I’ll list some hobbies at the end but for me, I struggled feeling motivated after work to do anything but eat and be entertained. It got pretty bad until I decided I needed to figure out something different. I thought I was just missing hobbies but even as I picked some hobbies up (usually on weekends) I wouldn’t do them during the week.

Most of my issues revolved around stress (from work), turns out.

I still struggle with this so don’t expect a magic solution, but what I found was that my job was actually a lot more stressful than I thought. To the point where I’d wake up in the night thinking about work problems that for sure weren’t a big deal and that for sure wouldn’t be solved half asleep. So now I try and be more productive at work to make sure I avoid deadlines getting tight, and towards the end of the day I make sure my tasks are simple, if possible. I also try and take lots of breaks and I check in with myself “am I relaxed right now?” “would a break make me more productive” - and I unfortunately found that media isn’t a good break for me at work. Somehow the stress stays, while also adding in cravings for more dopamine-inducing activities. Good breaks for me include walking, actively listening to music, daydreaming, planning stuff (holidays, dinner, my upcoming evening, weekend), reading (pretty much anything), and learning new stuff (I’m studying Spanish and chess right now, recently learned all of my PLL algorithms on a Rubik’s Cube). I’m a software engineer for context.

The largest stress benefit for me has been biking to work. Yeah, I almost get ran over sometimes which is scary (even with bike paths 90% of my route, you still gotta cross roads, and even with a walk sign cars still won’t see you), but driving during rush hour is stressful (there are studies on this but I’m too lazy to link any). Biking is just fun. I even bike in winter (studded tires and poggies/bar mits). Since not everyone has the luxury of biking, exercising immediately after work is something to consider. It for sure helps me separate work from home. There’s plenty of studies on exercise lowering stress.

And if your job isn’t too stressful, there’s another issues with not committing to hobbies… For me, it was that I was/am addicted to media. Once I get started with some dinner and YouTube, it’s hard not to lose a couple hours. Best advice for easing out of it is audiobooks make it easy after eating to do chores/walk/not get more food. But other than audiobooks, avoid consuming media while eating. Also avoid media served by an algorithm. It’s so easy to watch a great video, and refresh the recommendations to look for another. Then you’re watching sub-par videos just hoping for a good one… Wasting tons of time. I use an extension to hide video recommendations. I can still search, and browse my subscriptions, but it saves me a lot of time (extension is called unhook I believe).

My username is actually centered around the idea that the more passive an activity, the less valuable it is to you. I personally want more active hobbies in my life. It is weird to me that so many fulfilling hobbies exist, but I regularly waste evenings on YouTube…

If you can have low stress and minimal cravings for YT/Netflix, here’s some hobbies:

• Get a dog (huge commitment, consider a cat if you’re too busy) but mine forces me on 3 walks a day, and I’ve love training her
• Learn something on your bucket list (I mentioned Rubik’s cubes, chess, and Spanish already), cooking has been mentioned by others
• I enjoy free diving (diving with goggles, but you hold your breath instead of scuba). I enjoy training my breath hold, and everyone thinks I drowned when I first go underwater at a lake or something (I can only dive for around 40 seconds but that impresses people (this includes swimming)). I can also dive pretty deep which is fun. It’s also a bit surreal to be deep underwater with good vision and be comfortable
• I recently dipped my toes into making music, I have a guitar, trombone, and someday I’d like to learn piano
• Having/riding a motorcycle is a great hobby. Seems like it wouldn’t be, but in summer I’m often looking for excuses to go ride.
• Bike commuting is great fun. Get some saddle bags to pick up groceries and enjoy the weather when you run out of eggs
• Mountain biking was the easiest hobby for me to dive completely into. Spent loads of money, built my current hardtail part by part. I’m even thinking about traveling south to bike in the winter cause I miss it so much. I live in a place with good trails close to home. Easy for me to go riding before or after work.
• Camping, Fishing, Backpacking, Hiking, Snowshoeing, Back-country skiing/snowboarding, all great fun. Make great weekend trips too. Go explore your state
• Check out letterboxing. It’s a bit like geocaching but no GPS, just clues/puzzles. My letterboxing journal always makes people ask questions
• My wife and I like getting hotels in small towns nearby (within 2 hours). We’ll walk the town, get food, and have a lot of free time to read or play board games, or other adult activities
• Read. I try and read a book a month. I find that reading before bed helps me sleep WAY better. If I go to bed early and stay up late reading, I think I sleep better than if I went to bed somewhere in the middle without reading.
• Write. I love writing. Sometimes don’t know what to write about, but even typing out how I’m feeling today and what I’d like to get done - and then deleting it - lifts my mood
• I’m into software, I run a homelab. Huge time suck. I love it.
• Video games. Might seem super passive, but I think I actually play less than I want to. For sure different than watching YouTube. Some games are challenging even. I have a huge backlog. Tons of fun to play with friends. My wife and I just started Baulders Gate 3 together
• Exercise can be great. I love running in good weather. Some friends of mine got big into cycling. My wife likes the gym. My favorite workouts are to run to the college track and then do body-weight exercises there (and practice my handstands) before running back. I also enjoy Yoga, but do a lot less than I’d like
• Board games/Card games - I enjoy Magic, but the company has made it hard to be a fan (same for DND). Flesh and Blood has been fun, but I haven’t played a lot of it. On the board game side; Starwars the deckbuilding game, chess, dominion, and cosmic encounters are all good. You’d be surprised how many people want to play board games. In the few game nights I’ve hosted we barely got to play anyone’s games they brought.

Adventure is out there. Don’t waste your youth. Some of these might not seem like ideal after work hobbies, but most are totally doable in an evening.

Learn an instrument.

Here are my hobbies/interests that simultaneously get me off Social Media/Content Streams while giving me something to talk about/post about/watch about when I’m back. I may also have podcasts or youtube on in the background if the activity permits

Group A, the “touch grass” activities:

1. go on a walk
2. do some cleaning/organizing
3. spend time with people irl

That last one requires a lot of effort and rarely has immediate payoffs if you don’t already have a friend group bigger that one or two friends, but it’s so important and requires putting time into it and developing social skills. In fact, 2+3 both benefit from learning skills and shortcuts and habits; therefore they require just as much time and energy as any hobby.

Group B, the “what I do for fun”

1. “hacking” — pentesting computers and VMs, whether on HackTheBox, TryHackMe, Vulnhub, or someones one-off github-hosted machine; and of course so many online CTFs

2. “tinkering” — I like messing with the physical part of electronics too. Or mechanical devices. Or anything that I can dissect and modify

3. active listening to music — taking the time to listen and be carried away by music, maybe even start to analyze it. I know it’s still technically “consuming content,” but I consider it to stimulate a different part of the brain than, say, watching a random youtuber bring himself one mukbang closer to an embolism.

4. playing music — the world’s shittest bassist. I’m not trying to be good, just have fun and improve my ear and dexterity and musical intuition

5. foreign language learning — good for the brain, good for someone who wants to travel good for jobs and making genuine human connections. Not fluent in anything besides english yet, but I’m always acquiring new vocabulary words when I can

6. Creative writing — Most of what I do anymore is just drafting elaborate shitposts to post online later, but I’ve been known to crank out parts of short stories and terrible poetry

7. Activism — I won’t say where, when, who, nor why, but that doesn’t matter. The important part is that there are few things in life more fulfilling than coming home after a long day of doing outreach/aid/[redacted]/fundraising for a community and/or cause you care about.

8. coding — of freaking course I’m also learning to program. You thought I was done with the electronics, but of course I had to sneak this in. You expect me to learn binary exploitation without having a strong understanding of programming? You expect me to do DIY hardware projects without coding the firmware? You’ve been absolutely HAD.

9. Worshipping the dark goddess [redacted] at the temple of [redacted] — a healthy spiritual aspect to your life has far reaching benefits that scientific medicine and psychology are only just beginning to scratch the surface of. Of course you don’t have to start with worshipping [redacted], it can be as simple as cultivating a healthy appreciation for the beauty in every aspect of the natural world around you and the mystique of existence itself. Then later you can move onto the [redacted] sacrifices to make [redacted] [redacted] so [redacted] may once again [redacted] the earth.

Group C, the “dangerously close to consuming content” group, but still technically separate activities/skills

1. Armchair philosophy — we all do it, but I’m the only one who was smart/lazy enough to list it as a hobby. Unfortunately this does ocassionally learning about others’ philosophy and the topics you’re bullshitting about, which is why I say it’s “dangerously close”

2. Media analysis — see previous… Okay, I got my degree in Literature + Language, I really enjoy deep analyses of media, and sometimes make my own. The act itself doesn’t require consuming anything more than you already have, but if you haven’t consumed any media in awhile…

3. reading — okay, I know, this is literally just back to consuming content, but… You don’t learn how to do any of the above without some reading. It helps you learn a language if you read a story in your target language. it’s the format most philosophy was originally recorded in. It’s the medium writers have to learn to be good at their craft. It’s what format most electronic/software documentation is in. It’s how music was recorded for centuries before audio media. It’s also just a fun activity that engages different parts of the brain and trains your imagination even when it’s “just” fiction.

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.

Here’s a few of mine:

-Skateboarding

-Writing (books, plays, puppet shows, greeting cards, etc.)

-Learning Linux

-Writing and performing rap

-Petting cats

-Repairing video game consoles and controllers

-Decorating (using things you own or spending very small amounts)

-Cooking, baking, etc.

I also enjoy putting on some music when I have to do stuff that isn’t fun, like laundry, washing dishes or cleaning.

Install street complete app, Go for a walk and update information about your local area to OSM. It gets you out the house and is benefiting your wider community. 😁

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.

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

Origami I find fun, yes.

Have tried to learn to juggle several times, unsuccessfully.

Doing yoga I have learned to stand on my hands, learning a physical skill like acrobatics is so good for both mind and body.

Live music I love so much. Go see a show!

I guess it’s a game too but Pokemon go has actually gained me some casual friends.

a few ideas:

Learn:
An instrument
A living language
A dead language
A fictional language
A programming language
A new sport
A craft
New recipes
Bodyweight exercises

Go:
To Hell (Hell, Michigan)
Hike
Powerwalk your local mall
Cross country skiing
To your local arcade
To the coffee shop
On a road trip
Walk all the streets in your city
Test drive something interesting
To a movie
To your local library
To a concert
To an art gallery
To a museum

Go for out to an interesting place and take some cool photos.

make a list of everyone that you would want to attend their funeral/wedding. and everyone that you would want to attend yours. come up with a realistic timeframe for yourself of how often you should connect with them, and set aside times in your schedule devoted to it. keep in touch.

You didn’t rule it out, so my first thought is: play video games! It’s certainly on the line between consuming something and learning to do something. Some individual games can be a whole skill to study and hone for years (eg, learning a fighting game or a speedrun, etc etc)

Spirit of the question though, that would probably be considered content.

Other ideas, most already covered by other comments: art, photography, music, writing, programming, cooking, woodworking, or learning a new language.

Brazilian Jiu-jitsu. Will keep you fit, you won’t be able to think about your life problems for 1-hour … guaranteed, you’ll make new friends, you will build mental resilience and you’ll learn self-defence. So many benefits as long as you train for the long-term and avoid injury.

Drawing and reading are both time consuming, cheap and good stuff that can make you grow too. Can flow over into painting and writing so watch out.

Chess is even cheaper (free online with matchmaking: lichess.org also a gazillion youtubes to get you running like chessbrahs or chesswibes) if you want to be humbled but also like tactics, strategies and history.