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What's an easy to get in to hobby?
Hi. I recently realised that I don't do much is a sense that I only do two or three things all the time while on my free time, and those are usualy just watching youtube or browsing interenet in general. I am the kind of person that finds anything interesting when I start, but I usually drop it if there is a learning curve right at the start (eg. lockpicking). So any of you have sort of a hobby that would suite me?
Hiking is great! It's low cost and there isn't much of a learning curve.
Yeah, I like that. I guess I should have been clearer in my post. I would like to do something that I could do in my home, or near my home (I live in the city).
Okay! I can definitely relate. I live in a fairly urban area, and it can be tough to things to do at home. I live in a really small place too, so it feels really limiting.
I've recently started cooking some. It's a great way to pass time, learn a useful skill, and save some money. It's also a good way to make friends (having free food to hand out is definitely a plus).
I use reading to relax. I've been trying out new types of tea and relaxing for an hour with a book. I've been reading a lot of fantasy lately, and that's gotten me into world building which is really fun.
Sometimes I go down a Spotify rabbit hole and try to discover new music. Then I have something new to listen to at work.
That is a good place to start, thank you.
There can absolutely be costs to hiking, but you're right, there doesn't need to be. Obsessive hikers will go absolutely overboard about concepts like base weight and ultralight gear, you can easily spend thousands of dollars on the big three (your tent, your pack, your sleeping bag/quilt) alone!
But you're right, it doesn't need to be pricey at all.
It definitely can be expensive, but a casual hiker only needs a water bottle, some sturdy shoes and ways to protect themselves from the sun/cold.
Reading, if that counts as a hobby.
It certainly does.
super cheap too, with how easily accessible libraries are now (if you have a smart phone or tablet, you can type in your library card # and download ebooks) and then of course there's libgen with almost every published book/paper that's ever been digitized.
Libraries are underrated
Thank you for the warm welcome. Actually I am trying to get my first job as junior web developer. And yes, I do enjoy coding and just making stuff, I look at coding like playing with a more complicated legos that don't like mistakes. But just noticed recently that I don't do much besides just sitting at my computer all the time.
Definitely get a Raspberry Pi and learn some python.
Amateur Radio
It's a wonderfully scalable hobby; it's only as expensive/time-consuming/difficult as you want it to be.
Learn exciting things like why your weird neighbor with the 100ft tower in his back yard has very strong opinions about solar panels!
Finally discover why the router sitting on your microwave goes to absolute shit when you make lunch!
Talk to batshit insane conspiracy theorists in Alaska via Morse code!
Spend literally thousands of dollars on advance transmitting equipment so you can send memes over the air to people in Brazil!
Receive pictures from the ISS!
At the absolute bottom of the ladder are public WebSDRs.
You can fiddle with tuning settings and listen to all sorts of fun/weird broadcasts that are near the station you're connected to. This a fairly decent one located in an area with tons of transmissions.. You can pick up local short-wave conversations, images being transmitted from thousands of miles away, digital text modes, etc. Ever wondered what a radar station actually sounds like? Want to see what kind of pictures people in Morocco think are worth sending around the globe?
You can click on the labels in the waterfall display to tune into interesting frequencies automatically, scroll around the spectrum on your own and try to identify the weird stuff you hear, or look at the bottom of the page to see what everybody else is tuned into at the moment.
Pros:
Cons:
Your own SDR
Alternatively, you can buy a simple SDR dongle for your computer for around $20 and see what's going on in your own area. This is pretty much the same as browsing WebSDR online, only you'll be picking up stuff you can actually receive in your area. If you set up ISS flyover alerts, you can even pick up voice or image transmissions from astronauts.
Pros:
Cons:
Transmitting yourself
If you've done the first two and want to take the next step, this is it. With a handful of use exceptions, you'll need a license for this. This is where things start to get difficult. Start off with a small handheld transceiver and try to hit your local repeaters! If you're in the city, odds are you won't require an exotic setup for your signal to reach the repeater.
Pros:
Cons:
Beyond
If you've done the first three steps to Radio Excellency on this list, then you already know where to go from here. Join your local radio club and play with their advanced TX equipment, jump into HF and talk to people on the other side of the planet, get into digital modes, experiment with radio astronomy, run your own local short-range television station.
Thank you - once upon a time, I had a license for a high-school radio station slot, was in a ham radio family, and have been thinking about setting up an SDR/HT. Would you mind breaking out a separate post at some point with more details?
This is awesome. I just checked out websdr and spend an hour listening to weird broadcasts.
I'll second the earlier post about cooking - it's as much a lifestyle improvement as a hobby. It can be a great way to become more social gradually, and you can achieve very good results for everyday meals with minimal equipment and a modicum of conscious attention to improving your techniques and materials. On days off, you can experiment with more elaborate recipes and exotic ingredients, and keep the interest alive as your skills and knowledge grow.
You've probably got most of the equipment already, but the only investment I'd recommend is a good, basic 8 - 10" chef's knife if you lack one. There's now a 10" model in the very well-regarded Victorinox Fibrox series, for about $55. The tools to care for it don't have to be professional grade; you can delay any further purchases until you decide whether you want to take the hobby further. Fair warning here - if you take to the hobby, also be prepared for the risk of chef's knife fetishism.
There's an enormous amount of learning material available for free (ranging from excellent to very, very bad...).
Start with learning knife techniques, because those skills will make most other kitchen efforts easier, and generally speaking, all of your mistakes will still be edible.
Yarncraft. Knitting or crochet. There are so many Youtube tutorials that it's easy to learn even if you've never touched a knitting needle or crochet hook in your life. Go to ravelry.com for more free patterns than you could ever use.
Cycling is both a fun hobby and the only exercise I've managed to stick with for any length of time. And you can get some ridiculously good deals on bicycles at yard sales, thrift shops, dumpsters, etc.
To add to this cycling enables a rider to get a much more intimate view of their community. In a car most places are passed in a few seconds with barely enough time to realize they exist. The lack of an isolated environment (car interior), slower speeds, and maneuverability of a bicycle (sidewalks, trails, back roads) means a rider can become much more aware of their surroundings and discover places/people they wouldn't have had the opportunity to in a car.
You also get to know people better without having 2 walls of steel and glass in between each other. Even though you rarely get to say more than hi to other people you still remember their faces when you see them around again.
Is there any particular type of biking you do for exercise, e.g. road or mountain biking?
I do road biking on a cruiser style bike. Pretty low intensity and comfortable, and while I don't have bike lanes, there's miles and miles of low traffic paved roads around my house.
I have a lightweight mountain bike that I use for both street and trails. If you like nature, MTB'ing is the greatest.
Not OP but I do both. Mountain biking is harder per km than road but I go further and faster on road so it ends up being the same amount of exercise for both. Depending on what your area is like, one might be better than the other. If you have mountain bike parks near and the roads are really unsafe then mtb would be best.
Legos or painting
I have recently dived into filming and editing. With little to none previous knowledge about the subject, I already have a (parttime) job in the field. It is easy to pick up and there is no end to it. The price ranges from next to nothing, if you use your phone camera and get a trial version for the Adobe software (After Effects & Premiere Pro) to thousands of dollar equipment. There is a youtube tutorial for every aspect of filming and editing, furthermore it is easy to learn.
Video editing is an amazing hobby. If 14 year old me can do it, anyone reading this can too. It has opened such a wealth of opportunity for me.
Rock climbing! If you're in a large-ish city, there will probably be a gym in your area. There's something of a learning curve, but you'll be able to progress rather quickly as a beginner. And there's so much depth to the sport, too - the only limit is how far you want to go.
Speedcubing is a fun, inexpensive hobby. You can get a relatively performant speed cube for about 5 bucks. You can learn to solve in a few hours, and you can get to under a minute within a week.
Juggling is also inexpensive. You can make your own juggling balls for almost nothing link. It doesn't take long to learn the basics. It's very calming. If you buy heavier objects, it can be a pretty good meditative workout.
Running is a great hobby. If you do it enough, it's basically a drug, and it helps keep you fit.
Cooking is something that is great to get into, because while it does cost money, you do have to eat, and it does generally keep your costs lower.
Coding is a great hobby, and is also low cost if you already own a computer. I'd start with Python, but I love Python so take that with a grain of salt.
Composting! Do you eat? Of course! Do you have food scraps/waste? I would guess that you do. Mix those scraps up with two times as much shredded cardboard (just the brown stuff, like Amazon boxes) or leaves, turn the pile on occasion (four days after you start the pile followed by every two days is optimal, but everything that was once alive is going to rot no matter what you do), keep it as moist "as a wrung-out sponge" (or don't--see my last parenthetical comment), and you'll make compost.
Maybe it doesn't sound like a hobby. It didn't start off as one for me--initially, it was nothing more than a method of keeping my food waste out of landfills (I've always hated sending pretty much anything there)--but eventually I realized there were things I could do to make better compost. I've spent a lot of time reading about it over on /r/composting and researching elsewhere, and it's become a lot of fun turning it, experimenting with different ratios of "greens" (nitrogen-heavy waste like food scraps, coffee grounds, and even urine) to "browns" (carbon-heavy waste like cardboard, sawdust, and leaves), maintaining the moisture level, etc. It's become a hobby for me, and a relatively easy one. You can put pretty much as much or as little effort into it as you want.
There is a forum I used to visit frequently and one of the members had a very lengthy thread about his composting. It grew so large he turns them over with heavy equipment; he can throw an entire cow carcass into the pile and it will be gone in hardly no time. I think the county even brings their limbs/leaves/debris to the guy to be disposed of, which is cool since its not going into the landfill.
I bought a nice stainless steel pail to keep in the kitchen when I first started, and quickly discovered that it was far too small to be of real use. I bought something closer to a trash can and it caught our food waste along with paper towels that did not have any chemicals on them. I collected my grass clippings, leaves in the fall, and the detritus from my garden. It quickly went from a small pile of scraps in the corner of my yard to two piles about five foot tall and eight foot in diameter each. The older, more established pile, would melt the snow that fell atop it in the winter.
It was part of my first foray into gardening, and it was a very rewarding experience. I called it my "dirt therapy" and even got me interested in studying horticultural therapy. It can be as frugal or as expensive as you like to make it, so yeah, I can also say its worth checking out.
Is this the thread you're referring to?: https://www.homesteadingtoday.com/threads/extreme-composting.342651/
If so, I've seen it before; that guy is pretty inspiring. I aspire to scale up my composting quite a bit (I've collected 28 bags of leaves so far this fall from around town!), but I have a long way to go to get to that scale.
Sounds like I have a ways to go to get to your scale, too! My current biggest pile is only about three feet tall. Looking forward to a bit of a different method with my next pile--I've been storing kitchen scraps in 5 gallon buckets and am going to make a pile all at once the next time I get the chance.
All of it is indeed "dirt therapy." It's great to be outside, to be working with my hands, and to just get dirty with natural processes.
Podcasts! (making and/or listening) although really podcasts more likely complement an existing hobby unless you get really into it.
Knitting/crochet.
Disc golf courses are typically free.
Yeah, podcasts definitely augment other activites, though some series like 99% invisible or Radiolab can be engaging enough to listen to serve as standalone entertainment.
I can recommend trying out martial arts. It's easy to get into, hard to master (i.e. you can do it for a long time), you can meet people in a way that works even for me, a rather introverted human being, and while it is a good way to become a bit fitter, you don't need to be too physically fit to start it (depending on the actual discipline you chose, some are more demanding than others).
My personal suggestion would be German Ju-Jutsu (the german wikipedia page is a bit more extensive, but you'll have to use a translator function if you don't speak diese wundervolle Sprache), as it strikes a good balance between formalized and informal technique and etiquette, being physically demanding while not draining you for days, and being useful in an actual fight as opposed to some of the more... aesthetic martial arts you can find. It was developed for the German police after all.
For me, it's Wallpaper Engine.
It allows you to make still images into animated ones using it's built in wallpaper editor, which is super easy to use. (Pic of said editor)
My first wallpaper I made blew up and is currently at 8,600 downloads. And since then I've been animating somewhat random wallpapers I've come across.
How does it work? Do other people need to have WE installed in order to use your wallpapers?
Yep, others need WE installed.
Language learning is a fun one. Pretty cheap, too -- get started with an app that gives you exposure to correct pronunciation (I use Memrise, but I'm sure there's others), then you can move on to foreign-language books, YouTube, penpals, etc. as you get more experienced. 15 or 30 minutes a day, when given a certain quantity of days, gets you a long way.
Admittedly, I started out of sheer annoyance at my coworkers' weird fetishization of the impossibility of learning languages. And now, five years later, they're like "well you did, but that's a special case". Hell no; I'm a dumbass, but I just put in the time.
Puppetry, specifically with marionettes, is easy to learn the basics of. The only trick is you need to find a marionette somewhere to practice with.
Yoga is good for you and can be as easy/hard as you want.
Juggling is fun, cheap and can be done at home. In a weird way it's quite relaxing.
Like others have said coding will let you build & create some amazing things but I'd say the learning curve is steep unless you have prior programming experience.