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!
music is life <3
I started with crochet about two months ago (my 53’rd attempt at a new hobby) with the idea of wanting to make Amigurumi. But it kind of (d)evolved into just experimenting blindly with different stitch combinations and turning them into bracelets for myself. But I’m still having fun with it :)
It’s relaxing, relatively cheap (for what I do with it) and I feel motivated to slowly try to improve myself. I still feel anxious trying to complete any major project though, but that’s just me. There’s a sad unfinished amigurumi monster in my drawer, waiting for me to work up the nerve to stitch him together :)- Cooking / Baking
- Crochet / Amigurumi
- Gardening
- Jigsaw puzzles
- Learn a new language
- Take a course
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.
Learn an instrument.
And then when you get good enough you can consume music you like while also learning to play it at the same time. One of my favorite relaxing yet also stimulating activities.
I practice the skin flute daily.
The pink oboe.
The o-bone
The music penis
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.
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!”
Playing any musical instrument. The feeling of your practice grindings pay off, no matter how still mundane it is to compared to social media professional musicians, is a pretty good feeling.
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.
Nature photography, post results on iNaturalist for IDs, compare against what’s in your area, try and catch them all, Pokémon-style.
Miniature painting, like for DnD and Warhammer is a great skill that starts easy and can ramp up in difficulty as you learn new techniques. It can get expensive however, but is great for relaxing and being creative.
Oh My brother gave me a Mars printer and I never got bored again
That’ll do it, lol
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…
I just went for a run. Up the hill.
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
Meta answer.
To me personally any sort of addiction is a symptom of feeling out of touch with life. It’s a kind of rejection of what is and slapping a bandaid on that pain by constantly asking for more. More food. More content. More whatever.
It’s a desire that can’t truly ever be satisfied.
It’s important to take a step back when you feel lost in such a stream of more. Instead of trying to change things, try to accept things as they are. You can always decide to change it later. For example when you wake up, just take a few moments to experience waking up, rather than immediately focusing on what needs to be done.
When it comes to doing anything, play around with how much care you put into it. Try doing it quick and badly and without any care. And try doing it with utmost care and perfection. Think of it like training your ability to control the number of fucks you give for any specific thing. That way you can let go of control by giving up your need for change, but also regain it for the things that really matter.
And then it’s a matter of trying out many things to see what resonates with your personality. When you find something you can sharpen it by removing the things that don’t really matter to you.
For example you might figure out that you enjoy painting. You’ll probably come up with lots of unnecessary goals for yourself such as being able to paint realistic portraits with oil. Whereas actually you would have enjoyed art history more, or perhaps drawing childish looking animals with crayons.
If you had held onto the idea that you need to do oil portraits, you would’ve just saddled yourself with another thing that you only partially enjoy, and so you might just leave it laying around. It’s just a disconnect from who you really are. You’d be imprisoning yourself again with a need for more, instead of realizing that you are free by nature and that it’s alright to enjoy seemingly unimportant things.
