection!
- TrueNAS - file server storage for large share drives and local backups
- Grocy - Inventory management for groceries/supplies. Includes special features for batteries, chemicals/food with expiration dates, shopping list generation + barcode scanning, chore tracking (with automatic inventory of supplies like dish soap and laundry detergent), and recipes based on what you have on hand. Integrates with HomeAssistant
- PiHole or AdGuard Home - DNS-based adblocker. Any device connected to your network has a ton of advertising blocked at the network level, no plugins or installation required; devices simply can’t find the ad servers to connect with. (Can break stuff like Paramount+ or Hulu, etc but you can add exceptions)
- the “arr” suite - Sonarr/Radarr/Lidarr/prowlarr - fill up your Plex library with ahem legal backups of legitimately purchased media automatically over the internet.
- OPNSense - free, professional grade firewall with support for network-wide VPN clients. Put your entire house behind a VPN, allow VPN access inside your network from anywhere (get the benefits of PiHole on the go!), block shady IoT devices from seeing anything else on the network (Chromecasts, shady smart switches, etc), the sky’s the limit with this one
- Fediverse instances - Run your own personal Lemmy or Mastadon instance!
And tons and tons of other stuff. It’s not cheap, it’s time consuming, and the wife hates the power bill. But if you’re into doing shit with computers, it’s a damn interesting rabbit hole
I started just with a 2 bay nas that I had a few VMs on… then it spiraled. Back with PIs were cheap it was fun to spin up new stuff all the time. Now an N100 mini-pc is way more cost effective long term, plus you get to start dipping into VMs, LXC, docker, etc.
Not to mention Home Assistant is an entire hobby in itself. 4 more aqara devices just came for me today.
I do feel like I should second the comment that it isn’t cheap, but you can do things in bits and pieces that don’t make it feel like you’re spending your life savings.
I amuse myself with coding, and for the last couple of years, slowly teaching myself spanish. I know it’s a little thing that will probably never matter to anyone, but it feels kind of cool that I can open mexican newspapers and not go “Wtf is this gibberish?”
“It’s Spanish!”
Learn Blender! I’m not joking, it’s full of cool things to do if you’re into computer graphics. Anywhere from hand-sculpting, to 2D animation, visual effects, 3D printing…
Hiking.
I like sewing my clothes, I usually put on some content in the background while I’m doing my mending. It helps avoid fast-fashion and is helpful with thrift shopping, since it allows you to purchase garments that don’t fit quite right or are slightly frayed.
In college I took aikido classes. I had thin gi pants designed for taikwando, not grappling. With all the ground movement the knees ripped open constantly.
So each night after class I’d cut new squares out of an old white t-shirt, and then sew those squares onto the ripped-open knees of those gi pants.
My sewing technique was crude: just two pieces of cloth pressed together, then a doubled thread wrapping around that seam again and again and again. The seams were tough and thick, like scars on the pants.
Each class, they’d rip open again, and I’d add more path material and more thread. Eventually the knees were many layers of torn and patched cloth, with thick scarlike seams criss-crossing all across them. The inside of those knees were very rough and it was kneeling and crawling on that roughness that was tearing up my knees.
I didn’t have money for laundry either so every class I washed that gi in my tub and wrung it out as best I could to dry for two days until the next class.
I spent nearly as much time tending that gi as practicing on the mat. It felt cool. The skin of my knees grew thicker and more leathery as I tore it up and it healed repeatedly, matching the uniform’s knees getting thicker and gnarlier.
Every night after class first it was hydrogen peroxide for the blood (always blood in the knees after a class) then scrubbing that with a toothbrush, then churning the gi in the tub. The water would get murky and surprisingly dirty and then I’d pull the thing out of the tub a few inches at a time, wringing it as tight as I could to get the water out, then dropping the dry end on the bathroom floor and grabbing another couple inches to wring out. My forearms would be just dead, my hands wanting to cramp from all the gripping and twisting.
I miss being young.
That’s a really cool story, thanks for sharing.
Knitting is super fun. I used to do it every day until I started my masters. I keep thinking I should restart this hobby. As long as you don’t buy ridiculously premium yarns, it’s super cheap too. I used to find boxes of yarn at yard sales or thrift stores.
a few ideas:
Learn:
An instrument
A living language
A dead language
A fictional language
A programming language
A new sport
A craft
New recipes
Bodyweight exercisesGo:
To Hell (Hell, Michigan)
Hike
Powerwalk your local mall
Cross country skiing
To your local arcade
To the coffee shop
On a road trip
Walk all the streets in your city
Test drive something interesting
To a movie
To your local library
To a concert
To an art gallery
To a museumWhittling and woodworking are both extremely rewarding hobbies - depending on how much space you have.
Whittling seemed like something I could do indoors more easily without too much mess. We have a furnace and a giant woodpile so you’d think it’d be perfect, problem is when I try to carve something it’s too seasoned* to do much more than carve the bark off. Probably doesn’t help that I’m using a gas station knife, but it’s probably the wood itself being most of the issue.
I usually had luck with the rotary tool (probably because I usually don’t need to get rid of too much material), but once I tried to use the angle grinder with a cheap toothy power-carving disk on a small-ish log and I could barely put a small bevel on it.
*= Requested for carving even, not just something I picked out.
