Everything that takes the mind off of all the stress of contemporary life.
Off-what? You mean in meatspace?
Jokes aside: Reading. Designing and playing Pen&Paper RPGs. Cooking.
Would you mind talking a bit more about your approach to cooking? I take some satisfaction from being able to cook and sometimes from the feeling of improving my skill as a cook, but mostly it feels like a necessary chore.
Sure! But it’s not particularly sophisticated. Other than staple recipes (like e.g. vegetables stews) I learned while growing up, when there’s a product I was previously dependent on buying ready-made that gets enshittified by the food industry so much I’m unwilling to pay the full asking price, I start looking into the recipe for it and experiment to calibrate quality, time efficiency, and material cost to the exact tradeoff I consider best for me. Frozen pizza vs self made pizza being one example.
My joy in cooking, aside from the above optimization process I find fun, comes from knowning I pay less money to eat a better quality (and almost always less unhealthy) meal than I’d otherwise be able to. Once I have a recipe dialed in, it also requires virtually no thinking to get done, which is the opposite of my daily work; that’s the “unwinding” for me. I can then also combine it with listening to some audiobook or TTRPG actual play / podcast.
Due to this depth-first approach my actual list of recipes isn’t incredibly large, but it’s enough to never get boring by now, at least.
Going for a walk is an essential activity for me to reset. Riding my bike has a similar effect. I’ve started leaving my phone at home.
Reading as well. Something light-hearted if I’m seeking joy.
I have a small garden on my balcony. It’s not successful right now but it’s enjoyable to watch something green grow.
What about playing FTL? :)
I’m with you on everything except gardening. It sounds appealing in the abstract, but then in the spring it turns into “ugh, too much to do” and “ugh, gotta get up early to water” in the summer.
Actually…what DID get you into gardening in the first place? Maybe there’s something to it that I’m missing.
Ayy you got the reference!
I started because I wanted to grow Thai holy basil which I was struggling to find in stores, extended to different varieties of kind of pricey hot peppers, then a few flowers to keep it looking nice. I’ve had a few bad seasons over the years that made me almost quit but at this point it would feel weird to not have a garden to take care of.
The maintenance can occasionally be a pain but it’s sometimes nice to have a good reason to get up early. It only becomes too much work if I get greedy and take on too many plants at once. I try to keep it to a small and manageable amount, and choose plants that don’t require a lot of care.
Gardening, walking in forests :)
Litter picking is also a very in-the-moment activity, like an IRL hidden object game.
I’d also say that I read a lot, but I do it on an ebook reader, so it doesn’t feel properly offline 😅
Litter picking is a great suggestion.
Thanks :) I really like that it has an immediate positive effect. I typically work on digital documents and long projects, so it’s at most a couple times a year that my work has a tangible end result that I can leaf through. Litter picking gives immediate satisfaction :)
It reminds me of a scene in Iain Banks’s sci-fi novel Use of Weapons:
hidden for length
Later, he had wandered off. The huge ship was an enchanted ocean in which you could never drown, and he threw himself into it to try to understand if not it, then the people who had built it.
He walked for days, stopping at bars and restaurants whenever he felt thirsty, hungry or tired; mostly they were automatic and he was served by little floating trays, though a few were staffed by real people. They seemed less like servants and more like customers who’d taken a notion to help out for a while.
‘Of course I don’t have to do this,’ one middle-aged man said, carefully cleaning the table with a damp cloth. He put the cloth in a little pouch, sat down beside him. ‘But look; this table’s clean.’
He agreed that the table was clean.
‘Usually,’ the man said. ‘I work on alien - no offence - alien religions; Directional Emphasis In Religious Observance; that’s my speciality… like when temples or graves or prayers always have to face in a certain direction; that sort of thing? Well, I catalogue, evaluate, compare; I come up with theories and argue with colleagues, here and elsewhere. But… the job’s never finished; always new examples, and even the old ones get re-evaluated, and new people come along with new ideas about what you thought was settled… but,’ he slapped the table, ‘when you clean a table you clean a table. You feel you’ve done something. It’s an achievement.’
Litter picking seems like a blast. Dry litter is just fun to clean up.
Haha I live in Glasgow, so it’s often not fully dry, and I have to turn bottles and cans upside down to let the rainwater pour out before bagging them.
I love forests, especially when the terrain is rugged enough to straddle the line between hiking and freeclimbing.
For books, I like the feel of turning the pages by hand, but I won’t begrudge anyone their e-reader!
Yeah, I enjoy feeling/smelling paper books, but ebooks win me over by their overwhelming convenience 😅
Sex
This guy fucks
Good one, fellow adult. I too have had the sex. Many. 150%
Painting. You can get a decent brush set, as many colors of acrylic paint as you need to make just about any color you’d want, and a few canvases for around $40.
I love my time on my bicycle and my time spent fixing it up.
I really enjoy board games and ttrpgs
Also huge fan of getting the tar beaten out of me in my local kink scene, but that’s not a hobby for everyone
Oh and the wife has gotten me hiking more with her, which has been good for us both
Riding my escooter through the local parks.
Sounds fun, but the people in the park may have a different opinion 😅
Pottery or papier-mâché. Or any other sort of creative type stuff. Also, digging holes. Wizardry and such. There’s so much to do, really.
Cross stitch and jigsaw puzzles
Cooking. Gardening.
“literally” everything else I do is online :)
Playing guitar, riding a bike, reading a book…
But who am a kidding, when I play guitar i often plays chords off the internet to the background music from YouTube. When i ride my bike i listen to podcasts. And when I read a book, i do it on Kindle.
Arson.
i go stand in a forest for an hour every week. i don’t walk, run, or do anything interesting. i just stand there, watch and listen
The tree in the forest trying not to laugh and give away its sentience while you stare at it like this
I hike on trails near my house, but I make sure to look around and take in the small things. Even if I’ve been on the trail a thousand times, there’s always something new to see.
Interesting practice of mindfulness! How did this routine of yours come to be?
I was going for forest walks at the time to help deal with my depression and for some reason just tried to be as quiet as possible one day. It was the best and I realized I didn’t actually like the fitness part of the walk. Being as slow and quiet as possible felt much better
This is how you get the best animal sightings
yeah I see birds closer than I’ve ever seen them before
If you’re interested in ramping that up a bit:
- edge habitats: try to pock spots where ecosystems meet, like forest meets field
- wind alignment: stay
upwinddownwind (how did I do that) if possible - stillness (what you’re doing): 10-15mins of stillness between slow movement
- pinch points: check the map and try to find spots like where a ridge narrows that funnel animals
- tracking: look out for tracks, poop, etc
Investing in a little popup blind or camo netting or something to hide in can be magic
dude thank you this is very cool! I’ve noticed the forest meeting the field being interesting but hadn’t thought past that
Reading and hiking are the two main ones for me.
What are you reading?
On holiday this week, so I have a new read: Father Goriot. I have hardly started so far.
Great read! Not fun, but you went for Balzac so I assume you know what you are getting yourself into. Enjoy!
Picked up “The Flowers of Buffonery” and “The Cheese and the Worms” recently myself
Photo walks. Your whole point just becomes to go out and take in the scenery. Makes you slow down and appreciate your surroundings in a way that a walk doesn’t. If you’re after wildlife you have to move with intention, lest you scare the subject. If it’s a more static subject you’ve more time to take in the light and shadows, frame your background.
Also a very good practice in Mindfulness! Lovely Idea.
Ooh, thats a lovely idea
