I’ve been stuck in the work, recharge, repeat cycle for about a decade now. I’m looking to get back into hobbies and activities to enjoy my free time and possibly meet other folks.
I’ve heard you should have 3 types of hobbies: something to keep you fit, something to keep you creative, and something that can make some money. I’ve considered gym/triathlon (fitness) and woodworking (creative/income).
What are your hobbies? Anything you recommend I try out?
3d printing and role-playing. I print miniatures that my friends and I paint. Then we use them in our games.
Triathlon is 3 hobbies!
I do:
Yoga
Gardening
Baking (sourdough)
Do occasionally draw or paint too.
I think you have to find something you actually enjoy. If you are good at swimming, triathlon is a great idea but the long distance ones do take a lot of training time.
I don’t try to monetize hobbies anymore, it’s a drag.
If you work with your hands, rest with your mind. If you work with your mind, rest with your hands.
There’s a lot of crossover here but off the top of the dome:
Hand-based hobbies -playing music -cooking -woodworking -lifting weights, running, climbing -building dioramas/models -art (needle craft, drawing/painting, sculpting) -**casual video games **
Mind-based hobbies -puzzles -fast paced video games -programming -learn a new language
Those in bold are what I do. Also starting to learn art. It’s one of the lowest barrier to entry hobbies. All you need is paper and a pencil.
My hobby is reminiscing about the days when I had time for hobbies.
Adding to the interesting lists here: As a sport for me I found bouldering and climbing. I don’t like sport but bouldering is not about sport but about getting up that stupid wall, and it feels amazing.
I have multiple hobbies, some require my brain (programming, electronics, engineering and stuff like that) Others not so much (music production/playing live sets, building dioramas, woodworking, metalworking, working on my motorcycle or cooking) And I can highly recommend to get hobbies that both require some concentration and creativity so you can have some balance :) Good luck!
Beekeeping, rowing, swimming, knitting, photography, gardening. I also do quite a bit of tech stuff, and some sewing and baking. None of it is for income, though I have been paid for a few photos.
Beekeeping is far and away the most absorbing and interesting hobby I’ve ever had. Where I live there are very active local associations that support learning and hold social events. The national association organises courses at all levels. A government department sends out bee inspectors to check for disease; great support and another learning opportunity.
If you want to, you can make good money from selling honey. It’s a lot of hard work, but really enjoyable.
I don’t care about making money with my hobbies, I do them to help me feel better and have some good time. As a whole we’re all already way too focused on making money, at least that’s what I think.
- Long walks. Daily. This is the (second) best change I ever made into my life. I would encourage anyone, even more anyone that is like I was (in a very bad physical and mental shape) to give steady walks a go. Start small but don’t give up even though It’s hard to begin with, and slowly increase the distance you walk and your steadiness. It’s so much worth it. I was a potato couch but nowadays I could not not go out for a few miles walk at least once a day (as much as possible I’ll go everywhere I can by walking instead of using any mean of transportation). It also helps in the head, immensely as far as I’m concerned.
- Writing &
- Reading. Reading and writing should never go without the other as far as I’m concerned. Read (like you write) widely, don’t be afraid to read stuff you don’t normally read, or stuff/author you don’t like (there is a lot to be learned when confronting your own thought to those of people you don’t agree with), or read unpopular stuff.
- Sketching/painting. I’m not an artist, I don’t care I just enjoy doing it. I try to do more of that outdoor, while I’m out walking)
- DIY, making stuff with my hands (book binding, woodworking,… those come and go along the years) & also
- Fixing stuff. Reducing the amount of waste we create by making our stuff last a little longer.
- I had to quit model making, but I liked that a lot.
- Music.
Great advice.
And in the walking vein, good shoes are essential. If you can’t afford new shoes then good insoles are the next best thing and almost as good. Any aftermarket insoles are better than what comes with any shoe (and I mean any, that’s the thing they all cheap out on). You can buy what fits your foot (flat, medium, high arch) and they make walking painless.
And in the walking vein, good shoes are essential. If you can’t afford new shoes then good insoles are the next best thing
100%. And I should have mentioned it as, back when I started to walk daily, I almost gave up because of the shit shoes I was using. They were hurting my feet and my back and they were reducing my endurance, like really. Investing in decent shoes (and orthopaedic insoles made for my feet) changed everything. I probably would never have started walking as much as I do without those. Money very well spend, in both case.
Hobbies are not for making money. That’s what a job is for. Hobbies are where you sink the money you have left from your job and all the other expenses are paid.
That said.
Hobbies for me include:
Hiking (lots of good trails nearby)
Making sounds on my Synth (I’m building a case right now)
TTRPGS (when you can wrangle enough folks)
Skirmish Games (mainly Gaslands)
Video games (slay the spire, and casual WoW)
A lot of people have a hobby that they can either recoup some costs of the hobby, or earn some beer money. Arts and crafts may have the occasional fair or flea market, or even an online store or ko-fi.
In my experience though, once you try to turn a hobby into a primary source of income, that becomes a job and is no longer as fun as it was as a hobby.
IMO as soon as a hobby produces any sort of money, it becomes a side gig. Maybe not a profitable side gig, but a side gig none the less.
For fitness running, walking and weightlifting. For creativity reading, writing, sketching. For money, software development.
I’d recommend keeping a semi regular (daily to weekly) diary above everything else. It’s been invaluable to be able to check in with myself. It’s also fun to work on your lettering.
I’ve been making mechanical keyboards “from scratch” for the last year or so. I leverage a lot of pre-built parts and existing tools of course, but I tweak the standard layouts to fit what I want to do, fabricate the plates and cases with my laser engraver and 3D printer, assemble everything, wire them up to the switches and the microcontroller (usually “dead bug” hand-wiring, but I have done a very basic PCB in KiCAD as well), and configure the firmware. It leverages a lot of my other interests, provides an opportunity to improve incrementally between projects, and results in a product that is legitimately pleasant to use.
Little bastards are piling up, though.
I’m currently in the process of building my first mechanical keyboard. I have a Lily58 mostly assembled, in the troubleshooting steps now. It’s been a fun project so far.
I’d like to do a proper split as a project, but I don’t properly touch-type, so there’s a pretty large learning curve that I’m not particularly interested in overcoming. Before I accepted my truth, my second handwire was a permanent split that just bundled the matrix wires into a ratchet-ass cable. It works fine, but I just never used it, even enough to want to do a refined version.
Electronics projects mostly.
Mostly smart home PCBs and interconnect boards and 3D modelled housings. Examples:
- esp32-C3 dumb doorbell (just a doorbell that sends an MQTT message and sleeps the rest of the time). It works fatastic except that my Proximus ISP modem/router completely fucked up and so the network is no longer usable and I had to set it in bridge mode to a router it can’t reach. I want to release it, but haven’t had the time to water - resistance test it or make assembly instructions
- esp32-S3 voice assistant satellite attached to an IR blaster, I2S mic, and PCM5102 to control and send audio to my old Yamaha RX-496RDS to control it via IR and can play audio (local or Spotify) via music assistant. Pretty much an Alexa echo attached to my speaker system. PCB link which I am planning on releasing.
- My unfinished Flight Stick with custom electronics, fully custom 3D printable housing, etc… It is almost done, but needs like 2 more small iterations, but we moved and started doing a full-strip renovation, so my 3D printer is no longer set up because it is too dusty inside, and I don’t want to spend another $100 doing a PCB test iteration to use a better ADC with less components. Eventually as firmware practice, I want to rewrite the firmware in Rust or something.
I also have tons of new project ideas that I don’t have time for.
My other hobbies
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weightlifting, again completely dropped off due to every free moment renovating
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Running a home server with replacement services for everything I need
-
Running (my motivation has been 0 recently…)
-
cooking. I try to do a few new recipes per month
-
gardening. With the renovation, I just grew a few courgettes, tomatoes, and squash this year
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video games (more of a de-stresser nowadays than a hobby, most recently casual rocket league with friends is fun, hadn’t played since 2018 or so)
I own an LGS, so my hobbies have become part of my job. Before i opened i built and painted miniatures, and played a lot of miniature games. I also played RPGs and MTG quite a bit.
Now, i guess my hobbies would be my old job, audio engineering.
I guess those letters mean something in English.
Local games shop, role-playing game, magic the gathering
Somehow still can’t understand a few of those words. Yeah, I’m dumb.
A local game shop is a shop where you can go and purchase games, typically board games, card games (tcg, or trading card games, lcg, or living card games), miniature games, role-playing games (Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, Werewolf the Apocalypse, Vampire the Masquerade, and many many others) in which you assume the role of a character you create and roll dice to help randomize the successes and failures of your character. To go with the RPGs and miniature games I also sell dice.
Magic the Gathering is the first, largest, and oldest of the Trading Card Games (TCGs) where you buy packs of randomized cards and use those cards to build a deck to compete against other players. Other games in the genre as Pokémon TCG, YuGiOh!, Lorcana, Flesh and Blood, Weiß Schwarz, and Star Wars Unlimited.
I liked Pokémon as a kid. I had leaf green on my GBA
You might check out the tcg then.
Aren’t they usually called FLGS (Friendly local game store)? Or is yours just decidedly unfriendly? :>
Both are used. The F is a recent addition and seems to throw a lot of people do most of the shops I know just use LGS. That said I am a grumpy old neurodivergent, so the F can be questionable (this is a joke, I mask for almost all customers).
Fitness: cycles through the year, some combination of running, indoor climbing, rowing or dragonboat, backpacking
Creative: woodcarving, music, gardening
Moneymaker: nope, I am fortunate enough to have one job with good salary. I do not turn hobbies into side hustles.
Instead of moneymaking, the third category I look for is social. Many of my hobbies can be solo, so I want to make sure I’m doing something that has me out meeting new people. And that my socialization doesn’t become predominantly meeting friends in bars.
Boardgaming and RPGs kind of tie into my profession in design. I see my job as organizing information, so when I play games I’m just naturally working out ways to present the information for myself or other players as efficiently as possible. Or I’m writing/designing homebrew material because for some reason I get inspired sometimes.
My physical “hobby” is walking/exercise, though I have hard time calling that a hobby, it’s just something I do without thinking about it, it’d be like calling eating a hobby, it’s just something I do that seems important for my survival.
