What would you say is the thing you do that keeps you sane, such as fishing or drawing? How much time do you think you get to spend on this activity?
My go-to has been that I go for long walks where I'll listen to an audiobook, probably 8 hours a week. Since Covid I've also come to appreciate going to the supermarket as a good reason to get out of my flat and investing my money which gives a feeling of progress and something to look at which probably takes 4 hours of my week.
I wanted to do a full time budget but I really have no idea on how much is spent on the internet - probably a lot more than I realise.
Good thread. I used to think of myself as easygoing, but I seem to actually have a lot of requirements to staying even moderately sane and happy.
Whether I got the right amount of sleep is probably the foremost indicator of whether I'll have a good day, and over the long-term is maybe one of the biggest contributors to my mental wellbeing.
As I've probably posted verbatim on /fat/ before, lifting weights might seem macho and silly to some, but something about overcoming a resistance is very empowering. Similar to your financial investment, there's also a lot of satisfaction is seeing those efforts paying off as you get stronger, less winded, look a little better.
Tied into item 1, if you work full-time, I find it's also essential to get up well before your actual working hours. Especially with working from home, if there's one thing that'll make your days blend into one it's just rolling straight out of bed and onto your phone or laptop. A buffer of at least a couple of hours before I start right into "salary earning" helps me stay in control of my day, and do the things I want to do outside of work.
Similarly, seeing some sunlight, regardless of the weather, is essential for me. Even if it's a ten minute jog around the park, it's important.
Other than that, it's general organisation. I'm a meticulous planner, and having a big spreadsheet where I can plan out my finances and activities over the next few years has been a great contributor to my overall sanity. No more feeling lost in the dark, or not knowing whether I can afford something, or getting unexpectedly buried in debt, or missing a payment for something.
Another general rule of thumb is that whereever I'm living, I'll keep roughly 1/3 to a half of the spaces I could potentially fill with crap empty or at least clutter-free. For example, my desk is 2/3 full with stuff, with at least 1/3 of flexible space. The floor space of my living room is probably about half taken up by furniture.
>I wanted to do a full time budget but I really have no idea on how much is spent on the internet - probably a lot more than I realise.
I ran an experiment like this in my early 20s. It's not a panacea, but it was instructive. I used an app called TimeTune (there are probably better alternatives now) to plot out an ideally productive day, then I used another app to see how closely I actually matched it. It was haunting to see how much time I waste from day to day, and I think that was one of the small kicks in the arse I needed to take my life and my time more seriously. I still obviously backslide every now and again, but the lesson has stayed with me.
"Time management" is a fucking awful, corporate-sounding term for something which is much more important. If you can control how you spend your time, you're controlling the external stimulus for your brain and your thoughts. It's tantamount to controlling your environment. You're going to have a completely different outlook, and in a very real way, a completely different brain, depending on whether you spend eight hours a day on TikTok or eight hours a day reading books.
Sitting on my windowsill late at night, drinking brews and vaping. I like the stillness and solitude, occasionally punctuated by a burst of noise - a siren, the buzz of a moped, the rumble of a night bus.
I've started hearing pissed lads making a racket after closing time again, which used to be very ordinary but now seems rather strange.
>I used to think of myself as easygoing, but I seem to actually have a lot of requirements to staying even moderately sane and happy.
Same. Everyone at work and most of my friends know me as a very chilled out, laid back kind of guy who takes everything as it comes, but the reality is that's just a very well cultivated public persona and I'm a clusterfuck of OCD triggers and petty annoyances behind the scenes.
I have three, maybe four hobbies I like to divide my time between. The division is never equitable, it leans one way or the other depending on what I'm obsessed with at the moment. For this reason it becomes pretty important to prioritise time spent on that thing because if I can't, while there are invariably other things I can do, I just don't feel fulfilled and I am only consumed wit ha sense of longing to do that one thing.
The two main things I've kept myself occupied with over lockdown are guitar and "music production", which really just means faffing about with various bits of software; and the zen art of painting Warhammer. I used to be a massive gamer, but honestly games are just shit nowadays and I've mostly lost interest. There's maybe one or two per year that catch my eye.
I try to practice guitar for at least an hour a day, every other day at a bare minimum. I've been playing for something like fifteen years now, so it's easy to just get complacent and let a month slip by barely picking up an instrument, and it's very easy to neglect the need to stay in practice if you only want to play "for fun"- You can't always crank the amp up and spend all afternoon jamming out your favourite tunes, and playing through headphones with an amp modelling sim is undeniably a less enjoyable experience. But nevertheless it is rewarding in it's own way to stay disciplined and commit to getting some practice in despite that. When I'm keeping myself in practice, I'm not just some dick who knows a few tunes, I'm a genuinely decent guitarist, my skills are sharp. I'm no Vai, Malmsteen or Petrucci but if you sent me back to the late 70s I could just about hold my own in a jam with anyone who was a big name at the time.
As for the Warhammer that's a very "when I'm in the mood" thing; but that's okay because ultimately there's no deadline. It shares the same aspects of self improvement however. It's extremely rewarding to see the quality of your work improve (and then post it on the internet for those instant dopamine likes and upvotes etc).
Beyond that my day and week is strongly centred around rituals and routines- I feel disrupted and unhappy if I don't get to follow those routines. I like to sit and have a brew and unwind after I get in from work, and I like to have a day more or less to myself when I come off a stretch of shifts, to do low-pressure time wasting sort of stuff, like just catching up on the forums I read and a bit of shitposting if I'm honest. I feel it's important to have real downtime, and in the past I have often had to go to some lengths to explain this concept to partners who see it as "free time" they can use to pester me into going shopping or whatever.
I don't know if any of this is necessarily healthy, but it's just how I've come to be, and I figure it's kind of just the path of least resistance to roll with it rather than try to train myself, at this late stage, into being more normal. My girlfriend has got this gamification app where she literally gets these little quest rewards and loot boxes to open on her phone for completing goals you set yourself, like going for a walk or keeping to her diet*; it occurs to me I have basically been doing the same thing for the last several years, except my reward isn't a loot box, it's just being able to tell myself I'm not a complete waste of space.
*Funny how she hasn't put "take the bins out" or "do the washing up" on there eh, but what can you do.
Copious amounts of alcohol. The ridiculous amount of depression and the wanting for it all to end without it means - I have not been sober since December 2019. Lockdown just made it easier.
OP, this is the question that keeps me up at night.
Reaching my thirties now, I realise I have no hobbies or activities which are just "me" time. I've lived up to this point getting all of my important leisure in the form of group activities or social settings.
As a kid, I was always outside with the other lads down my street, I vividly remember being up and out the door at 7 am to go knocking to see if they were up and wanted to come out - not to do anything in particular, just wander around the street. Their parents must have fucking hated me. When I wasn't outside making the place look untidy, I don't really recall what I was doing. I liked art when I was a kid, but I didn't nurture anything out of that interest, and neither did my parents.
As a teen, it was more of the same. You could find me on the skatepark, but I wasn't very good at skating and wasn't working on getting good, I was just there because that's where me and my friends went. You could find me at a friend's house, where he'd be playing the latest videogame on his Xbox, but I wasn't arsed about the game, I was just there for the company. You could find me at the various nightclubs with decent indie/alt nights, but I didn't drink, I was just soaking in the atmosphere and meeting new friends.
I moved numerous times throughout my twenties, and my constant opium was a tiny, terrible social media app that was semi-anonymous. I had a whole second life on that app/website that nobody from my real life/lives knew about. It had a global feed, and a handful of prominent popular users as any online community does, and they all became my friends too. Behind the scenes, I was hounding the place - as was everyone else - in pursuit of sexting and dirty pics. I've probably lost in excess of a thousand hours of sleep in the last ten years because I was trawling for someone to try and engage in a late-night flirt, it was the only way I could get off. I've had some fucking questionable wanks as a result -- you can't exactly be too choosy when it's almost sunrise and you've desperate for it since the early evening.
Tinder was an eye-opener in my mid-twenties also. Between my guilty-pleasure app and Tinder, I spent every minute of my day that I wasn't working on either trying to meet people on Tinder and get laid, or planting the seeds for some virtual stranger to help me ejaculate and get to sleep that night.
All this to say that I'm an adult now with a lucrative academic career, several cities around the world I can call home, and the best partner I could possibly ask for, but very little self-esteem and no hobbies or interests to speak of.
Everyone needs a hobby. It would appear that yours has been e-whoring. I empathise sincerely because I've been down that rabbit hole myself; it's only in the last couple of years I've weaned myself off it because the quality of bird you find has gone into steep decline as the platforms become more mainstream. I must admit I've kept it up through most of my relationships too.
Anyhow. You need to find something that tickles the reward centres in your brain. I find most hobbies have a common factor in that they give you a sense of progress, and positive individual agency. It's your little pet project and you're in charge of it, regardless what else is going on in your life. That's the mental benefit they provide, even if it's just something relatively low investment and daft like maintaining a few succulents.
(Incidentally this is why I have no respect for any man who ever finds himself saying something like "I wanted to do X but my wife wouldn't let me" or whatever. You have to be completely under thumb if your partner doesn't "let" you pursue the things that make you happy, and ultimately it tells me this person has turned over their very autonomy and individuality to a surrogate parent figure. But I digress.)
Just buy an old motorbike to fix up or whatever. I suppose it depends on what your finances and free time allow, but there has to be something that itches your creative instincts, your desire for knowledge, your curiosity above all else.
Do you still like it? Why not try and pursue it a bit, you don't have to be "good" at drawing or whatever. Could be anything really, photography, painting, sculpting, minting NFT's etc etc. Could do a course or just practice on yer own. Don't put pressure on yourself like, just see what you enjoy.
Days like today. Working from home, outdoors. Sat in the shade of plants I raised, growing over the frame I built. No need to stare off into space there are bees to watch. Made those sausages grilled with beer and sauerkraut for lunch and ate them at my "desk". Listened to the birds, to the neighbours gradually working up the nerve to murder each other. I've been waiting for this weather for most of a year.
>>444062 Thanks, lad. I should mention I've kicked the habit, barring a brief relapse when my now-fiancée and I were countries apart for an extended time, which did culminate in a long hard look at myself in a mirror, and then a switch to porn websites like a normal person.
Certainly a project that is entirely my own is something that's missing. I did the whole "my work is my hobby" thing as a postdoc (where it's almost forced on you if you want to get another position after that postdoc), but now I've got a big boy job and live in a much more humdrum and sensible place, I need to focus on my work-life balance.
Doing up a bike is on my list. A Lambretta specifically. Once I've got more clue where I'll be living, I'll likely hop into /mph/ with a project on my hands. Our lass also wants a camper van, so we'll be looking at those once we commit to a house.
>>444064 I frequently ask myself if I even still do like it. I scraped out a drawing in my sketchbook (which I've had empty for four years) earlier this year and felt great about it, but haven't had any desire to do it again.
>Don't put pressure on yourself
That's the hard bit, isn't it. Doing something just for enjoyment's sake, without obsessing over how you could have done it better.
>That's the hard bit, isn't it. Doing something just for enjoyment's sake, without obsessing over how you could have done it better.
Part of the enjoyment of a hobby, at least to me, is that you naturally get better stuff the more you do it. If you expect to be producing excellent work from the start then you're only ever going to be disappointed. If you could just pick up a camera and become Ansel Adams within the hour, then nobody would be a hobbyist photographer as it'd be fucking boring. The journey, learning stuff, researching, practising, teaching yourself, that's the point.
I have many hobbies that I've taken up to address things I want to improve about myself. Develop a skill, tackle a specific fear. I started caving because I wanted to play with ropes and get drunk in a weirdly cult-like group situation, in a hit in the middle of the UK countryside.
Pictured is the traverse in eastwater cavern, it's a 40 degree angled slope that's been rubbed smooth by the traffic and you have to wedge yourself from one side to another to progress while making sure you don't just slide into the progressively smaller cavity below you and get hopelessly stuck. I hate it. I don't know why I do it. It's akin to hard drugs, I keep going back to it anyway.
I think it keeps me sane by the relative strangeness of it all making the outside world seem tame.
I remember reading the story of that bloke who got stuck in a cave, only his ribcage was wedged over an incline so that they couldn't even pull him out, and he just slowly starved to death. It honestly terrifies me in ways very little else does.
I suppose it's not so bad if you just stick to the beaten path, so to speak, I'm sure it's far from completely safe but you know you're not going headfirst into unknown territory. What absolutely boggles my mind is how people explore these tight, blind passages in the first place, not knowing if there's a way through or if it's just going to get progressively tighter until you're just fucked. I mean somebody has to be the first person to explore a passage I suppose, but I can't fathom how people do it when every time there's a tricky bit, you just have to go in on blind faith you'll be able to get back out, but it could just as easily turn out to be a dead end point of no return.
I can't even rationalise it as brass balls that pays off in the end, it seems more like bloody minded stupidity.
That's both chilling and exciting. I'm terrified but can also understand the appeal.
The closest thing I can compare that to is that I did a bit of outdoor climbing once and I realised I topped out on a route that had no easy way back down. There's few things that match that sudden pang of "I'm stuck" type dread.
At least if you realise you're terminally fucked it up on a free climb, you'll have a short and relatively painless death awaiting you when you eventually let go.
If you get yourself stuck in a cave, though, it'll be days of absolute misery. Wedged in, unable to move, in the dark, soaked in your own piss and smelling of shit. Can you imagine the lurch of absolute horror when you realise, after trying to dislodge yourself for a few minutes, that actually, properly stuck?
>>444105 It's conceptually terrifying, but what happens when they get out the other side? Presumably they just fall over as soon as they leave the hole?
>>444114 This story's horror factor is based on the psychological aspect of compulsion. As the holes are "made for them", the people feel the irresistible need to enter, despite knowing the result being death. Famous psychologist Sigmund Freud describes this feeling as "death drive", unconscious instincts that seeks to destroy the individual; for instance, having the thought of jumping off a cliff when near one. This feeling is also known as "call of the void".
The psychological aspect of this story thus drives its horror. Essentially, it is the story's characters killing themselves - something inherent within them causes a deep urge to destroy their own self. As there are no evil forces/enemies presented in this story, it emphasizes the internal psychological factor - that is, it is possible for people to actually have a desire to harm themselves (such in the case of mentally disturbed persons, and those unable to control their instincts and unconscious, similar to all those that enter the holes in the story). As such, the story comes to explores the innate human instincts of curiosity and destruction (which is also present in Ito's other works) which can, invariably, be the end of themselves.
>>444115 I've always preferred the Kierkegaard interpretation that the sensation is the realisation of free will in itself. The unsettling idea that you could jump and it's well within your capability to do so. It creates a generalised fear not of any hole but of the intensity of life and the terror of real choice.
It reminds me of that story on Joe Rogan from the cave diver facing death. Well worse a listen:
