Despite a busy schedule, there’s always that point in your day, week, month, or even year when you have absolutely nothing to do. Rather than staying in bed and binging on more television or spending your hard-earned cash on alcohol, why not pick up a hobby?
Picking up a hobby is a great way to rejuvenate yourself from everyday stress. It’s also a way for you to learn something new that you usually won’t encounter during your day job. Having a unique hobby is also a great conversation starter when you’re dating and getting to know someone new.
While hobbies – by their nature – are done primarily for enjoyment, with enough dedication and passion, even your hobbies can become lucrative as an alternative source of income. If you think now is the right time to pick up a hobby – or even start a new one – we’ve got just the list to inspire you.
Topiary
Topiary is the art of training plants to develop and maintain specific shapes, with bonsai cultivation being the more popular and accessible kind. As a hobby, topiary will appeal to those wanting to work with their hands and exercise their patience.
The activity itself – regardless of whether you’re cultivating a small plant or your garden – is actually quite relaxing as it forces you to wait for the fruits of your labor. The speed at which you see results is limited by how fast your plant can grow, which rewards your skill at visualizing the future.
Plane spotting
Plane spotting is the activity in which enthusiasts watch airplanes in their local airspace. But plane spotting is not merely the act of watching planes as they fly by.
Part of the joy of plane spotting is identifying classic airborne machines based on unique identifiers and potentially tracking their movements across the globe with the help of other plane spotters. It’s the thrill of knowing that amazing technological masterpieces – both modern and from the past – are up in the sky, defying gravity.
While planes are still a prevalent mode of transportation, the practice of plane spotting has been declining due to the activity potentially being a security risk for airlines. Still, if you’re able to find a local plane spotting group that has good relationships with your local airports and airfields, the joy of finding a rare plane visiting your local institutions is always a thrill.
High-power rocketry
If you had an interest for model rockets as a kid and the thrill of launching pieces of metal and plastic into the air has yet to leave your heart, high-power rocketry may just be your thing. Even if you have no prior experience with model rockets, a desire to simply succeed in making something you built reach the skies is a great motivator to get into high-power rocketry.
In comparison to model rockets, high-power rocketry involves bigger, better, and more explosive rockets than ones usually launched from some kid’s backyard. Even on a larger scale, it still retains a lot of the joy that model rocketry espouses, including the building and launch planning phases, which are important parts of the hobby.
Locksport
Requiring good dexterity, an understanding of how systems work, and a desire for a challenge, locksport is perfect for those looking for a different kind of puzzle to solve. While the act of lock picking may be related to criminal activities, practitioners of locksport are not criminals by themselves and some prominent historical figures – such as King Louis XVI of France – have also enjoyed the puzzle that locksport provides.
The practice of locksport is grounded on the philosophy of responsible full disclosure, with veterans of the hobby helping the lock industry strengthen their products by pointing out their weaknesses. As a modern comparison, locksport enthusiasts are no different from white hat hackers testing the security of an IT system.
Rogaining
A form of team-based competitive navigation, rogaining isn’t just a matter of endurance and physical capability. The cross-country competition adds a layer of strategy, leadership, and mental sharpness not usually available in other single-man outdoor sports and competitions.
A rogaine involves teams of two to five players competing to visit as many pre-deseginated checkpoints scattered across an area as possible within a specific time frame. Essential skills in rogaining include technical navigation skills, the capacity to estimate the stamina of a group, as well as the ability to push your team to the finish line.
Worldbuilding
If fully engaging your mental faculties is your cup of tea, you may want to look into the hobby of worldbuilding. Worldbuilding involves sitting down to consider the laws of physics, cosmology, geography, and culture of a fictional world and committing those thoughts to paper.
Worldbuilding requires the desire to stamp down on inconsistencies and see an imaginary world thrive much like how the real world would act. The act of creating worlds constructed by your imagination is great mental exercise, and is also the activity that results in the most impressive works of fiction of our age.
