New Hobbies

A couple of weeks ago I tweeted that I wanted to explore new hobbies. For the past couple of years, I’ve engrossed myself in a job I love. My career development has been really rewarding professionally, but lately I’ve felt personally underdeveloped. My current hobbies include seeing movies (especially horror and sci-fi) and exploring my new home of Los Angeles (biking, hiking, and of course eating). While these things are fun, I feel like I could be doing and creating so much more.

It seems like everyone I know is into some really awesome hobbies: kite surfing, beekeeping, knitting, curling, trapeze, etc. etc. And I used to do some cool things myself: play oboe, sing in a Georgian folk choir, mountain bike. But lately I’ve been filling my time with a lot of Netflix.

So I decided to poll my cooler-than-me Twitter audience. What are some interesting hobby ideas I can try out on weekends?

I just had the idea to try one totally new hobby per week. Or maybe every other week... What are some cheap, cool weekend hobbies you like? 🎨🖌️🌱🎹📝

(The plant emoji obviously means fairy gardening.)
— meg.ehh 🇨🇦 (@MeganRisdal) September 17, 2018

Ideas flooded in! In case you might be inspired to try something new yourself, here are all of the suggestions I received:

Juggling
Puzzles
Voxel Art (MagicaVoxel)
Kaggle Competitions
🍰
Birdwatching
Sketching portraits
Mod podge
Skateboarding
Cooking
Manga/anime sketching
Start a local food and travel blog
Meet new people from different cultures
Ukele
Tango
Martial arts
Drawing painting
Visit museums
Coffee/ice cream/chocolate tasting
Paper crafts
Baking
Wine tasting
Learn to make 3D polyhedra
Make notebooks
Help local refugees
Teach English

Naturally, I ignored ALL of these suggestions. For my first hobby, I’m not straying far from my comfort zone (I am still in my sweats at home, after all)–I’m creating this new personal website. Now, there’s a reason why I’m spending my first hobby project this way, of course. With this blog, I’ll now have a place for me to document my “new hobby” hobbies.

Anyway, so that’s it for the meta-post. I hope you’ll look forward to my next!

–